[Locke]

This is what head writer Nathan Long said on the inception of the show,

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Part of the reason had to do with the US market. You can’t have straight up murder on kid shows in the US, and so the concept of the Rider War seemed a little too harsh. But I think a bigger reason was that we wanted to make something original – something that came out of our heads rather than just a carbon copy of an old show.

Believe me, if someone had come to us and asked us to make a completely new Toku show from the ground up, without adapting some previous property, we would have jumped at the chance. That would have been so cool! The decision to use the Ryuki footage was the producers’, and it was primarily budgetary. They didn’t have a lot of money, and re-using existing action scenes was a lot cheaper than shooting new ones. Also, Kamen Rider has world wide name recognition, where as ‘Steve and Nathan’s Super Cool Hero Show’ does not.

So, given the task to make an American show out of Ryuki, we decided that we would do something completely different. If we’d tried a straight adaptation we would have only ended up making a watered down “child safe” version of the original, and we didn’t want that. That would be lame. If people want the old show, its available, and better than any US adaptation could ever be. We made a completely new show that can be watched as something entirely separate, and which stands on its own two power-armored feet.

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Our goal from the beginning was to give Kamen Rider Dragon Knight the weight and drama of the original series. The last thing we wanted to do was to infantilize it. Kamen Rider has never been the kind of bouncy super sentai show Power Rangers was. It has always been a superhero drama, and that’s how we pitched it. We didn’t get it without a fight. Our bosses got cold feet a couple times and would come and say, “Can you put more humor in it?” and “Does it have to be so dark?” but eventually I think they realized that we knew what we were doing and left us alone.

The funny thing was, at the beginning, I think they wanted us to do a goofy “monster of the week” show with all the Kamen Riders going out and fighting as a team, just like Power Rangers, but… well, look at the action footage from Ryuki. It just doesn’t support that kind of story at all. The Kamen Riders fight the occasional monster, but most of the time they’re pounding the living crap out of each other. There was just no way we could make it look like they all lived in a big club house and went surfing together. When the bosses finally realized that, things went a lot smoother.

And his feelings on Ryuki

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Some of it was incredibly cool, and the basic story line of a madman pitting these poor saps against each other so that one could win his fondest dream was cool, and we took some of that for Dragon Knight too.

There were other parts that I wasn’t so hot on. I didn’t care for the comedy relief at the TV station. I didn’t think we needed to have Len and Kit wearing aprons and working in a tea shop either. There was a fair amount of girly soap opera stuff that I thought we could do without. But the fights and the infighting between the riders was terrific stuff, and it’s that feeling of never knowing who your friends are that we borrowed most heavily from Ryuki.