[Locke]

Kamen Rider X 01. I love how Keisuke spent the entire episode getting shot, like literally.

It took me a long time to articulate this post, as I attempted to side step 'HYPOCRITE' remarks but it was impossible to do so. Look right, I HATE the rinse repeat style of tokusatsu storytelling, let's get that out of the way. However have you ever read a comicbook from forty years ago and just hated it? The art is weird, the story is paced odd, the structuring of the comic is strange, it just all feels so damn alien and therefore alienates your enjoyment.

For tokusatsu though, not a whole lot has changed in forty years. Sure comics are still doing the same song and dance too, but the technology needed to create comicbook artwork has come leaps and bounds and has been utterly embraced, whereas with toku advancements in technology is something they only ever seem to embrace gingerly. Cardboard robots, back fins and bendy rubber swords have become a part of the fabric of these shows and are still used at a time where technology could make all of these things irrelevant.

So as much as I hate the rinse repeat style of tokusatsu storytelling, I was able to get on board with X so quickly because the show felt so familiar despite being born in a very different time and culture. A lot of the tropes of the Rider you love now, are present here, so it allows these older shows to age a lot better than they might of otherwise.

Ironically the worst part about this is X himself. The suit is boring looking. He looks like he's the product of a slapped together pile of prop scraps, layered over a tracksuit with a pan on his head. It's hard to imagine that just ten years later we'd be getting classic, timeless designs like Black.

The little touches were nice though, with how Neptune stabbed X in the leg so in the next scene with Keisuke he's clutching his bleeding leg. I can't remember the last time, outside of the climactic battles at the end of a series, a Rider show actually connected the injuries sustained in battle, to the character out of the suit. But then I guess these days with the sheer quantity of explosions and lasers you couldn't really do that without having the characters just being one giant open wound, all the time.