[Fish Sandwich]

So here's directors Nobuhiro Suzumura (on the left), and Takayuki Shibasaki (the right) making a cameo in episode 9 of Kuuga.

I started going down the rabbit hole of Suzumura's tweets about the show, obviously, which is where I learned this information. Apparently him and Shibasaki even acted out a whole silly dialogue exchange after the one or two seconds of footage that was actually going to be used was filmed.

Among other interesting tidbits I wanted to share:

- Suzumura is also the voice speaking over the radio in Ichijou's car during episode 4, both right before he decides to give Yuusuke the TryChaser, and right after he rides off on it.

- Scripts for Rider and Sentai episodes used to have pictures of that episode's monster on them, apparently to help the props guys make sure the costumes were being put on correctly (I think I read that part right?), a practice that has since been dropped now that the huge influx of form changes (thanks Kuuga!) and the like means there's an entire staff position dedicated to managing the characters.

- He straight up showed the first few pages of the proposal document for Kuuga, which is SUPREMELY fascinating. Of particular note is that where I guess it sounds like it would ordinarily say "planning intent", it instead reads "transformation declaration", something Suzumura points out shows how strong Shigenori Takatera's feelings about making this show were. I couldn't fully read the text below, but it basically talks about the perceived need for hero shows to "transform" and challenge themselves more, summed up as trying to create "a show that doesn't lie". The final words of that page are "the standard of the 21st century begins here". Reading things like this, I am, as ever, both deeply impressed by Takatera's considerable vision, and amazed this attitude didn't get him fired earlier.

- Oh, hey, and speaking of Takatera being removed from Rider shows... the scripts for episodes 11/12 (the iconic origin of the thumbs up) took longer than any others to write, and this apparently caused some waves. There are things here I'm definitely still not grasping the context of (Suzumura shows pages from a freakin' manga about this???), but filming was running significantly behind schedule due to both Takatera's own style and Arakawa's inherently sluggish writing. This resulted in what was apparently a full-blown attempt to get rid of Takatera, and add a new writer to finally turn Kuuga into that non-problematic Normal Hero Show it kept refusing to be. Other staff managed to keep Takatera from being removed, and the new writer, one Toshiki Inoue, is apparently the secret hero of the whole story according to that comic, doing what Toei wanted by getting the scripts back on schedule while also being understanding of Kuuga's need to keep its own style. It seems like this pretty much confirms everything I speculated about at the beginning of episode 13 in my thread, but I didn't realize 11/12 in particular were like, the battlefield for all this going down. Probably pretty vindicating for the staff that those episodes are huge fan-favorites, huh?

- Spinning out of all this, Suzumura mentions how the excessively tight filming schedule started resulting in those "fake preview" shots I mentioned eariler really kicking in with episode 13 as well, which was as far as I could read before my brain started to melt from all this deep-cut Kuuga lore I was taking in. I'll probably come back in here to summarize more of these at some point if anyone cares, but right now, I think I need some sleep or something.