[Androzani84]

So here we are, at the show that people insisted (and in some cases, despite the whole show having aired) you need to watch Double to understand and screamed “bloody murder” at Toei for not licensing the show out.

But anyway. It’s a fairly good first episode. It tells you that we shouldn’t expect Rider action in every episode and that we are gradually introducing the existing elements from Double into this anime for new viewers. And we also get an audience surrogate for said new viewers.

And yes, I will be continuing this feature here, but with some extra categories added because… anime.

Rider-Lert!

To start with, the VAs for the main 4 from the original show all return from Memory of Heroes, with the main duo being Koki Uchiyama and Yoshimasa Hosoya, who have both voiced monsters within Rider proper, Uchiyama being Desast in Saber and Hosoya being the Butterfly Yummy in OOO. And our mob boss guest part is Katsuyuki Konishi, who is currently the “equipment voice” for Kamen Rider Gotchard, in addition to describing who “Gatchanko’d” the previous week. And now onto other categories new to this show.

PreCure-Lert!
So being an anime, it’s only natural that Toei’s pool shares some mutual swimmers with the “imoto” of the Super Hero Time block’s water. Now let’s discuss them before I stretch this metaphor out to sea.

Both Hosoya and Akiko’s actress Mikako Komatsu (so named after an Olympic swimmer who was everywhere on the news when her mother was pregnant. It was an Olympic year) were regulars in Star Twinkler Pretty Cure, the former as the villain Kappard, the latter as the 4th Cure, Kaguya Madoka/Cure Selene.

And for a retroactive example, Akira Sekine, the VA for our Time Princess (my nickname for Tokime) went on to be the lead character Sora Harewataru/Cure Sky in the filling year’s Hirogaru Sky Pretty Cure.

And now for one that’s exclusive to this episode. It won’t appear again.

Yu-Gi-Oh ZEXAL-Ert!

So this is basically an elephant in the room mention, since the three leads introduced so far were all prominent characters in Yu-Gi-Oh ZEXAL. Uchiyama as Kaito Tenjou/Kite Tendo, Hosoya as IV/Quattro (who spends an entire three-parter duelling, and thus throwing mutual insults with, the aforementioned Kite) and Komatsu as Kotori Suzuki/Tori Meadows. Hosoya also had a minor role in the previous show Yu-Gi-Oh 5Ds as one-shot villain Dick Pitt/Grady and had an even greater role in ZEXAL’s successor Yu-Gi-Oh Arc-V as Reiji Akaba/Declan Akaba.