[Fish Sandwich]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

TOKUMEI SENTAI GO-BUSTERS MISSION 46 - "OVERHEATING, AND A NEW UNISON!"

With Die having both understood the strong series structure level stuff of this story's place towards the end of the show and also readily acknowledging the subjective nature of how he felt about the way it chose to go about that story, I find myself with shockingly little to say about this one, despite remembering it well enough. I could argue for the depth of Escape as a character or something, but no wait that's been covered too! (Admittedly, I was apathetic enough towards Escape the first time watching the show that this development probably bounced right off me too back in the day.)

I guess the only thing left at a time like this is to resort to pointing out completely inconsequential trivia.

The cliff from the climax was still in my head after all these years, but skimming back through the episode, I was a little shocked at how many filming locations were giving me deja vu, even by the typical standards of Toei tokusatsu. Not only am I pretty sure I remember that cliff, I'm pretty sure remember that bridge, too! I feel like usually in these shows it's like one "hey I know that place" per one episode, but here, not only does all that stuff feel familiar, there's even one more place that shows up in a brief cutaway at the start of the episode that I don't think shows up nearly as often as those other places?

Here's this episode of Go-Busters:



And here's episode 31 of Kamen Rider Kuuga:



See, usually the reuse of filming locations in these shows is a matter of where it's easy to film a nice fight scene, but in this case, for a brief scene of two characters sitting around, they went a place that apparently didn't change much in the decade between 2000 and 2012 -- some cafe on Toei's lot. A suitably quick trip for such a quick bit of filming.

I presume director Katsuya Watanabe made sure those windows are blotted out the way they are so you can't see the stage numbers on the buildings in the background, something I can assume safely, because I once read Nobuhiro Suzumura say he had to do the same thing when he directed that episode of Kuuga.

(I think it says something about how deep I've gotten into Kuuga trivia over the years that I was instantly more certain of where I had seen those chairs before without looking it up than I am about that bridge, even though I've definitely seen the bridge in way more shows. It's honestly a bit scary that this ended up being the easiest thing from this episode to talk about for me.)