[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER OOO EPISODE 1 - “MEDALS, UNDERWEAR, AND THE MYSTERIOUS ARM”



There’s a thing that I’ll always associate with Kobayashi, and it’s the idea of partnerships – specifically, how two people can pull in the same direction without necessarily wanting the same things.

I wonder sometimes if it’s her expressing the feeling of working on a toku show, where her ideas and a producer’s ideas have to coexist within one narrative, regardless of how often those ideas are mutually embraced. It’s just… it’s you and another person, someone you may not have chosen to partner with, trying to accomplish a goal that’s been set for you. Being an adult means needing to work in concert when you aren’t friends, or even exactly friendly.

(Ex-Aid hits some of the same ideas for me, but it’s more about a workplace than an explicit partnership. It’s about people seeing each other as supporting cast members, but we’ll talk more about that in a few years!)

OOO is maybe the Most Kobayashi show, for exploring the dramatic and comedic potential of that template. Den-O gets at it early, but resolves into a friendship fairly quickly. Go-Busters keeps the tension to a minimum, outside of a few short stories, to focus on the bond of family between the cast. Ryuki has it with the Contract Monsters, but they don’t really have enough character to be a part of the narrative. But OOO! OOO is the show where a disembodied hand outwits a well-meaning vagabond, as the best Henshin sounds in any series ever try to distract from the peril.

It’s hard not to just talk about Ankh and Eiji, even this early. The beats land instantly – Eiji’s eagerness to defend a disembodied hand from a monster made out of impulses, Ankh’s quick decoding of Eiji’s eagerness to create a patsy that can secure his future, and the low-level animosity that dances with the enthusiasm of defeating a shared foe. The instant chemistry of this series, man! Eiji immediately buys into what’s happening here, to a gloriously absurd degree, which is maybe the only way this premiere episode could fit in a complete adventure, tons of series setup, and the actual full opening title sequence. You can only do that in 20-odd minutes if your hero jumps in with a smile on his face, ready to make some new connections.

I love that little idea floating through this episode, that meeting anyone new, experiencing anything new, is an objective good. Kougami being excited for the Greeed’s appearance because it’s something brand-new in the world, Eiji’s willingness to defend a cop he had one conversation with that morning and a mildly terrifying disembodied hand that is maybe mugging him because he’s known them for all of a few minutes and that’s enough for him to want to help them… I love that. I love how Eiji’s simplicity and guilelessness never looks like childishness or stupidity; it’s charmingly direct heroism, full stop.

But it’s the monster story aspects that made this episode pop for me, beyond the promises of the start of an indelible partnership over a year-long serial. The violence was unexpected, for one thing – the Greeed wiping out a platoon of Kougami Mooks (Ridevendor something-or-others; they’re Mooks) while a haunting orchestral version of Happy Birthday plays? That’s some dark stuff, despite the trappings of monster suits and vending machine motorbikes. (I love how the bonkers Kougami gear is, like, the first toku thing this show introduces. Why not!) But the Greeed’s immediate goals of reconstituting their bodies is a nice way of grounding the early battles and minor adversaries that a levelling-up hero needs to interact with. I get what these four villains are trying to do, and giving them all the same We’re Just Getting Started energy as the heroes is more appealing to me than a show where an implacable adversary is cackling from a fortress, waiting for a hero to get 40 episodes of power-ups under its henshin device and make a run at defeating him/her/them. I like that the Greeed are introduced as weak as OOO, you know?

OOO the hero, not OOO the show; show isn’t weak at all! There’s so much energy in just this first episode, with an emphasis on embracing new experiences and fighting for new friends -slash- manipulative disembodied hands. Loved it all, especially that theme song. It grew on me!

(But, boy, that OOO Driver jingle is just where my love lies the most. TA TO BA! TATOBA TATOBA!)