[Androzani84]

So this was another early watch for me, and having seen Super Hero Taisen GP as my intro to Kamen Rider, before and after I became more familiar with Rider, I felt that did this plot better.

And like other OOO-featuring movies, this one is a slight continuity nightmare, in that the 1971 scenes are basically the theme park version of the original Kamen Rider. While everything presented existed, General Black and the Rider Scouts weren’t around until 1972 (and the latter was, like most real scout groups, boys only, so there were no girls like the one that appears here) and Ichigou and Nigou never had the Batman and Robin dynamic they have here (they tended to rotate who was guarding Japan and who was destroying Shocker’s other evil plans offscreen, only coming together against monsters that were supposed to be really tough). But funnily enough, the two kids Mitsuru and Naoki who are surprisingly relevant to this plot share their names with two of the original series’ Rider Scouts, so they’ve got that going for them.

And speaking of those kids…

Rider-lert!

In addition to a whole crap ton of returning VAs, not all of them reprisals (King Dark gets the standard stock Showa big bad voice rather than his original VA, while Apollo Geist is voiced by the guy from Decade), and some making their final appearances prior to death or retirement (The Great Leader, General Jark and General Shadow being the standouts there), we’ve also got the older version of Naoki, who is played by Isao Sasaki. Who is basically Japan’s answer to Elvis (don’t let his youthful looks fool you, he was in his old age when he did this movie), and the original Super Sentai theme singer. But in Rider, he performed the theme to the movie “8 Riders vs Galaxy King” and played a similar mad scientist dad role in Kamen Rider ZO.

And to close off… man is the theme cover at the end pretty terrible.