[Fish Sandwich]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

Doesn't hurt that this is maybe the signature Sakamoto show, a guy who's synonymous with Heisei action... and other stuff.

I wonder if people who have been around longer than me could better get this across, but it's also sort of important to note that Sakamoto was actually only just starting to become synonymous with Rider at the time, since he got involved with the franchise during Double a few years before this. Nowadays, it's like he just shows up to direct episodes and movies and web spinoffs of every toku franchise ever without anyone even needing to ask, so it's easy to take for granted in retrospect, but at the time, it was pretty exciting to see this guy leave Power Rangers and suddenly be making all these projects in Japan that had *this* level of kinetic excitement to nearly every shot. There really wasn't anybody else on these shows doing anything quite like it back then, and maybe there still isn't? This specific period for him, especially, I've always felt was just crazy heightened in a way I feel like he's sort of reined in a bit since. I don't particularly miss his obsession with legs being on such prominent display so constantly, but I definitely still yearn every now and then for how wild stuff like the camera setups could get.

Anyways, yeah, Fourze! Hard to go wrong with this show! Really happy to see you give yourself the opportunity to dig into every episode like this, Die. Going with Aesir for the subs, too, I see! I actually made the same decision during my own rewatch of Fourze, just to mix things up, but the fact that Fourze has so many options available to begin with reminds of what I guess is my first personal anecdote for the thread. I'm grateful to Fourze for a lot of reasons, but one of them is simply that it was the show that gave me the push to try Over-Time's subs after sticking with TV-Nihon throughout OOO, mostly because it was the same place I was grabbing the earlier shows like Ryuki.

Obviously the way Over-Time wrote the lines by comparison was a bit of a revelation and all that, but mostly? It was entirely a matter of them being faster, because I couldn't wait to watch this show. This will all be stuff I've definitely mentioned a million times even just in these threads, but I got into Rider during OOO, which meant Fourze was the first show I was around for from the earliest rumors. I still recall seeing some leaked picture of the dude's spaceship/onigiri looking head and everyone freaking out about how strange and/or lame he looked, because this is back in those pre-Ex-Aid days where it was still possible for lead Rider designs to affect people that way. For whatever reasons, every piece of information that came out about the show just made it seem more and more exciting to me, and when I finally got to watch that premiere, it was everything I hoped for and then some? OOO, I always took for granted, but this was a show I knew right away I was going to be treasuring each and every week of.