[GoldenXtreme]

Aaaand, Toei Spider-Man has also been completed! I swear I didn't binge the entire show in one day after Exceedraft, I've been watching it slowly for months with a friend and just happened to finish both within a short time of each other.

I of course came at the show from the perspective of a tokusatsu fan with some minor knowledge of Spider-Man, while my friend came at it from the perspective of a Spider-Man fan with some knowledge of tokusatsu. Neither of us really expected much of the show going into it, but both of us actually came away from it really impressed! It's a show that really respects the "vibe" and powers of the source material it was working with, while also putting a uniquely Japanese spin on things. It's can be hilarious, it can be thought-provoking, and was just all around excellent.

Takuya is also a very fun protagonist, he feels like an average Joe in a lot of ways what with his jock-ish personality and mundane interactions with his family and girlfriend. However, he also shows remarkable growth as a hero, becoming less motivated by personal revenge over time and more motivated by his desire to save people from suffering the way he has. Of course, he also gets to have one final, cathartic, revenge motivated smackdown against the villains in the final episode to round things out too. The villains were also quite fun and hammy. The Ninders in particular might be my new favorite mooks in a tokusatsu. They're so utterly hapless and useless that they wrap right back around into being irresistible.

Something that I think really enhances the show is that it has a really strong narrative motif later on in the show, where it focuses on family relationships, particularly parent child ones that tie back in to Takuya's own situation and his grief over the death of his father. There was also an excellent balance of stories that had happy and tragic endings. It's not common for Showa tokusatsu to have such an explicit slant to the story like that.