[Locke]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Switchblade

Drive is a show that I felt got off to a really weak start but improved after the halfway mark. I've always felt that the show's reliance on over-the-top comic relief was probably a reaction to how dark Gaim got by the end. I was never the biggest Gaim fan - I thought it was overhyped at the time and that made me more resistant to it - but I still felt like shifting back to episodic two-part stories with lots of slapstick was a huge step backwards. It also drove me crazy (pun intended) how many times Machine Chaser would show up at the end of an episode just to pad out the runtime so that the story couldn't be wrapped up until part two.

The shift (pun intended again) towards more serialized storytelling in the second half of the show did a lot to win me over, though. I didn't love all the Gold Drive stuff, but the show absolutely benefited from having room to breathe in its plot. We also got Captain Nira, who is one of my favorite human villains in all of Kamen Rider. I love the multiple fakeouts we got with him: "He's another wacky Drive character!" "Actually, he's a really nasty piece of work." "But now he's seen the error of his ways and he's on Shinnosuke's side!" "Just kidding, he is so much fucking worse than you ever thought he would be." Great stuff.

Yeah from memory at the time, I thought Drive just felt like an overreaction to Gaim, going to as back to basics of a Rider show as you could imagine. It does end up developing into more than that, but even if I had stuck with the show when it aired, I am not sure how much difference it would have made around my feelings towards the show for it to suddenly shift into something better so late toward the end.

The good thing about watching these shows years later is if I want to sit down and watch six episodes in a row or whatever I can. It doesn't mean the pacing issues necessarily go away, but it doesn't mean I get one half of bland case of the week, and then have to wait a week to see the second half, knowing all of these episodes play out in largely exactly the same way anyway.

I have mixed feelings about the two block case story structure thing and find myself sorta talking out of two sides of my mouth about it a lot. I think for as much as I loved Gavv overall, it was a reminder that your show being largely formless, largely structureless, actually often isn't healthy for a story, because your story lacks clear focus and a driving engine. You indulge on things which don't really add much to the overall story, and having some sort of framework to funnel you down the right path when you start veering off track would have taken a great show like Gavv to me, and made it even more special.

For all of Drive's own pacing issues, one thing it doesn't do is wander down tangent arcs that take up a lot of screentime and achieve basically nothing like Gavv did constantly. The two block case structure forced Drive to focus on its core elements always, almost to a fault at times, but I actually do think it was probably healthier for the overall story to shackle Drive into a framework until the end where they let them go Type Wild.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mesnick

Drive is a decent show with some good moments, pleasant to remember, but nothing more. I think some commentators' over-rating of it is due to the fact that they liked Drive much more upon rewatching. Regarding Chase's costume, I have a feeling the goal was to make him look more generically heroic. Perhaps they were inspired not so much by the Riders as by the Six Senshi from Super Sentai. But yeah, the end result could have been better.

Yeah the Sixth Ranger is exactly what it looks like to me too, but more like the Power Rangers original ones they do cheaply and can only afford to have in a couple of episodes.

[Locke]

Checked out Surprise Future, because production qualities on Rider shows (and Toku in general, really) are largely static (unless you literally compare like a 70s show side by side to today), it is easy to forget how old some of the shows are.

I bring this up, because this created some unintended strangeness while watching 'Surprise Future'. As the title implies, this is a Drive story about Tomari trying to stop a dark timeline, and when they date the key disaster events in this dark future, I realise now I am closer in time to those events than I am to when this actually came out.

Still, this movie is actually pretty damn good, but I will say it’s brisk runtime is a double edged sword. On the one hand, needing to wrap within 60 odd minutes and to still leave time for new forms and fight scenes, doesn’t leave much room for the story to breathe. But on the other hand, it also means the movie is forced to break out of the formula shackles of the main series to make sure they can cram everything in.

And man, it is crazy how much better Drive is, when it isn’t this awkward smooshing of case of the week and goofy comedy jostling for screentime and undermining one another in the process.

One of the best things about Drive for me were the Rider suit designs, and this movie is no slouch in this regard once again. Drive Type Next looks like a 90s Power Rangers villain in the best possible way. Type Special is a nice way of reusing this into a more heroic form. Super Dead Heat is a great reuse of the Machine Chaser suit, my beloved oh how I miss you. It is funny that once again the worst suit here is the evolved Roidmude one.

Oh and Ghost is here, we don’t need to talk about that.

So yeah, overall, I had a good time with this. It probably helped a lot that I watched this out of order by watching it after I had finished the main show. This means these movies are the final times I will see anything new happen with these characters or this world.

As the theme song blared over the climactic battle and I realised it would be one of the final times I would be experiencing this, I couldn’t help but feel a tinge of sadness. I may have never loved these characters exactly, but I do feel like I am probably going to miss these idiots.