[Switchblade]

Oh, before I forget:

Stargazing Snuggle count: 4.

[Kamen Rider Die]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fish Sandwich

If you're wondering from the Faiz thread why I equate getting constantly injured with heroism, I definitely learned it from watching this guy.

The best thing about the version of Riders Don't Quit that Den-O does is that... it's not even the fights and protecting people and detonating monsters that Ryotaro has to overcome? It's his teammates? Like, I haven't seen Ryotaro fight more than one single imagination monster from the end of time in this story, but his friends and allies are:

-abducting him from his home at all hours
-knocking him out
-hijacking his body
-I don't think Deneb ever let Ryotaro use the toilet???

With friends like these, who needs Movie Riders?

[DreadBringer]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

KAMEN RIDER DEN-O EPISODE 26 - “THE TICKET TO GOD’S LINE”

Hey, let’s talk about the Yuuto/Ryotaro plotline in this episode, a.k.a Literally The Only Thing I Can Talk About From This Episode.

Yeah, previously it seems that it will be one sided in Yuuto's case for tearing down Ryotaro due to misunderstanding. But it turns out that Ryotaro packs as intense of a flame to pick with to Yuuto (in his case, Yuuto taking him away). Previously you unfairly blamed Ryotaro, seeing it as legit reason of why Yuuto doesn't want him as a friend. But this episode seems to make Yuuto the one who learns. Yuuto, as I said before, can act self-righteous towards the Den-O cast especially Ryotaro, that his way is the only legitimate way and he refuses to listen to any of the others. He also makes himself sure to not help anyone including those not in the past, where he scolds Deneb for doing so to others (and it's a blast to see his agitated reaction towards Deneb's righteous acts) previously, but here both has the same aim (and I jumped on that), which probably makes Yuuto realize they're compartible. Yuuto gets to learn about the presence of the other Yuuto, and he realizes that what Ryotaro's talking is right, even if Ryotaro apologizes for judging him at the end, admitting that he's right, and apparently he gets along with the other Yuuto and lets Ryotaro taken away by the other Yuuto with a salute. Though yeah Ryotaro does apologize at the end, I don't think that Ryotaro learns that Yuuto is more empathetic, Ryotaro always knows that Sakurai is what he sees in him, which is the empathetic one, Ryotaro is always shocked about the change Yuuto is now, but he still try to get on with him.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

It’s a plot that excels in its specifics, because the overview is such a goddamn template by now. Literally every show with two or more Riders needs to do this story. We even got a version of it earlier this series between Ryotaro and Momo! These two guys don’t think much of each other, but then they learn they’re more alike than they thought. Tensions have thawed somewhat, roll credits.

Well yeah, like every show with two or more Riders needs to do this in story, it's even memed in a Rider community in this post, where the motto of this franchise becomes this:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

It’s the little details, though, that make it still somewhat enjoyable. (Somewhat! This is not my favorite episode!) Yuuto getting to see the lengths Ryotaro will go to as Den-O is the less compelling part, since it’s a story we’ve gotten a few times before, but I’m never going to be too down on an episode where Ryotaro honors his commitments and takes down an Imagin. Honestly, it’s just nice to see Sword Form get some screentime again? I feel like every other Form has been getting the spotlight, and when Ryutaros cuts the line for the big fight in this one, I was channeling Momo’s frustration. But then Ryuta gets bored, Ore Sanjou, and Sword Form gets the climax. Fun fight. Sometimes I’m easy to please!

Ryutaros' negative traits here make a way for Momotaros, where he's someone who clearly doesn't fight for alturistic reasons, with temper of a spoiled brat, and he wants to have fun, and hates it when his fun is interrupted. Now... Ryutaros' negative traits shouldn't be qualified though as a tool that gives some audience satisfaction of watching Sword Form...

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

I don’t know if this is a plot the show’s going to come back to in 27, but that whole Milk Dipper thread went absolutely nowhere? It’s just some kids on break? I thought, bare minimum, we’d see the hospitalized sister brought to Milk Dipper to see some stars. The two Riders decorated and everything! The way the show ended up going, the Hope Hill stuff, was probably better, but it’s weird how extra-unimportant the Milk Dipper scenes ended up being.

Oof yeah, Milk Dipper does have stars as Airi is interested in astronomy and her catchphrase is something about shooting star... The previous episode only talked about the students coming and it happened (and Miura got well-liked by the students seemingly), but of course Ryotaro and Yuuto knows better about the Imagin and their victims. Imagins are really chaotic, they're just using the wishes of the contract holder as an excuse to wreak havoc, he was going to tie the sister up above.

[Kamen Rider Die]

Quote:

Originally Posted by DreadBringer

Now... Ryutaros' negative traits shouldn't be qualified though as a tool that gives some audience satisfaction of watching Sword Form...

It's the opposite! If it weren't for Ryutaros being a brat, I could've watched Sword Form kick ass even sooner!

[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER DEN-O THE MOVIE - "I'M BORN!”




It was always weird to me how many Riders are orphans, or have a dead parent. I'd joked back in Ghost that All Dads Are Dead, but it's really prevalent over this franchise. It's something I'd write off as some weird quirk, an overused trope, but it's such a deliberate choice that it got me wondering why.

The first reason you'd have a main character with dead parents is to create some unfillable void, some unresolveable wound. It's not a loss that happened as a result of the character's actions or inaction, give or take a Blade. It's not some heroic thing, like you'd get over the course of the series. It's a tragedy that befell them, and all they can do is live with it. It creates this absence within the character, a pre-show acknowledgement that loss is real and irrevocable. It's also a way to bake into the hero a motivation to overcome hardship, to make the best out of what you have left. Dead parents... it's a preexisting condition, a thing that the character can't ever fix or undo, so they fight to keep other people from having to experience it.

The other reason, though - and maybe the main reason - is because the character can try to fill that void with a found family. Those parents are never coming back, but you can make a new family out of a sister, some imagination monsters from the end of time, a time-displaced version of your almost-brother-in-law, an eccentric train owner, and a vinyl-clad timepiece-enthusiast. It's not about replacing anything, really. Your parents that are gone will never come back. But you can keep their memory close while still creating something positive in the present.

So, yeah, really liked the way this movie approached concepts like loss, memory, and found family. Mostly, though, I just liked how it all felt like a Den-O story? And a really good Den-O story, at that?

I mean, all of the themes I just talked about are 1000% the themes of this series, so expanding them to movie length works out great. There's no weirdo AU to muddy the water or distract from the message. It's Ryotaro trying to figure out how to explain to a younger version of himself that you can't hide yourself in the past, because time's always moving forward. The best you can do is remember it, while looking to the future. They didn't need to have this story exist in A World Where Water Is The Only Currency, or make everyone samurais or whatever. (Although, uh, there are some samurais!) It's a Den-O story about Den-O themes with the Den-O cast. It's probably my favorite Phase 1 Heisei movie so far?

There've been some fun ideas in earlier films, and a few that were just generally entertaining, but they always felt at least minimally compromised. They needed to cram a season into seventy minutes, or create some goofy new world to explore. Here, it's like Episodes 27-29 of Den-O, where there's no time wasted on restating the premise or explaining relationships. (I mean, maybe to a fault? Sieg, a two-episode character, appears basically out of nowhere and everyone acts like he's a main cast member. A couple lines of recap probably wouldn't've killed Kobayashi!) Literally everything good about Den-O (and bad: Airimirers) gets shown off in this movie. It's a giant, big-budget celebration of everything the show is about, and it's not toning that down for newbies.

Like, the first sequence is a Ryutaros dance scene that now includes a kick-line, because Movie Budget. That is such a statement of intent, moreso than any extra explosions or whatever. Everything's plussed, everything's sweetened. You like Form Changes? Here's every goddamn Form Den-O ever used, and every Form Zeronos ever used! You like Hana kicking ass? Here's her fighting ninjas and spanking Imagin! You like Owner eating fried rice? He does it twice! You like Ryotaro? Here's him twice.

Kotaro! Man, I think Sword Form Junior is my all-time favorite Movie Form. Did that thing ever get a Figuart? Money left on the table if it didn't. Kotaro's a fantastic part of this film, in all respects. He's great at channeling Momo, absolutely nailing that Ore Sanjou pose. But he's also interesting for what his performance tells us about Ryotaro. It's weird, him being so energetic and excitable, knowing that Ryotaro is neither of those things. But that works for me, because it invites concern about what the last few years have been like for Ryotaro: the choices he's made, the burdens he's carried, the regrets he's ignored. There was this kid who was happy once, despite everything he'd lost, and now there's this soft-spoken young man who lets his emotions lie fallow. There's a disconnect between the kid he was and the man he's become, and I'm curious if the show's going to tell more of that story.

The whole arc of this movie was great, with a look at how Ryotaro has moved on from memories to make something real in the present. Focusing in on the Ryotaro/Momotaros friendship was an ideal way to do that, but this movie didn't skimp on anything else you might like from Den-O. It was a blast, from start to finish. All climax, you might even say.



THE BAGGAGE CAR

-One of the only downsides of Phase 2 going to a more interconnected universe when it did its movies, with all of the Legend Riders and whatnot, was that we missed out on actors from previous shows popping up in background roles. Like, if you're bringing back the actor who played JK in Fourze, you're probably going to want him to play JK from Fourze! That's a better use for his talents! But that does mean we don't get incredibly fun, totally random cameos like this film's Todoroki From Hibiki as a ninja and Todokoro From Kabuto as a bodyguard. I'm not sure anything will ever top Kaido From Faiz showing up in the Blade movie to participate in a chase scene as the most WTF cameo, but these felt nicely random and nonsensical. (I also liked that, in whatever timeline, Todokoro has people making his job more difficult. That guy!)

-Super funny that the movie spends a bunch of time having characters ask why Sieg is hanging around, since thematically he's the absolute best Imagin to have in this story. Sieg's whole story is about the value of found family, about how what you get may not be what you wanted, but it can still have value. Of course he's going to be in a story about Ryotaro trying to explain why he's able to move on from his parents' death because he's still got people who care about him!

-Gaoh! Great visual, huge villain presence, tons of charisma, absolutely zero character. There's never a compelling motivation for what he's doing, he's already 90% done with his masterplan before the story even starts, and his death is just him going Oh Shit I Died. Kamen Rider Kabuki, he was not.

-Watched that Momo's Summer Vacation short. It was cute! The end!

-Really can't say enough about how great it was to see a story that foregrounds the bond between Momo and Ryotaro. There's a real pain to Momo when he sees his connection to Ryotaro severed, and the movie treats his loss seriously. There's this shot of Momo wandering down an alley that is just heartbreaking for how isolated he looks. But, eventually Momo's reunited with Ryotaro because Memory Beats Tragedy and we get a hell of an exciting climax.

-Oh, right, Ryotaro's Narratively Convenient Amnesia. Ehhhhh. I love that the kick from Gaoh only eliminated the Den-O stuff from Ryotaro's brain. That is the hackiest shit! The movie gets away with it by a) playing up the schism with Momo as incredibly sad; b) spending some time with Ryotaro and Kotaro bonding over their shared trauma; and c) making the whole point of this thing that Memory Beats Tragedy, so we need Ryotaro to lose and regain memories. Thematically it works, but kicking off the plot with a kick to the head is pretty lazy.

-I keep feeling like there's something else I wanted to talk about from this movie, but I can't remember what it was. A fitting way to end this post!

[Androzani84]

In addition to the onscreen cameos, there’s also some behind the mic as he Imagin in this movie.

The Imagin killed in the first scene is Yaguruma

Gaoh’s main henchmen are Asakura (playing the snake, no less) and Kageyama, with the third being Masumi Inou/BoukenBlack from the previous year’s Super Sentai (which hilariously, had Kobayashi doing an episode with a bizarre take on the story of Momotaro).

And I’ll mention that Kotaro’s actor went on to be Shibuya in Ghost. That probably the most notable thing people think of when they think of Shibuya.

I’ll mention that Gaoh’s actor once auditioned for the lead role in Kamen Rider Super-1. He didn’t get it , but it’s likely that Super-1 would be more prominent in crossovers if he did (given that the actual actor is currently on the run from the law).

And when it comes to Riders and parent… just wait til the Summer of Inoue. Until then, wait for my opinions on episode 27-8 (it’s gonna be a long one).

[Switchblade]

The ending of this film always gets me, the bit with Ryotaro's parents and then seeing Ryutaros's crayon drawing in place of the lost photo. It's a nice, sweet, simple moment.

The rest of the movie? It's also really good. Like you said, it's very much Den-O but with a bigger budget and the ability to use it to indulge in even more chaos. The story doesn't even feel all that consequential; Gaoh himself was pretty tough, but the legendary time-destroying ancient Aztec train goes out with minimal effort. There's a lot of running about and some good emotional stuff, but otherwise it really does feel like another strong Den-O story.

So guest star corner:

You noticed Todoroki and Tadokoro. I'd honestly forgotten they were in this one. There are two I want to highlight, though.

Gaoh is played by Hiroyuki Watanabe who, in addition to being very handsome, is a fairly prominent tokusatsu veteran. in the late 90s he played the commander of XIG, the anti-kaiju defense force on Ultraman Gaia. More recent to this movie, he also appeared on Garo as Taiga Saejima, the main character's father and predecessor in the title role.

More relevant to your interests, Kotaro (young Ryotaro; not to be confused with Kamen Rider Black, Kamen Rider New Den-O, or the milk guy from Blade) was played by Takuya Mizoguchi. Mizoguchi would go on to return in Kamen Rider Ghost as Shibuya, one of the two assistant monks whose names I can never remember. Shibuya is the one with glasses and the awful mom who gets turned back into a kid at one point.

[Kamen Rider Die]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Androzani84

And I’ll mention that Kotaro’s actor went on to be Narita in Ghost. That probably the most notable thing people think of when they think of Narita.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Switchblade

Mizoguchi would go on to return in Kamen Rider Ghost as Shibuya, one of the two assistant monks whose names I can never remember. Shibuya is the one with glasses and the awful mom who gets turned back into a kid at one point.

This confusion over which Temple Dork a guy played on Ghost is maybe the most brutal indictment of their collective superfluousness. Was he the one who shouted "Takeru!", or the one who shouted "Monster!"? There's no way to know!

Quote:

Originally Posted by Switchblade

The ending of this film always gets me, the bit with Ryotaro's parents and then seeing Ryutaros's crayon drawing in place of the lost photo. It's a nice, sweet, simple moment.

It really drills home the movie's theme that The Past isn't a thing you can hold onto; that our memories are more powerful than our losses. It even lets the most selfish monster contribute something!

Also, I remembered the other thing I wanted to talk about!

Maybe I'm reading too much into it (sounds like me), but I like the subtle implication that this movie is where the younger version of Ryotaro gets the idea of an imaginary friend/hero who looks like Momotaros. It'd be a nice little time loop, Momotaros creating his own reality by accident. Not sure if it's intentional by the movie, but I like the little detail of this maybe being Momotaros's "origin".

[Switchblade]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

This confusion over which Temple Dork a guy played on Ghost is maybe the most brutal indictment of their collective superfluousness. Was he the one who shouted "Takeru!", or the one who shouted "Monster!"? There's no way to know!

I mean, I know I'm correct because I was looking it up to get actor and character names, but also you're not wrong.

Quote:

Maybe I'm reading too much into it (sounds like me), but I like the subtle implication that this movie is where the younger version of Ryotaro gets the idea of an imaginary friend/hero who looks like Momotaros. It'd be a nice little time loop, Momotaros creating his own reality by accident. Not sure if it's intentional by the movie, but I like the little detail of this maybe being Momotaros's "origin".

That's a cool point that I hadn't thought of. One of the later Den-O films does something kind of similar, but more explicitly.

[Fish Sandwich]

One more bit of behind the scenes trivia that's rather odd is that producer Shinichirou Shirakura was apparently the one to write that goofy animated short preceding the film. Generally not the kind of work he's known for, but hey, he even wrote a whole Den-O novel way later on, so I guess these characters really ARE just that fun to write!

Anyway, it's interesting to have it pointed out how little the film cares to educate moviegoers about what Den-O is, because thinking about it, that's probably a direct sign of well, simply that Den-O was probably so successful by that point that they kinda legitimately could count on *everyone* knowing exactly what's going on? I've joked before that Momotaros is as iconic as Rider #1, but I'm also convinced it's not a joke, is what I'm saying.

Oh, and this is a pretty great movie, too! I remember being fairly neutral on it the first time around, and then never giving it a second chance until my big rewatch of the whole series, but after it got that second chance from me, I described it rather glowingly as...

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fish Sandwich

a classy flick that, in choosing to explicitly be part of the show's continuity, gets to really represent Den-O as a whole, telling a simple but effective story about the Den-Liner getting hijacked by our obligatory movie-exclusive Rider that packs in all the humor, excitement, and sentimentality that make the series so great.

...and now it's still a Rider film I think rather highly of. Not one of my absolute favorites, but the more time passes, the more I appreciate all the smart choices this one made.