[Fish Sandwich]

This final episode is particularly special to me. I could talk about it in great detail (and I kinda hope to some day), but rather than try and explain how profoundly moved I was by the way in which a story I hadn't previously been all that invested in tied everything together with such purpose and grace that it pretty much singlehandedly made sense of the entire series for me, I'll instead choose to focus in on impressing one particular point, which was how happy I was to see Gridman using the Fixer Beam.

Back in the original show, to me at least, that ability was the crux of the entire fantasy that is Gridman. Imaging this hero that would go into your everyday electronic devices when they start acting up (a universal frustration for all humanity) and have some epic battle with a giant monster, all so you can get AOL working again, or whatever. For drama's sake, the actual episode plots would obviously involve greater consequences to those malfunctioning devices than just missing out on downloading the latest Doom WADs (or whatever), but that was the brilliant, immediately relatable undercurrent to the whole concept.

This new and different Gridman handled the way the fantastic and the mundane mix very differently, and the way the kaiju fights now seemingly played out in a straightforward Ultraman style was a particular sticking point for me. That slick new design for Gridman didn't even have the panels on the chest that would shoot out the Fixer Beam! It's like they didn't even think that was important!

There are a *ton* of reasons beyond this that I loved and love this finale, and I'm not sure this is even necessarily the unequivocal biggest one, but that reveal that the Fixer Beam, even in the anime version, was actually secretly still the most important thing the whole time -- that the entire 12 episodes was essentially one big episode of the original show -- was just about the best Christmas present I could've asked for back in 2018.

[Kamen Rider Die]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fish Sandwich

Back in the original show, to me at least, that ability was the crux of the entire fantasy that is Gridman.

And here I didn't even know what I was missing! I'm glad that the climactic reveal of the Fixer Beam could mean so much to fans both new and old.

[Kamen Rider Die]

SSSS.DYNAZENON EPISODE 1 - “WHAT’S A KAIJU USER?”



I thought this was okay? Not great, but okay?

A lot of the tools that made Gridman’s premiere work are naturally going to be unavailable to the producers for a direct followup series, because using them again would make for a relentlessly disappointing echo of a seminal series; like, we gotta have a new amnesia kid get stuck in a parallel dimension while we all act like we don’t know where this is going? That’d be annoying, and dull.

What we get instead – robbed of the mystifying immersion and magical realism of Gridman’s instantly engaging debut – is something smaller in scale, and more uncomfortable for its refusal to let you in, which naturally suits a cast headlined by a very different kind of cool teenage girl: Yume.

(I will allow that Yomogi is our nominal lead for this diverse ensemble of negligibly intersecting protagonists, since he’s A Boy and that’s just how a lot of this genre of action storytelling works, but Yume’s the way more interesting character to me.)

Yume’s not like the cast of Gridman, that – excepting Rikka’s genre-lacadasical mother – exist outside a continuum of family and parents; sort of explicitly so, as it read to me as a show about pushing through the trauma of adolescence into the unknown of adulthood. Gridman barely allowed for things like the connection of history, because the show was about the isolation of Akane, so we didn’t really have to learn about anyone’s parents or home life. Gridman wasn’t that show.

Dynazenon very much is that show, and it’s most arresting and captivating when it allows for the scope of family to inform its cast. Yume’s parents are sniping at each other, the dishes aren't done, their interest in Yume is minimal and mildly disappointed. There’s been a death in the family, presumably – Yume’s sister’s room has been packed up, but enshrined. Yume continuously asks guys out, and stands them up, which on the surface is easy to interpret as teenage cruelty and acting out, but feels more like her trying to connect with her lost sister. (My headcanon right now is that the tower she goes to, and the one where she asks Yomogi to meet her, is where her sister died. I think Yume was supposed to meet her there, and she didn’t, and her sister died. Seeing someone else there makes her feel a bit like her sister’s still alive, and waiting for her, and she likes to watch that, while also punishing herself by disappointing another person who’s waiting for her.) The innate connection that Yume’s feeling her way through the absence of is so much weirder and sadder than a lot of the connections within Gridman’s cast, and it is refreshing in its personal-scale tragedy.

(Similarly, I really liked the scene with Yomogi having dinner with his mom and what’s probably her boyfriend? It’s just sort of awkward, and he doesn’t care about this guy, and he definitely doesn’t want his attempt at connection. I promise I will not always put Yomogi thoughts in parentheticals!)

All of that, the first half, I liked. I didn’t love it, because it’s paced too slowly and teenage depression is kind of not as engaging and Fog Kaiju and Alexis Kerib, but I respected its swing at doing exactly the stories that Gridman was not built to: parents, families, and history.

And then the giant robot showed up, and I sort of entirely checked out.

I don’t want to be that guy! I hate being the guy who doesn’t give a shit about the core action-adventure components of a toku show! But, man, the second Gauma’s doing his Big Hero Schtick, I just didn’t care. Nothing about the fight really worked for me, either aesthetically (it’s a bunch WHAAAA?!?! stuff from the other three, and it instantly made me miss the relative zen-like mindfulness of Gridman’s combat) or narratively (Dynazenon just sort of shows up, and it’s propulsive but lacked any sense of work or effort for what the heroes achieved). The fight just ended up being the thing that happened at the end of the episode, and it took me right out of an otherwise pleasant/depressing look at forging connections when the weight of the past is dragging you away from people.

So, yeah. I thought this one was okay.

[DreamSword]

I'd say that, in hindsight, the first episode gives the viewer a good look at what they ask expect from the average episode of Dynazenon.

[Androzani84]

So yeah, Dynazenon. I remember that the majority of Tokunation watching at the time preferred it to Gridman, but I definitely preferred the latter since it didn’t leave me consistently confused (hilariously enough, history repeated itself months later with mainline Ultra instalments, but that’s another story).

For this show the director and production crew set themselves three rules.

1. They could only use an adaptation of Dyna Dragon and its components Dyna Fighter and King Jet (or as they were known in Syber Squad the one time they were shown as separate components, Jamb and Torb).

2. They weren’t allowed to reuse any of Gridman’s cast.

3. They had to go with an entirely original plot and jokes. The only thing this show has connecting it to Gridman right now are some recycled storyboards (which in this episode, consists of a shot of the classroom’s name).

And in terms of casting, there’s two actors with a major Toku role in this episode.

Daiki Hamano (Gauma) was later the voice of the Donbrothers equipment (except for Don Dragoku’s equipment).

Gakuto Kajiwara (one of Yomogi’s friends) was later the voice of Ultraman Decker’s equipment (except for the bad guy’s one toy)

There’s also a bit of a mini MCU reunion, since Hamano voices Sam Wilson in the Disney+ shows, while Jun’ya Enoki (Yomogi) is the voice of Peter Parker.

And in this season, there are three notable things.

1. The monsters are all named for terms related to psychology, fitting with the theme of trauma and the Shattered Souls Shine like Stars motto. In this case, Shalbandes is named for Augustine Charpentier, a French physicist who studied the size-weight illusion.

2. There are only two pieces on the entire sound track. The orchestral choir as Dynazenon combines and this song, played at different pitches and with different instrumentals based on the pacing of the fight.

And 3…

[Fish Sandwich]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

Yume?s not like the cast of Gridman, that ? excepting Rikka?s genre-lacadasical mother ? exist outside a continuum of family and parents; sort of explicitly so, as it read to me as a show about pushing through the trauma of adolescence into the unknown of adulthood. Gridman barely allowed for things like the connection of history, because the show was about the isolation of Akane, so we didn?t really have to learn about anyone?s parents or home life. Gridman wasn?t that show.

I'm not at all the best person to explain this, but I've read that apparently, "no parents/adults in general" is actually a sort of unspoken rule of popular late night anime, that the staff of Dynazenon were consciously and deliberately going against -- a rebellious spirit that helps explain why I ended up being a big fan of Dynazenon. Although even after learning to see so much in its predecessor, I wasn't immediately gripped by this premiere at first either. Pretty sure that's more my fault than the show's, though. Gauma is immediately pretty great here, though. I do remember liking him right away, as this weird but clearly warm big personality who draws the rest of the cast into the heroic adventure in a very different way from Gridman's stoic righteousness.

I will say, the broadest decision the show made that I'm happiest about, even now, is that it treats its relation to SSSS.Gridman the same way SSSS.Gridman treated its relation to the tokusatsu version. It's telling a new story about new characters in a new way, so that it can appeal to new viewers and make new fans even without them needing any prior knowledge, and given how much more recent and how actively popular the previous series was this time around, I maybe respect that even more here.

[Kamen Rider Die]

Quote:

Originally Posted by DreamSword

I'd say that, in hindsight, the first episode gives the viewer a good look at what they ask expect from the average episode of Dynazenon.

Good to know!

Quote:

Originally Posted by Androzani84

So yeah, Dynazenon. I remember that the majority of Tokunation watching at the time preferred it to Gridman, but I definitely preferred the latter since it didn?t leave me consistently confused (hilariously enough, history repeated itself months later with mainline Ultra instalments, but that?s another story).

Interesting! I don't know that I find the toku mysteries in Dynazenon nearly as perplexing as the Akane/Yuta explanations that eventually arrived in Gridman, but that's mostly because I will never find toku mysteries as interesting to think about as character development. I'm the wrong person to talk about toku shows!

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fish Sandwich

Gauma is immediately pretty great here, though. I do remember liking him right away, as this weird but clearly warm big personality who draws the rest of the cast into the heroic adventure in a very different way from Gridman's stoic righteousness.

I'm split on Gauma? I liked him in the first half, like I liked the entire cast: he's weird and broad and tonally dissonant and plays great against first Yomogi, whose reluctant protagonism pairs hilariously with Gauma's WE ARE ON A MISSION-style nonsense, and then against Yume's traumatized indifference, which he just starts yelling at so we can move the plot forward. It's a great use of a character like that!

...and then we got to the robot fight, and every positive -- Gauma's boisterous energy, Yume's withdrawn mystery, Yomogi's skeptical normality -- all flipped into huge drags on the storytelling for me. I very much did not like them getting in the robot! I'm the wrong person to talk about giant robot shows!

[Frontier]

Having watched Gridman: The Hyper-Agent long after watching the anime's, it was surreal seeing God Zenon and Dyna Dragon and realizing "wow, so they really combined these two into one Mecha!"

Of course I also remember seeing the God Zenon suit and thinking "wow, this would make a solid tokusatsu Optimus Prime suit."

Also Masayoshi Ooishi delivers another banger OP.