[Fish Sandwich]

I just hope Rider #1 is enjoying Gavv right now

[Kamen Rider Die]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fish Sandwich

I just hope Rider #1 is enjoying Gavv right now

I'm sure he hates it! Biological modifications instead of mechanical augmentations?! ABSOLUTELY NOT!

Now, Shin Kamen Rider, on the other hand...

[Kamen Rider Die]

originally posted on December 6th, 2021, as part of “Kamen Rider Die rewatches Legend Rider projects (and more!)”

OOO, DEN-O, ALL RIDERS: LET’S GO KAMEN RIDERS



That’s the one thing I remembered from this movie.

I love that shot of Our Heroes (well, Our Heroes And Also Ankh) getting crucified in Kamen Rider Plaza. (Not to be confused with Kamen Rider Aubrey Plaza.) It’s… I was very new to Kamen Rider when I saw this movie, and the gigantic thematic swings a Kamen Rider movie could take hadn’t really been made clear to me yet. So seeing a public execution steeped in Western religious iconography was… I did not see that coming! It’s a pretty shocking image!

No pun intended! I dimly recalled that this was one of those Phase 2 movies where Shocker takes over everything, and it’s definitely that. (I think the other one is Kamen Rider 3?) There’s not really much to this movie outside of Kamen Riders and Shocker, though. It’s a 40th anniversary celebration of Kamen Rider, and boy do they never let you forget it.

Like, the story or moral or lesson or whatever, it’s paper-thin: Kamen Rider -- much like Wu-Tang -- is for the children. We see a world without Kamen Riders, and we see children with nothing to look to for examples of bravery and dedication and sacrifice and sweet-ass bike tricks. It’s a very good lesson! I find it hard to complain about a movie whose text and subtext is Thank Goodness For Kamen Rider.

But, man, this movie eventually just becomes a parade of Kamen Riders, with all the story inherent in, y’know, parades. It’s an entire final third that’s just introduction after introduction, and that’s in a movie that already spends a ton of its runtime introducing Kamen Riders!



Like this guy! It’s the return of New Den-O, now with (I want to say) lighter hair. This was my first ever Den-O experience, and I don’t know that I got even half of the premise. I definitely didn’t get why Momotaros could just become a Den-O despite being one of the monster guys, and I think I sort of get it now. I guess those Decade episodes where he became a real boy are Den-O canon? Maybe?

This was a fairly middle-of-the-road outing for New Den-O. He doesn’t really have an arc. (None of the superheroes do in this movie. Hell, not even Ankh learns a lesson, and he’s the one instigating the plot!) He’s put through another brief demise of Teddy, which I think now accounts for half of all Teddy stories to date? Him dying and Kotaro feeling distraught until Teddy just shows back up? But the Imagin are all very fun, and Kotaro doesn’t drag anything down. He’s fine, and Den-O’s always at least fun. Nice to see that cast again.



And then it’s just a million Showa guys. I don’t truck with Showa, so all them old guys flipping through the air was not what I wanted in an OOO/Den-O film. They’re just there, which is pretty much how the entire final third of the film felt to me. I like Kamen Rider suits and all, but these guys were interchangeable for the plot. It was just more and more dudes, without anything for them to do or say.



Except, of course, for the returning W team! It’s a cameo, at most, but I love seeing them. (And, what the hell, did Philip’s voice change between Movie War Core and this?! He’s got a relatively husky voice when he’s saying his two or three lines! He’s all grown up now!) Shotaro and Philip are maybe my favorite duo in all of Kamen Rider, so I’m going to be a hypocrite and applaud this movie for bringing them back for maybe thirty whole seconds.

Beyond that… god, I don’t know what there even is to talk about. It’s a million hero suits fighting a million villain suits, and the only real theme is that Kamen Rider is an awesome franchise. It’s nothing I disagree with, but I don’t know that I needed it shouted at me for ninety minutes.

Still, that crucifixion shot! Very cool.



—

40 MONTHS LATER



It’s really the prototype for the Taisen movies, isn’t it?

There’s the requisite Nighttime Showdown at Kamen Rider Quarry, preceded by an entire third of the film spent introducing conspicuously silent and glaringly interchangeable Legend Riders, preceded by a plot that asks more questions than it answers, preceded by an emotional story that actually engages with its audience in a smart way. Read another way, it’s a good story that gets progressively dumber the more it leans into spectacle.

Like, I think all of the Rider Scouts stuff in this movie is great? Really great? I gloss over it above – to almost the same degree the movie eventually abandons it to spend more time burnishing the legend of, like, ZX – but the way this movie talks about how Kamen Rider’s gift to the children of Japan for 40 years is that it taught multiple generations to believe in things like hope and kindness… that’s so cool. Creating an alternate non-Rider world whose tragedy is that kids are meaner and more selfish and scared? Very smart, and genuinely affecting for all of its nonsense in worldbuilding. (I like that Shocker kept building inspiring buildings and making fun fashion for people throughout Showa and Heisei, despite being a malevolent kleptocracy.) I like when these movies get at something sweet, rather than just something awesome. That’s such a nice thing to celebrate for a major anniversary.

And then the movie basically forgets about it for over 20 minutes.

The spectacle is what we’re nominally here for, if you believe the filmmakers, and I find it a fairly mixed bag. There’s an effort to get everyone and everything onscreen in some capacity, logic and/or history be damned. (Kind of surprised #1 and #2 invited, like, Scissors to the big brawl at the end. I feel like being a serial killer would be disqualifying, but maybe being Shocker henchmen for 40 years blurred their red lines some.) The bikes all can fly now because Why Not, everyone's just back because of belief so there's zero consequences, and the scale eventually dwarfs the humanity. It’s Quantity over Quality, which is basically the formula for every upcoming Taisen film. It’s a big party at Kamen Rider Quarry, and everyone is invited except for compelling storytelling.

But the beginning! Kind of a fun story, right up until the movie decided it didn’t need one anymore! A shame this all begat the Taisen series!



edited to add OH RIGHT THE OOO GUYS. Incredibly funny that Eiji and Ankh go on a literal journey without going on any sort of emotional journey -- they travel through time and alternate realities, but the only lessons they come away with are Fighting Harder (Eiji) and I Wasn't Listening To The Question (Ankh). Absolutely just along for a celebratory extravaganza, and they didn't even get to share the screen with the two Riders they actually knew already. Amazing. YONEMURA!!!

[Switchblade]

This is maybe the most quintessentially early-10s Rider movie: a modern remake of a Showa general, Den-O, Shotaro and Philip, Black and Black RX being treated as separate characters, random other Ishinomori heroes, that one quarry, and - of course - Stock Yonemura Plot #1 (of 1).

It's not my favorite of those movies, but... actually, that's pretty much all I've got. It is a film that exists.

(if I had directed this, the scene where everyone chants the Showa Riders' names would have continued past Black RX and included the crowd going "Um... this guy!" for Shin)

[Kamen Rider Die]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Switchblade

Stock Yonemura Plot #1 (of 1).

I could spend an hour talking about this, which is longer than Yonemura spent thinking about it, but: Rider 1 and Rider 2 seriously spent F O R T Y Y E A R S subjugating humanity in the name of Shocker as a long con?! Just so they could, what, eventually impress a plaza full of civilians when people's residual alternate-reality memories of Kamen Riders as good guys magically reincarnated a couple dozen Riders who never existed in this reality? This does not seem like either a great plan or a fair trade-off!

(It's still infinitely more plausible and heroic than the plot of Super Hero Taisen, though.)

[Androzani84]

So this was another early watch for me, and having seen Super Hero Taisen GP as my intro to Kamen Rider, before and after I became more familiar with Rider, I felt that did this plot better.

And like other OOO-featuring movies, this one is a slight continuity nightmare, in that the 1971 scenes are basically the theme park version of the original Kamen Rider. While everything presented existed, General Black and the Rider Scouts weren’t around until 1972 (and the latter was, like most real scout groups, boys only, so there were no girls like the one that appears here) and Ichigou and Nigou never had the Batman and Robin dynamic they have here (they tended to rotate who was guarding Japan and who was destroying Shocker’s other evil plans offscreen, only coming together against monsters that were supposed to be really tough). But funnily enough, the two kids Mitsuru and Naoki who are surprisingly relevant to this plot share their names with two of the original series’ Rider Scouts, so they’ve got that going for them.

And speaking of those kids…

Rider-lert!

In addition to a whole crap ton of returning VAs, not all of them reprisals (King Dark gets the standard stock Showa big bad voice rather than his original VA, while Apollo Geist is voiced by the guy from Decade), and some making their final appearances prior to death or retirement (The Great Leader, General Jark and General Shadow being the standouts there), we’ve also got the older version of Naoki, who is played by Isao Sasaki. Who is basically Japan’s answer to Elvis (don’t let his youthful looks fool you, he was in his old age when he did this movie), and the original Super Sentai theme singer. But in Rider, he performed the theme to the movie “8 Riders vs Galaxy King” and played a similar mad scientist dad role in Kamen Rider ZO.

And to close off… man is the theme cover at the end pretty terrible.

[Kamen Rider Die]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Androzani84

And like other OOO-featuring movies, this one is a slight continuity nightmare, in that the 1971 scenes are basically the theme park version of the original Kamen Rider.

I didn't get a chance to mention it before, but kudos to the Kougami Foundation's production department, because the Shocker HQ they built for their Kamen Rider movie looks exactly like the actual Shocker HQ that the heroes travel back to in this movie. How did they get it so right?!

[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER OOO EPISODE 29 - “A SISTER, A DOCTOR, AND THE TRUTH ABOUT ANKH”



After what felt like a million years of watching all of the various 40th Anniversary celebration media – two episodes, 49 Net Movies, and one lackluster feature film – we are now back to the serialized storytelling that we love.

It’s an episode that acts as a minor amount of recap, in that we’re hitting nearly every single viable subplot that was left hanging at the end of 26. We’re checking in with Eiji’s concerns, Maki’s backstory, Kazari’s casual endgame, Kougami’s warnings, Gotou’s new Status Quotou, and the duality of Ankh. I think the only thing that goes unremarked upon is Date’s mysterious backstory? Short of that, we’re catching up with the many, many gears that are turning inside this show’s season plot.

In a series that’s often explicitly about how desires don’t exist in a vacuum – how they interact with one another, oppose one another, and beget new desires by the reaction – it’s crucial that there be a lot of antagonists (and protagonists!) who all want slightly different things. That’s just good thematic storytelling, where the shape of the story is helping to tell the story. But it also means this show never lacks for an inciting incident, or a new quandary to vex our heroes.

Like, Birth and OOO basically accomplish nothing this episode? Birth, in general, is a reactive force, but even Team OOO is running around like a Chicken Yummy with its head cut off, flung from one Greeed sighting to the next. It’s an episode all about how the villains are not just sitting around waiting to spring a scheme on the heroes – Kazari, Maki, and Ankh Lost are pursuing their own goals around the actions of the heroes, not because of or in spite of them. There’re a million threads in this one episode, and they’re all pretty compelling.

It’s really the best second-half storytelling in the franchise. There’re any number of shows that need to find a new level when the show comes back from a movie break, or need to introduce new threats to be vanquished. While this episode nominally does that – Ankh Lost is, for all intents and purposes, the big new threat for the quarter – it never feels like it comes out of thin air, and it never feels like the totality of the storytelling options. This thing could’ve just been about Kazari’s reluctance to finish his form, or Maki’s fight against his own Yummy, or Gotou scarfing down a birthday cake as Satonaka's new assistant (!!!), and the episode would’ve felt no worse off for it. Adding in Ankh Lost feels motivated by 26 episodes of Ankh’s backstory, not some weird new menace that dropped out of the sky. This is a show that spent so much time creating a nice stew of different plot ingredients, and now it can ladle them out in whatever portions it wants.

That said! A stuffed episode of a half-dozen barely-intersecting plot threads doesn’t exactly allow any one of them to feel like a lot to talk about. They each get a scene, maybe a scene and a half, and then we’re off to the next thing. It makes for a fun episode of non-stop intrigue, but not much that feels especially evocative. It’s hard to find much to relate to in this episode, but it’s enormously fun to have watched it. Very happy to be back in a mode where plot and character matter again!

[Androzani84]

A two part in which we learn slightly more about Dr. Maki, who up until now has been defined by three things. 1. He carries a doll around with him at all times, 2. He has an obsession with endings and 3. Chiyoko looks exactly like his dead sister. Though the fact his Yummy is a rather beaten up looking panda that goes around hugging people… that probably says a lot about him without saying it.

And we also get to see what happened to the rest of Ankh in full, complete with it getting a personality and voice of its own.

Ultra-lert

The voice of the new Ankh is provided by Miyu Furuno (who like with Mezool, is not the actor who portrays the human form), whose prior Tokusatsu experience consists of a child character in Ultraman Gaia the Movie and the voice of Jean-Nine in the Ultraman Zero sub-franchise.

[Kamen Rider Die]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Androzani84

Though the fact his Yummy is a rather beaten up looking panda that goes around hugging people? that probably says a lot about him without saying it.

Yeah, his Yummy is not subtle.