Kamen Rider

[Angilasman]

Early listing has popped up for a Ryuki complete series blu-ray in February. Presumably this is Shout's next set and I'm excited for it because I haven't watched beyond the first two episodes on Tubi. It'll be new to me!

[LegendZilla]

Would anyone be opposed to a Shin version of V3 as a follow up to next year's movie?

[LSD Jellyfish]

I finished the first set of “Hongo episodes” of the original Kamen Rider (the first 13 or so episodes). They were good, and I enjoy Shocker and how devious they are, as well as the creepy cyborgs they make, but the series feels a little aimless and in need of an update. I don’t know if I can deal with 90 more episodes of the same thing, without a switch up, which is what the next episode promises.

I’m looking forward to it.

[StardustGenius]

Serialized television has seriously damaged episodic TV as a format. That's just how it was back in the day! Though, I would say there is a mixup early on and then midway.

90 episodes IS a huge ask. Let's see what Anno can do.

I recommend Black/RX if you want some streamlined Showa Kamen Rider stuff.

[LegendZilla]

^Anno's probably gonna base his take of Kamen Rider off of the original manga storyline.

[StardustGenius]

One thing I already disagree with Anno right away, is that he made the Rider head a helmet, and not an actual mutant creature head like it was intended.

[Cryptid_Liker]

One thing I already disagree with Anno right away, is that he made the Rider head a helmet, and not an actual mutant creature head like it was intended.

Well, there's the first Shin Kamen Rider and Black Sun for that.

[StardustGenius]

One thing I already disagree with Anno right away, is that he made the Rider head a helmet, and not an actual mutant creature head like it was intended.

Well, there's the first Shin Kamen Rider and Black Sun for that.

It's a convention that was used in other Showa Kamen Rider shows, such as Black. I'm sure the movie is going to be fine, Anno has a proven track record. I just disagree with his take on it. Kamen Rider Ichigo is a grasshopper cyborg, not something his head is removed like a helmet, like say a Ranger or a Metal Hero. Like in Ultraman, that helmet/mask is his head.

[Angilasman]

It's a convention that was used in other Showa Kamen Rider shows, such as Black. I'm sure the movie is going to be fine, Anno has a proven track record. I just disagree with his take on it. Kamen Rider Ichigo is a grasshopper cyborg, not something his head is removed like a helmet, like say a Ranger or a Metal Hero. Like in Ultraman, that helmet/mask is his head.

Well, it seems he's permanently stuck in his "suit," with only his head still appearing human - then hidden by the helmet/mask. Also, it wouldn't surprise me if every Shocker cyborg is similarly designed. The spider and bee look similar to me. The bat seems to have bat ears but an otherwise fleshly, human looking head, which I imagine will also be covered in a helmet when in battle.

... I think it's an interesting take on the body horror element important to Kamen Rider. I can see the reasoning behind it and the idea of being stuck in a non-human form but still retaining human face is pretty horrific. It's gross and weird. I like it!

[StardustGenius]

If that is what they are going for I'd like it!

[LSD Jellyfish]

... I think it's an interesting take on the body horror element important to Kamen Rider. I can see the reasoning behind it and the idea of being stuck in a non-human form but still retaining human face is pretty horrific. It's gross and weird. I like it!

I'm not sure if this will be discarded later, but early on in the original 1971 series, they keep leaning into Hongo/Kamen Rider being a tragedy. It's made clear that he's too strong for normal human relationships, and that his body is definitely some freaky cyborg underneath. I think that's what they are going for in Shin Kamen Rider too.

[miguelnuva]

... I think it's an interesting take on the body horror element important to Kamen Rider. I can see the reasoning behind it and the idea of being stuck in a non-human form but still retaining human face is pretty horrific. It's gross and weird. I like it!

I'm not sure if this will be discarded later, but early on in the original 1971 series, they keep leaning into Hongo/Kamen Rider being a tragedy. It's made clear that he's too strong for normal human relationships, and that his body is definitely some freaky cyborg underneath. I think that's what they are going for in Shin Kamen Rider too.

Depeding on the tone it would be tragic to see him trying to hug someone and he accidentally crushes them.

[Angilasman]

... I think it's an interesting take on the body horror element important to Kamen Rider. I can see the reasoning behind it and the idea of being stuck in a non-human form but still retaining human face is pretty horrific. It's gross and weird. I like it!

I'm not sure if this will be discarded later, but early on in the original 1971 series, they keep leaning into Hongo/Kamen Rider being a tragedy. It's made clear that he's too strong for normal human relationships, and that his body is definitely some freaky cyborg underneath. I think that's what they are going for in Shin Kamen Rider too.

Reminds me of something Anno said about the original series: loving the fun action the series had later on, but still being obsessed with the dark tone of the early episodes.

[Cryptid_Liker]

Speaking of Shin Kamen Rider, new posters!

[Angilasman]

An update on Mediablasters blu-ray set for those 5 Kamen Rider movies: essentially, they planned for a holiday '22 release, but two factors delayed it. The first is that they plan on having a bunch of extras and deluxe packaging and that takes time to pull together, and the second is the company was thrown into disarray when their primary distributor, Rightstuf, stopped selling porn. Mediablasters makes most of its money on smut, so they had to setup their own storefront and things are stabilizing now. Probably a summer release for Rider.

[Angilasman]

Rightstuf has both Black and Ryuki in stock!

[StreamOfKaijuness]

I've watched all 10 episodes of Kamen Rider Black Sun (2022) on Prime Video. People, this show is a landmark in tokusatsu production quality! Seriously, this limited series stands toe-to-toe with any of the serialized Marvel shows made for Netflix or Disney+. It's bold, inspired, adult-oriented, powerfully acted and it just goes for it, with a brilliant mix of practical and visual effects helmed by Kiyotaka Taguchi.

You don't need to have seen the original Kamen Rider Black to enjoy or understand this show but I do recommend watching that classic series first because you will appreciate what this new series does even more. Kamen Rider Black Sun is a reboot that takes a lot of the core elements and characters of Kamen Rider Black and reimagines them in a new, modern-day story. It doesn't have anything to do with Kamen Rider Black RX, so it won't make a difference if you watch Black Sun without having seen Black RX.

These 10 episodes tell a single, serialized story that's ambitious in scope and unflinchingly political. Kamen Rider Black Sun is like the antithesis of Shin Godzilla in a lot of ways.

Let me provide a little context for what I mean by that. Unlike the United States, in which there are still two major political parties that are both dominant electoral forces, Japan's bicameral legislature (the National Diet) has been dominated almost exclusively by one political party since 1955, the right-wing Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). The LDP lost control of the House of Representatives in the 1993 election to the left-wing Japan Socialist Party (JSP) but the LDP regained majority control in 1996 when the JSP dissolved. The LDP lost control of both the House of Representatives and the House of Councillors in 2009 to the center-left Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ). The DPJ's Naoto Kan was Prime Minister of Japan during the Fukushima nuclear disaster on March 11, 2011 when it took the government hours to declare a state of emergency and even longer to order evacuations of the affected areas. Kan resigned in August 2011 and the LDP regained majority control of Japanese government in 2012, which it has maintained in elections ever since.

The LDP has long been the party of Japanese nationalism. For decades, one of the most notorious trends among Japanese nationalists has been a predilection for historical revisionism, specifically regarding the Empire of Japan's culpability in perpetuating colonial and military atrocities before and during WWII. In the 1990s, a right-wing movement devoted to school textbook reform produced new textbooks which denied that the Nanjing Massacre ever happened or that the Japanese military ever forced women into sexual slavery. It took the Japanese government until the late 1990s just to finally acknowledge the existence of Unit 731, the covert unit of the Imperial Japanese Army that carried out horrific and lethal experiments on hundreds of thousands of people, and detailed information about Unit 731 has rarely ever been taught in Japanese schools. When the 2001 Hollywood film Pearl Harbor opened in Japan, a news crew outside of a theater interviewed people waiting in line who were excited to see the new Ben Affleck movie but genuinely knew nothing about the real historical event on which it was based. As time has passed, more and more Japanese people have grown to think of their country's role in WWII as being nothing but the victim of devastating atomic bombings by the United States, without recognizing the years of Japanese imperial invasion, slaughter and human rights abuses that led to that outcome.

When the LDP regained power in December 2012, the Diet re-elected Shinzo Abe as prime minister later that month. Abe had previously been prime minister for a year from 2006 to 2007 but his second tenure lasted nearly eight years until he eventually resigned in September 2020. Abe himself was the grandson of Nobusuke Kishi, who mercilessly ruled Japan's Manchurian colony in the 1930s, was subsequently imprisoned by the US for three years after WWII as a suspected Class-A war criminal, and still went on to help form the LDP and then was Japan's prime minister from 1957 to 1960. Abe also served as a special adviser to the far-right ultranationalist lobbying group Nippon Kaigi (Japan Conference), formed in 1997, which holds historical revisionism and Japanese constitutional reform among its official goals and is deeply entwined with the LDP. Along with opposition to civil rights for women and LGBT people, some of the core beliefs of Nippon Kaigi are that "Japan should be applauded for liberating much of East Asia from Western colonial powers; that the 1946–1948 Tokyo War Crimes tribunals were illegitimate; and that killings by Imperial Japanese troops during the 1937 Nanjing Massacre were exaggerated or fabricated." Although nationalists in Japan generally value the United States as an ally against the threat of aggression by China, Russia or North Korea, they also resent what they have long seen as Japan being kept on a leash by the US rather than the two nations standing on equal footing with each other. The push for reforming Japan's post-WWII constitution is primarily focused on amending or abolishing Article 9, which renounces Japan's right to wage war and prohibits Japan's military from engaging in any kind of collective self-defense operations on behalf of the country's allies. Although the constitution still has never been formally amended, Abe's cabinet in 2014 circumvented the Diet and the public by issuing a declaration which reinterpreted the principle of minimum necessary force described in Article 9 as allowing Japan to participate in collective self-defense operations in the event that one of Japan's allies is attacked.

Shin Godzilla was made to resonate with the Japanese voting populace who largely swung back to the LDP after 2011. The movie's first act is an allegory for the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster. More specifically, the first act of Shin Godzilla completely flays the real-time response to that disaster by the DPJ and Prime Minister Kan's cabinet five years prior. The movie doesn't have to specify which party or which administration it's lambasting because audiences in Japan had lived through that disaster and they recognized the allegory immediately. The rest of the movie is a parable for the common people of Japan reasserting their will through the government to save the country from a major nuclear crisis. When the Japanese government receives a diagram of the US military's proposed zone for bombing Godzilla in Tokyo, characters remark that the damage would be worse than Godzilla. Yaguchi at one point cites the 3 million Japanese lives lost during WWII after the old Imperial Army's unfounded optimism, and later there are two historical photographs that fill the screen to remind viewers that Japan was once the victim of two atomic bombings, but the movie avoids even broaching the subject of the many millions of noncombatant lives in the Asia-Pacific theater who were slaughtered by the Empire of Japan. Ultimately, Godzilla is defeated by an international military operation that is very decidedly led by Japan, which the film depicts as the alternative to having Tokyo nuked by Japan's international allies should the country fall in line with their way of handling things. From beginning to end, Shin Godzilla is a story that was tailored to Japanese people of the nationalist, LDP and/or Nippon Kaigi persuasion.

Kamen Rider Black Sun goes hard in the complete opposite direction. The show's premise is that people known as kaijin, who have the ability to transform into anthropomorphic animal forms, have lived in Japan for decades and are treated as second-class citizens. The story begins with a teen activist named Aoi Izumi delivering an impassioned speech at the United Nations urging the countries of the world to recognize the civil rights of kaijin. "The value of human and kaijin lives outweighs that of the Earth. There isn't even one gram of difference in their worth," she says. Back in Tokyo, a throng of anti-kaijin protesters led by an angry man with a megaphone marches through the streets calling for kaijin to be expelled from Japan or exterminated altogether. A smaller group of counterprotesters follows them, calling for equal rights and the end of discrimination against kaijin, with police struggling to keep the groups separated as they walk. When two officers restrain a counterprotester who ran toward the protesters, he asks them "What are you doing? Are police officers being violent against citizens now?" to which one of the officers replies, "Citizen? What are you saying, you kaijin?" When the man then transforms into his fly kaijin form in front of them, the other officer shoots him in a panic. Several other counterprotesters transform into their kaijin forms and briefly riot against the police before being forced to scatter, as the anti-kaijin protesters continue marching through the streets.

In the original Kamen Rider Black, Gorgom is an ancient cult bent on world domination that serves as the show's central antagonists, ruled by the unseen Creation King and led by the Three High Priests, Darom, Bishum and Baraom. In Kamen Rider Black Sun, Gorgom is originally formed by eight student protesters, both human & kaijin, in 1972 as a Zenkyoto group to push for equality between humans and kaijin. When Darom, Bishum and Baraom present the group's formal proposal for improving treatment of kaijin to Prime Minister Michinosuke Dounami, he surprises them by accepting their terms and agreeing to provide kaijin with equal opportunities for education and work. However, he then reveals that this is just the position his administration will take with the public, and that he agreed to meet with them for the purpose of forming a new political party together. "Sooner or later," he explains, "I plan to reform the constitution so that I can use military power overseas. When that day comes, the 200,000 votes from the kaijin will be helpful." He continues, "It's also worth mentioning, that when we start a war with another country, I'll have the kaijin fight at the frontlines as military weapons."

By 2022, the Gorgom Party is the long-dominant party in Japan's government and it's led by Prime Minister Shinichi Dounami, the grandson of former Prime Minister Michinosuke Dounami. He publicly maintains the party's position that kaijin deserve to live in harmony with humans but there is no real check on his power. During a legislative session on a bill proposed by Dounami, a member of the opposition party calls it a war bill and declares that it would prevent security and put Japanese citizens and the self-defense force at higher risk. She demands to hear answers from the prime minister but he directs his chief cabinet secretary to the microphone, who insists that they would halt all military activity to focus on safety if, by any chance, a battle were to erupt in a location where Japan's self-defense force is deployed. He also insists that the bill is not a war bill and should be called peaceful security legislation. When the opposition member still insists that Prime Minister Dounami answer in his own words, he approaches the microphone, puts on his reading glasses and reads the exact same response from a page. She criticizes him for repeating it word for word and says he'll never get the approval of citizens like that. Afterward, when Dounami walks with his cabinet through the Diet while ignoring the press, he turns to his chief cabinet secretary and says, "Getting the citizens' approval? I never intended to. The majority of this world was created without getting their approval. They don't get that, and that's why they'll always be the opposing party."

There's a lot more to scrutinize but I don't want to get into too much detail about the plot. Suffice to say that when the show eventually touches on the origins of the kaijin, the parallels to Unit 731 are undeniable. The Gorgom Party is a brazen allegory for the real-life LDP and the show shines a light on the party's link to Japan's imperial past, a point exemplified by a scene in which the Creation King sits inside an old shrine with the Imperial Seal of Japan adorned over the entrance. Kamen Rider Black Sun is a fearlessly political series and it doesn't pull its punches. It also boasts memorable characters, brutal action sequences and a beautiful score. This series is fantastic!

[CyberZilla]

-snip-

Yes, yes, yes! I loved Black Sun! I only just got into KR recently, but that show was so well-made. I had a friend who knew more about KR Black who was able to fill me in on some things I didn't know. I am enamored with the score and how they handled the story. It's not as action-packed as the older series, but it doesn't pull its punches with its focused themes and narratives. The last episode had me very emotional, which I didn't expect. I ABSOLUTELY recommend it.

[G-Matt]

A few new shots in this trailer for Shin Kamen Rider:

[LSD Jellyfish]

So, with Shin Kamen Rider coming out shortly, I'm in a jam.

Long and short of it, I've been watching the original 1971 production. I'm 20 episodes in after a few months, but it's dawning on me that unless I watch like 5 episodes a day (not happening), I won't be able to finish it before it's Japanese release.

Can anyone compile a list of "major episodes"? Episodes where more about Shocker is revealed, the best episodes, and just important ones overall? I hate skipping over stuff, but I want to go into Shin Kamen Rider with some point of comparison beyond the first twenty. I'll go back and watch the rest of the series AFTER Shin Kamen rider, so thanks.