OK, I have no idea how most of this kind of stuff works, so I wasn't sure if some of you guys might know a more.
I didn't realize there was any drama with that, I had just assumed bother versions were easily available here.
Kamen Rider and General Tokusatsu
- Thread starter Samurai8472
- Start date
It took a while to sort it all out.
Harmony Gold USA legal issues with regards to Macross.
The entire debacle started in the 1980's, only got resolved in 2021.
That's how long this licensing shenanigans went on.
Toei's getting antsy to make money/move to the west. They're stuck in their own country not making enough profit.
Some tinfoil hat comments online are that they're willing to end a 50 year franchise to circumvent Hasbro with a slightly reworked series/franchise so they can exploit the western market
Whatever form this revamped franchise takes we're still getting rumors
Hmm. If we're getting another Zenkaiger level of wacky series I don't know if I'd be into it. Sounds like we're getting big googly eyes/anime eye mascots in 2026
Could we be getting a TwoKaiser type of format?
One male
One female
Robot team mate
We'll see
Hi everyone! I've never seen anything from the Kamen Rider franchise (except the Shin Kamen Rider movie, because it was directed by Hideaki Anno).
However, I've started watching "Tojima Wants to Be a Kamen Rider" and I'm loving it!
I think the first 10 minutes are among the most depressing anime I've ever seen. A 40-year-old man realizes he's accomplished nothing in life, except an obsession with Kamen Rider.
At the beginning of the first episode, he sells all his Kamen Rider memorabilia because he doesn't want whoever takes care of his corpse to throw it all away like useless plastic when he dies alone.
But then I meet a trio of petty criminals who are stealing while pretending to be Shocker and...
I won't say any more!
However, I've started watching "Tojima Wants to Be a Kamen Rider" and I'm loving it!
I think the first 10 minutes are among the most depressing anime I've ever seen. A 40-year-old man realizes he's accomplished nothing in life, except an obsession with Kamen Rider.
At the beginning of the first episode, he sells all his Kamen Rider memorabilia because he doesn't want whoever takes care of his corpse to throw it all away like useless plastic when he dies alone.
But then I meet a trio of petty criminals who are stealing while pretending to be Shocker and...
I won't say any more!
Uh, I know I could Google the answer, but I think it's more fun to ask here! I'm asking to better understand the references in this anime: what was the goal of Shocker? A generic criminal organization? Did they want world domination? By what means?
Oh, world domination, definitely. Shocker was the ur-evil organization of Showa-era Kamen Rider. They were based on the Nazis in certain ways -- the pursuit of world domination and the creation of a master race, their emblem and iconography, their stiff-armed salute.
Their primary method was to brainwash abducted humans and transform them surgically into cyborg kaijin (monster-men) who would carry out various episodic evil plots designed to undermine society or kill or transform everyone or whatever the writer of the week came up with. The kaijin generally had special powers that they used to carry out their plans, and destroying them would conveniently undo whatever harm their powers had inflicted on their victims, the environment, whatever. Your pretty standard Showa-era tokusatsu premise.
If you've seen Shin, you know the basic story, that Shocker abducted Takeshi Hongo and modified him to become Kamen Rider, but he was helped to escape before they could lobotomize him and reprogram him as one of their agents. (They should've brainwashed him first. Poor planning.) It's traditional that the majority of Kamen Riders share the same origin as their enemies, or at least a related one. It was kind of a dark premise, in that the monsters Kamen Rider killed were actually brainwashed human victims of Shocker, but the premise was that they were too far gone, their humanity and personality already destroyed by the brain surgery, so if anything he was just putting them out of their misery.
Shocker Combatmen (sento-in), the interchangeable grunts, wore skeleton-themed costumes and luchador masks and cried a high-pitched "ee-ee!," which seems silly at first, but when there are dozens of them doing it at once, it's actually kind of chilling and menacing, like something out of Hitchcock's The Birds. (Actually the early Combatmen had berets and face paint, and the luchador ones were the personal guard of a specific villain, but then they took over, I guess because it saved on makeup time, or just because the producers or audience preferred them.)
In my Tangent Knights audio drama trilogy for GraphicAudio, I approached the overall premise as a pastiche of Heisei-and Reiwa-era Kamen Rider and other tokusatsu, but the Eclipse organization I introduced in Book 2 was an homage to Shocker and other Showa-era evil organizations.
Per the KR wiki, "While some are slightly modified humans, others are said to be creations of the Shocker Leader who are not really alive but are instead puppets that follow [his] every command." I guess maybe they changed it so the Rider's kill count wasn't as high. The original show started out rather dark but was toned down for the young audience pretty quickly. (Which also happened to Gorenger, the original Sentai series, also from Shotaro Ishinomori. And Ishinomori's manga versions were even darker.)