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Of late I’ve found myself interested in older shows and books. Stuff that isn’t really “literary”, but resonated with people all the same and became immensely popular. Stuff that’s been kind of overlooked or forgotten as modern media becomes more complex and “interesting”.
A lot of these are “pulp” novels, like Zorro, but I’ve also been interested in old shows too. Especially old Japanese toku shows, which have a lot of truly bizarre creatures and plot elements. In many ways, I think a lot of these old things are fertile ground to study as an author interested in LitRPG/Progression Fantasy. The plots are simple, the characters are straightforward, and there’s a strong element of gaining new weapons/powers at regular intervals. Now, admittedly, a lot of that (in toku shows at least) comes from the fact that they’re kids shows designed to sell toys, but the point remains.
As an American, there are a lot of old toku (and new toku) that I’ve never seen or been exposed to. Outside of the Saban-ified shows (Power Rangers, Superhero Samurai Syber Squad, Big Bad Beetleborgs), that is. So, I decided to take a look at a franchise I’d oft heard about but never watched: Kamen Rider.
Thanks to Shout!TV, there’s a legal way to watch all kinds of old tv shows and stuff, and I managed to find the original Kamen Rider from 1971. The general premise is that Shocker, an evil organization with aims of world domination captures a human named Takeshi Hongo (who conveniently happens to be a brilliant scientist/amazing motorcycle rider/martial arts expert/and all around cool dude) and turns him into the kamen rider, a cyborg they hope will help them in their conquest of Earth. However, Hongo breaks free of their mind control/refuses to work with them and decides to protect the world instead. He also continues working on his racing times, for some sort of poorly defined and not really important Grand Prix/Racing Championship with the help of “Old Man” Tachibana. More on that later.
Every episode (with the exception of a few multi-parters), Shocker starts a new plan, and introduces a new cyborg villain for the kamen rider to fight. Since it was made in the 70s, the special effects are, uh, not fantastic, and none of the monsters are particularly scary.
However, with a strong ability to suspend disbelief, the show is surprisingly dark. Most episodes start with an innocent person (or more often, several innocent people) getting murdered by Shocker’s newest cyborg. And they’re not quick, clean deaths either; most of the Shocker cyborgs melt people into little puddles for one reason or another. Others use mind control and then sic their victims on the world around them, typically starting with the victim’s loved ones.
Shocker’s plots are dark too. While some of them are kind of classic old show nonsense, like satellite rays that hypnotize sleeping people, a lot of them are oddly terrifying in the modern world. Like attacking power plants, or poisoning reservoirs, or creating viruses to infect and kill an entire population. There’s even multiple episodes where Shocker cyborgs kidnap and brainwash children into becoming soldiers, teaching them how to assemble guns and bombs (even if they mostly use knives when attacking the heroes later). Like I said, you need a strong ability to suspend disbelief and accept what the show is telling you at face value, but if you do so there’s a lot of really interesting tidbits here and there.
Getting back to the main plot, there’s not much going on in the early episodes, but there is an interesting pseudo-romance building between Hongo and one of the side characters whose father was killed by Shocker. A big aspect of this development is the fact that Hongo can’t let her know that he’s a cyborg (along with the related questions of what does it mean to no longer be human).
The kamen rider sequences themselves are kind of strange. The basic idea is that Hongo has a turbine in his belt/waist that turns him into the kamen rider when wind blows through it. There are a few references to the idea that he can only store a finite amount of wind power, and that transforming is a somewhat random event (though it always happens in time for Hongo to fight the episode’s big bad). Once transformed, Hongo doesn’t really seem to change much. He does martial arts moves and beats up on Shocker’s minions, or duels them with a sword he’s taken from one of their number (they all seem to produce swords out of thin air for fight scenes?). Outside of the costume change, there’s really nothing new here, and the fights are forgettable for it.
Now, if things continued like that for the entire series (which is more than 90 episodes), it would have been fairly dull. But! There’s an interesting meta story that develops surprisingly early. I don’t remember which episode it is, but suddenly there’s an episode where Hongo doesn’t appear at all. There are a few scenes of Kamen Rider on his motorcycle, but none of Hongo himself. Then, in the next episodes, a new character named Hayato Ichimonji appears out of nowhere and tells us the viewer that Hongo (and his love interest) have gone off to fight Shocker elsewhere around the world. The MC changes! Thankfully, Ichimonji also turns into the kamen rider, so Shocker’s attempts to conquer Japan can continue to be thwarted.
A quick Google search revealed that the reason for this was that Hongo’s actor actually broke his leg, so the show had to go in a different direction. I do kind of wonder what it would have looked like if that hadn’t happened.
As soon as we get Ichimonji, the show opens up a lot more. There’s another character, Taki, who is introduced, and he happens to be an FBI agent working to stop Shocker. He handles a lot of the out-of-costume fights against Shocker, and also helps Ichimonji foil evil plans left and right. I’m not entirely sure why he didn’t become the sole MC, but that’s a separate issue.
Old man Tachibana also becomes a bigger player, leading a kind of organized resistance to Shocker that is made up of pretty young women at first, and then pretty young women and an army of children by the end of the series. The lore here is kind of muddy, and I wasn’t really paying attention to it to be honest, so there might have been a good reason for both of these things that I missed out on. Regardless, Tachibana starts getting more screen time, and I think he was a fairly cool character.
Interesting to me is the way that the kamen rider’s powers also start to change. Once Ichimonji takes the wheel (or the handlebars, as it’s a motorcycle?), the wind-turbine-in-the-belt thing goes away, and instead Ichimoni waves his arms in a special series of movements while saying “Henshin!” (“Transform!”
He also develops some new moves, which seem to come from the show’s theme song. Rider Jump, which allows him to like, jump really high, and Rider Kick, which is, uh, a kick. Typically the two are combined, and eventually become Rider’s finishing attack, turning Shocker cyborgs into nothing more than a big fireball. It’s not particularly interesting, and I think the fight sequences are oddly, one of the show’s low points.
Ichimonji, Taki, and the rest of the supporting cast foil Shocker plot after Shocker plot, and things seem to be in that perpetual stalemate of “see you next episode”, but eventually Hongo returns. The narrator even breaks the fourth wall to ask viewers if they remember Hongo, and for a few episodes there’s kind of a back and forth in terms of our MC. Is Hongo taking over again? Is Ichimonji sticking around? At first, they imply that Hongo is leaving again (he gets on a boat and says that he wishes he could stay in Japan but has to go fight Shocker somewhere else at the end of one episode), but then Ichimonji is gone and Hongo is running the show like nothing ever happened. Kind of weird, kind of jarring, and I didn’t dive too deep into it.
Hongo’s second showing is more interesting, and he keeps building on some of the foundational pieces that Ichimonji started (the Henshin sequence slowly gets more intricate, and he adds “Rider” in front of it.) The plots get more serious, and there’s a decent number of multi-episode arcs. We learn more about Shocker, spend more time with their leadership, and while we never really get a better idea for why they want to conquer the world or what they plan to do with it once they succeed in doing so, it’s nice to have some time with the villains. Sadly, the philosophical idea of what it means to be the kamen rider vanish. No longer does Hongo wonder what he’s going to do after Shocker is defeated, and his love interest character never returns to the series. Instead, he just becomes this weapon who fights off the bad guys, then gets on his motorcycle and rides off. Once again, going a bit beyond the “text” here yields a surprisingly melancholy world if one imagines that space beyond what we see on the screen. What does Hongo do in his free time? Is he trying to find a way to return to being a human? Is he practicing his combat techniques? Is he trying to get his lap time down, since the racing subplot introduced at the beginning of the show suddenly returns to half-hearted relevance via a few Tachibana monologues? It’s never mentioned or answered, and while I know that’s not the Point Of The Show (note the capitalization), it’s a question I kept coming back to.
The stakes keep going up in the episodes after that, and it kind of felt like the show knew it was flagging in terms of ideas/options because we have a fairly abrupt ending. Ichimonji returns for the final few episodes and the two kamen riders fight side by side, and ultimately Shocker (which has re-branded to Gel-Shocker by this point) is defeated and the world lives happily ever after.
Again, I wish there’d been at least some sort of afterward given to our heroes. Do they have to live as cyborgs for the rest of their lives? That’s a fascinating question (I think)! It’s philosophically interesting to consider what a weapon like the kamen rider might feel like after its sole purpose (defeating Shocker) no longer exists.
On the whole, I liked the show well enough to check out some other toku stuff. It made me think a lot about adding powers, “monster of the week” type stories, and other things like that. It was dated in many ways (from its special effects to some of its character attitudes), but again, with the power of suspending disbelief, it was quite a decent watch.
I don’t know if it’s available worldwide, but like I said earlier, Shout! TV has the whole series for free legal streaming.