On Thursday I showed off five of my favorite suit-up transformations, so I thought it might be fun to see one of them in action. I’ve already done a number of He-Man and She-Ra adventures, as well as the animated Filmation version of Captain Marvel. That left Skysurfer Strike Force, which doesn’t have an official posting anywhere I can embed from, and Kamen Rider Kabuto, my sampler for the Masked Riders, which I can embed since the first two episodes were posted to Toei’s abandoned Tokusatsu World YouTube channel.
I chose Kabuto based off a video compilation of Heisei era Riders even though I have a mixed relationship with the period. Some lean too far into the drama, some into the comedy, but the big issue is how little sense some of this is. With the original Showa era riders and movies it’s easy. Evil organization turns people into mutants, one of them turns out to not be evil and fights back as a bug man with a motorcycle. There weren’t as many ancient civilizations, mysterious monsters, mystical enemies that still use technology, or any of that. Just science gone wrong. Having to push the gimmicky toys with numerous features doesn’t help because they put play and coolness above making sense more often than not.
Then you have the protagonist, with some kind of quirky personality that could be silly or just obnoxious, and from these two episodes I find our hero more towards the latter. Still, work with what you got and some of you might find this more interesting and worth exploring if Shout Factory ever gets the license for the full series or Toei remembers they have this channel and learns how to use it. Since it is Toei, you’ll have to use the captions to subtitle in English and for some reason French. Japanese is also an option. Enjoy.
Two episodes in and I still don’t know what’s going on. It’s like reading a 1990s comic.
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