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This Week in Anime
International Rider Kick
by Coop Bicknell & Jean-Karlo Lemus,
Kamen Rider Zeztz has hit the international streaming airwaves, and our resident Kamen Writers are here to join the fray!
Disclaimer:The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network. Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.
Full Disclosure: Coop has worked with Discotek Media & MediaOCD, having provided the back of box description for their releases of Kamen Rider V3, X, Amazon, and Black RX. His opinions given here are purely his own and do not reflect those of his employers.
Coop
I've been having the strangest dreams lately... Last night, I dreamed that Lynzee finally let us write a Kamen Rider column and Jean-Karlo tagged in to do it with me!
You know how these things work: the yearly crossover movie always brings the old heroes back.
With that in mind, in this special Generations edition of This Week in Anime, let's talk about the very first Kamen Rider series to simulcast in North America and around the globe—Kamen Rider Zeztz!
This one's been a long time coming! Tokusatsu fans will know that Studio Tsuburaya has been eating Toei's lunch for years at this point—and not just because of SSSS.Gridman and SSSS.Dynazenon's success! For over a decade, various Ultraman shows have been available on streaming platforms like Crunchyroll or TokuSHOUTsu. Tsuburaya has also made sure you can get almost any UItra-media on DVD. And while some releases are better than others (the Denkou Choujin Gridman DVD set representing the absolute nadir), those Ultra-sets tend to be extremely complete, even including any of the movies the given Ultra has appeared in. And they also go on sale extremely often, I've never paid more than US$15 for an Ultra show.
Tsuburaya has also gone above and beyond and ensured that their latest-running shows, like the currently-airing Ultraman Omega, are available day-and-date on their free YouTube channel. No questions asked; you want to see a giant red alien wrestling with rubber suit monsters, you log into the official Ultraman YouTube channel and start watching. They've even simul-dubbed some of the recent shows.
The English dubs for Ultraman Z and Ultraman Blazar are spectacular! In fact, I recently nabbed Z for a cool US$11 thanks to those sales you mentioned. But more important than the price is the wider accessibility the dubs provide. I can't tell you how cool it was to flick on an episode of Z and watch my nephews' eyes go wide in awe.
But on the Kamen Rider side with Toei, it's been a slow drip of streaming and home video releases over the past five years. Not to mention from various companies as well, with select titles coming from Shout! Studios (The Original Series, Kuuga, Ryuki, Zero-One, Geats), Discotek Media (V3, X, Amazon, Black, Black RX), Media Blasters (The First, The Next, ZO, J, Shin Prologue), TOKU HD (Faiz, Agito), Crunchyroll (Fuuto P.I. ), and Amazon (Shin, Amazons, Black Sun). In the case of Discotek's offerings, I've provided the back-of-the-box copy for most of those entries. Back in 2023, Chris and I ran through most of the series available at the time in a handy little guide. Needless to say, the series has slowly but surely been building the momentum for a leap into the world of simulcasting... Even if viewers are a touch frustrated with the overall rollout.
Also, watch Kamen Rider Kuuga. It's one of the best television series ever made.
And that's before you get into Kamen Rider's historical troubles in coming Stateside. Folks in Hawai'i have been able to enjoy Kamen Rider on local television since the '70s, partially because there's a strong population of Japanese people or people of Japanese descent. Generation Kikaida was able to give the series an official home video release in 2008 (and I remember OtakUSA talking about it!), but that was still just a blip on the radar.
But if you were in the continental United States, you had to contend with Saban's Masked Rider—which, fun fact, is celebrating its 30th anniversary as of this writing.
Not to give the belated (and much-missed) T.J. Roberts any grief for a 30-year-old show he was in, but Masked Rider was a pretty dire adaptation of Kamen Rider BLACK RX—so much so, that Toei basically refused any further attempts to localize Kamen Rider for years, until the mid-'00s when ADNESS Entertainment flew to Japan to take a quiz on Kamen Rider to prove their earnestness in trying to localize Kamen Rider Ryuki. And it worked! Kamen Rider: Dragon Knight was relatively well-received (and won a Daytime Emmy for stunt coordination)... but the last two episodes never aired on TV.
Heck, if the scuttlebutt is to be believed, Dragon Knight was also well-received in Japan! It even got a new opening theme with blackjack and strippers!
And now I'm thinking about the bar that would be projecting Kamen Rider episodes on the wall at 2:00 AM...
All this to say that, outside of memes about Kamen Rider Gaim airing on HBO, it's been really hard to keep track of Kamen Rider in the United States—especially legally. For such a tremendously influential series with such deep roots in Japanese pop culture, Kamen Rider has a surprisingly small footprint in the United States. It likely doesn't help that a lot of Kamen Rider is influenced by Internet "leak culture," which I don't think Toei's production appreciates.
But with all the fandom and availability history accounted for, it sure is sweet to watch the latest Kamen Rider series officially as it airs in Japan. From the trailer alone, you can tell that the localization team is putting their heart and soul into this series!
There's a lot about Kamen Rider Zeztz that makes it an interesting choice to pin these global hopes onto. For one thing, Zeztz's design is very heavily inspired by the original Kamen Rider (a black suit with red and green highlights). His red neck parts even do a good job of giving him Kamen Rider's silhouette if you squint. And the main theme of the show is "dreams and nightmares," along with a protagonist who loves spy fiction and a mascot character who speaks exclusively in English.
With as universal a theme as dreams, you don't have to worry about weird stuff like, say, cross-cultural differences in gaming slang, knowledge of the Warring States era, or people having to reckon with Japan's interpretation of Thomas Edison.
Speaking of themes, I'd bet the presence of an opening theme song from Hiroyuki Sawano's band, NAQT VANE, might appeal to Western anime fans as well. I could easily see some new viewers hopping on due to that association alone.
But then here's where the roadblock comes in. Remember Tsuburaya's YouTube channel, where you can just log in at any time and watch any old episode of Ultraman that's been uploaded? Even if you missed the episode's premiere (Friday nights), you can just watch it on demand, no questions asked. Toei's scheme for watching Kamen Rider Zeztz is not that simple. You need a calendar to watch Kamen Rider Zeztz.
And even since the posting of that trailer, the airing schedule has shifted around further. Which isn't bad, but it still isn't ideal.
My biggest problem with this specific strategy is that it's primarily aimed toward pre-established Kamen Rider fans. Generally, people are more willing to check something out if they can easily fit it into their schedule. Rider hasn't proven itself to be appointment TV just yet, especially with the niche space the community has occupied over the past 20 years or so.
Shout-out to Toei for making Kamen Rider Zeztz available in Puerto Rico (that would've delighted me back in college—there was a time we didn't even get Crunchyroll over there!). But appointment television on the internet is a tall order.
As you said, this isn't really going to bring in new fans! Most people barely know the first thing about Kamen Rider!
It's why you, dear reader, only ever see the occasional passing mention of Rider here on ANN. The wider name recognition isn't there just yet, even with James Gunn mentioning it a time or two over the past decade. In comparison, Ultraman occupies a similar space, but Tsuburaya's efforts to make their series easily accessible have gone a long way. Like I mentioned with Ultraman Z, it's going to be way easier for a kid to enjoy a dubbed show over a subbed one depending on their reading level. Catering to the ride-or-dies is great, but I believe it's in the best interest of any long-running series to look toward new audiences as well.
It's especially disappointing with Kamen Rider because the various entries are all such different shows with their own unique tones and atmospheres. If you don't like one show, you're bound to latch onto another. Kuuga and Agito are dark and moody, with a lot of turn-of-the-millenium dread and anxiety. But then you have the extremely-lighthearted Fourze, with its gee-willikers protagonist and his beloved friend group of high school archetypes straight out of The Breakfast Club. Kamen Rider Drive is a kid-aimed police procedural show, while Kamen Rider W is a genuinely engaging mystery series with phenomenal writing.
It bears mentioning again, we got Kamen Rider W's anime spin-off, FUUTO PI, before Kamen Rider W was made legally available in America! It still isn't!
At the climax of Zeztz's premiere stream, I noticed there were around 11,000 concurrent viewers on YouTube. While those might be solid numbers for the built-in fanbase, who's to say that more eyes wouldn't have had the opportunity to discover the series with a different approach? I admire that Shout's trying to provide a solution with a 24-hour stream after the initial airing and a repeat airing on Fridays, but I don't believe this is the way to build up a new audience. Which stings, because I sincerely want to Rider to do well here!
Especially with how strong Zeztz's first two episodes have been! And JK, I love the Faiz-esque light strips that adorn Zeztz's suit!
They're such a great detail, it's a shame to think that they might stop emphasizing it as the series goes on.
But it might help to explain a bit more about Zeztz. Our protagonist in Zeztz is Baku, a young man who's mastered lucid dreaming. He loves spy movies and acting them out in his lucid dreams, but he has no real-life skills and a horrible, unlucky streak (a later scene reveals he's been struck by lightning and a meteorite). So the dream world is the only place where he can really do much of anything. Heck, his one attempt at stopping a kidnapping ends with him getting hit by a car.
Despite his bad luck, Baku sincerely wants to do something that allows him to help people. I really felt for him when his sister told him that he shouldn't bother with looking for a job or pursuing his dreams. Given Baku's hyperfixation with spy fiction and how his sister interacts with him, I could see neurodivergent viewers deeply relating to him. Especially in dealing with family who only see them for one aspect of their lives instead of as a multifaceted person.
So, here's where I get a bit nerdy. Kamen Rider has an ongoing theme where the main character's powers always come from the same place as the monsters they fight. SHOCKER created the original Kamen Rider as a cyborg super-soldier, like their various kaizoningen. Kamen Rider Kiva is a Fanguire who fights other Fanguires. On that note, Baku finds himself chased after a Nightmare, a creature that attacks people in the world of dreams. Even Baku's lucid dreams can't help him out much—only dreamstuff affects Nightmares. (Incidentally, experienced folks might notice that Baku is named after the Japanese dream-eating Yokai.)
It's not until Baku finds and wears a mysterious—belt? Sash?—that he's able to start using his expertise in the dreamscape against the Nightmares--as Kamen Rider Zeztz. See, it's funny, because the three "Z"s in "Zeztz" are like the "Zzz" onomatopoeia for when people are asleep, and the "Z"s also get reflected in the "777" effect from his Rider Kick.
On my nerdy end of the motorcycle, the scene in which Baku runs from his nightmare reminded me so much of a similar sequence in Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer. Just like Baku, Ataru and the gang find themselves running through an infinitely looping series of halls and stairs.
I'd also be lying if Satoshi Kon's Paprika didn't pop into my mind while watching these episodes. The surreal, dreamlike imagery on display here is wonderfully executed and used to its full potential in the action scenes. Be it Baku going through a bit of psychological horror, running through posters, or using the environment around him as a weapon to fight back against the Nightmares.
Baku also has limited shapeshifting abilities, mostly involving his body. His base form lets him buff up his muscles in a pinch, and later forms promise to give him some other weird abilities like turning his muffler into wings.
It's here that we have to talk about the dream-eating elephant in the room. There's been some consternation over Zeztz using generative AI for some of its shots. There were worries about what was supposed to be a glimpse of AI in one of the trailers, but the opening scene with the helicopters felt uncanny for me.
I had the same feeling while looking at that skyline myself. The talk around Zeztz's use of generative AI started in July, back when Toei was slowly dripping out snippets of this teaser trailer.
This pair of shots from the teaser raised the first alarm bells for eagle-eyed fans. Specifically, the funky columns in the first image and the uneven roofing in the second.
Toei, for the most part, has kept mum on the whole thing, but for my part, I hate it. Tokusatsu at large—not just henshin-hero stuff like Ultraman or Kamen Rider, but the entire genre—is based around the power of imagination. It was pioneered by problem-solving artists using their scant resources (and budgets) to create sweeping stories that capture the watcher's imagination. Eiji Tsuburaya created powerful imagery that has been endlessly iterated upon for the past 60 years, courtesy of Ultraman, and he had to do it at a time when most people in Japan still didn't have color television sets!
The power of tokusatsu is in the suspension of disbelief. Even fifty years out, Toei hasn't really updated or changed the looks of the older Riders—and even now, the special effects for their finishers are just CGI re-creations of the same animation effects from decades ago. Artists have spent their lives perfecting the effects and performances in tokusatsu. Trading all that in for generative AI that has stolen so much from so many people is a slap to the faces of everyone who has helped make Kamen Rider what it is today.
While there's a part of me that understands the temptation to simplify the production of year-long television series wherever possible, generative AI isn't the way to do it. The spirit of tokusatsu is working with what you've got to wow audiences. There's been more than a few cool Rider suits over the past 20 years that have been clever reuses of old suits with some new elements. From the villains of the first Cho Den-O film to Kamen Rider Gavv's final form, Toei's artists have time and time again found new ways to innovate with what they have.
Part of why Super Sentai and Kamen Rider have stayed in production for so long is because Toei's artists have so many decades of knowledge working on this show. Without their craftwork, it'd be impossible to produce any of those shows weekly with the budget they have. It's not just the suit designers: it's suit actors, it's the stunt artists. Companies in the United States have tried with Power Rangers, but the more they try to break off from the Japanese source footage, the more trouble they find themselves in. It's all Hasbro can do to just rerun remastered episodes of the original Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers. You just can't make a show like Super Sentai without a team of artists, actors, producers, and production crew who know how to do this stuff in their sleep (especially not for cheap).
There's a reason Japan Action Enterprise exists: you can't just film one of these suits without a trained suit actor inside of it.
I mean, you can try. But folks will know. 25 years of Power Rangers, and the most their production can figure out is "punctuated poses and karate, right?"
And the occasional backflip.
Going back to the AI debacle—the folks in Japan know people abroad aren't happy about it. I can tell from first-hand experience that there's a degree of excitement from Japanese fans when American productions try to make tokusatsu stuff—they went wild for that Fortnite Power Rangers trailer. But these same fans don't really understand how unknown Kamen Rider is in America. If folks are catching wind of how much the shadow of generative AI has tainted Kamen Rider's American debut, I can only hope that this means that the powers that be recognize that they backed the wrong horse and course-correct.
Same here. Fingers crossed it's something that the production team keeps in mind while working on future episodes. Well, unless it's a mandate from up on high—as most uses of generative AI are these days.
I'll tell you this: a handful of fans wouldn't be going feral over this robot bike man and his sultry voice if he were the result of a prompt.
I haven't been able to watch Commander Zero's bike-form debut because of Toei's byzantine streaming schedule for the episodes. But the fact that they're committing to a whole episode with honest-to-god motorcycle action points to Toei really trying with Zeztz. Motorcycle stunts are really hard to do in Kamen Rider these days because of recent laws passed in Tokyo regarding modified motor vehicles. These were ostensibly for cutting down on gang activity (as well as controlling noise pollution), but it also made filming Kamen Rider within city limits difficult. You couldn't have a hero named "Kamen Rider"... ride his bike in every episode.
Honestly, I got those feelings quite often while watching this pair of opening episodes. Before Rider's modern formula had been perfected with series like Kamen Rider Double, Fourze, and OOOs (a run of shows that I'm very nostalgic for, by the way), each entry had an experimental vibe to it. Toei hadn't made one of these shows in years when they started working on Kuuga in 2000, so it and every one that initially followed wrote their own rules. It was about nine-ish years before something consistent was fully settled upon, and that's mostly in the gimmicks department.
From a regular police presence in the plot, to the low-profile gashapon capsule gimmick, and its willingness to get visually experimental (minus the AI), Zeztz might be the kind of show that gets me back in modern Rider. Admittedly, I haven't kept up with a Rider series since 2020's Zero-One.
Zero-One was also the last time I was able to finish a proper Kamen Rider series, too. The sad reality of writing a weekly column for an anime website is that I don't have much time to watch media for fun on my own. It's about all I can do to make time to watch my Kamen Rider BLACK DVDs from Discotek. But even if I can't watch the series weekly, I still love the stuff. I'm not sure I can verbalize what it is about Kamen Rider that captures my imagination instead of some other superhero like the Green Lantern or The Incredible Hulk. But there's nothing like seeing a Rider show up and do the thing. It makes me feel nine years old all over again.
I hope that Zeztz can help the series nab a proper foothold in America, because even when these shows get absolutely goofy, there's nothing like when you get to see your guy show up and have their moment in the sun. And it's all wholly without pretense or artifice. You're either too young to care about the visible zippers or you're old enough to just not notice them anymore. There's an earnestness in these shows that genuinely inspires hope. When the heroes show up and do their pose, you get excited. When the scoundrel who's been dogging the heroes all series long finally lays his life on the line for something greater than themselves, you cry. There's a notion that these are heroes, and these characters live up to that ideal: larger-than-life figures who live to inspire people, who run at danger for the sake of other people. They just happen to do it while wearing spandex bug-suits.
When I was in my tweens, I saw Rider as the next step beyond Power Rangers. As I got older, I came to appreciate tokusatsu for saying, "We're going to make live-action anime with whatever budget we have, and it will rule." Today, I adore the genre when it breaks through the merchandising monster of the week to say something about the time it was made. Be it Kuuga's take on living in the direct aftermath of the tragedies that befell Japan in the 90s, Ryuki's portrayal of the the dog-eat-god battle to survive in the following years, or Zero-One showing that the "good" corporate CEO might be too naive to understand that he's part of the problem.
Zeztz hits at a time where many feel like they're in the same boat as Baku—isolated and in a place where they've been told that their dreams and the empathy they show to others don't matter. And maybe he's a dude in a bug suit with lights and a fanny pack across his chest, but like Baku, perhaps viewers can take back those dreams and work to make them a reality. They might not wake up with a strange belt on their chest in the morning, but maybe they'll find a way forward. However, I do hope that with the presence of generative AI assets in the series, that plagiarism isn't a potential theme of the series either...
This is normally where I'd encourage folks to seek out other Kamen Rider media, but it's complicated. FUUTO PI is a genuinely great time that also serves as a good introduction to Kamen Rider W, and TokuSHOUTsu regularly has the 1971 original series streaming. You can also seek out Hideaki Anno's Shin Kamen Rider, which is as keen a distillation of the original series as you'll ever get. And if you're able to grok the bizarre-o schedule Toei has going on for Zeztz, you might as well jump in—it's only two episodes in at the moment.
I'd like to see Kamen Rider become more popular in the United States. We need more people gently rotating kung-fu bug men in their heads.
And with that, it sounds like I have to send you DIRECTLY on to your next mission, JK. I've prepared a bike for you.
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