The Power Rangers 30th anniversary is wild as hell because it has a real genuine emotional core that depends on the acting talent of the original Mighty Morphin Power Rangers and it pulls it off. I honestly can’t believe how well put together it is, they really pulled off an impossible balancing act between nerdy ranger lore stuff, a very slightly more adult tone, and earnest cheese. I can’t imagine someone making something better with the ingredients they had.
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nothing beats stop motion for robot transformations but this is a pretty great use of cgi
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i just watched the first two episodes of megabeast investigator juspion, and was pretty surprised! it’s a lot more like an old-school sci-fi show like star trek or doctor who that also happens to have a kaiju battle at the end of each episode than it is like most superhero tokusatsu shows.
the first episode has a star wars-like seedy space bar complete with jabba the hutt-esque laughing fatguy alien boss. the second episode has an ai satellite that was abandoned by humans many many years ago and now wants vengeance on them. both have a bunch of matte painting backgrounds that look like 70s sci-fi book covers.
i don’t know if there’ll be the budget to maintain this “planet of the week” format for 44 episodes, but so far i’m impressed
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incredibly ugly. an aesthetic crime. i love it
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Exactly what it should be, wow.
oh no
also, juspion did indeed run out of budget, and episode 4 has him landing on earth. also episodes 4 and 5 have unusually long recaps at the start. this early in the series and they’re already padding out the runtime? there’s still 39 more episodes!
but it’s actually fine because there’s still plenty of good stuff going on. a mysterious new villain in an evil black version of juspion’s power armour, main villain satan gorth has a creepy human form who acts like a cult recruiter and tries to tempt kids into doing evil, and there’s lots of awesome-looking composite shots
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Loved the casting for the scientist in Shin Kamen Rider which put the ending of the movie in a new light
Shin Kamen Rider is probably the weaker and cheapest looking of the Shin movies but still a lot of fun. Maybe a little to self serious but it felt like most of the villains actors were having fun. My biggest complaints are it feels a little to much like a MCU movie with to much CG usage and any action involving real people was really close up and used fast camera cuts to hide how little the actors could sell a punch. Thematically it has some ideas but don’t feel it was able meet them fully. I’d watch it again and get a home copy.
Even in this movie you feel the Toei curse where they seem afraid to spend money on anything they don’t have direct control on.
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I had to deal with an unfortunately extremely disrespectful crowd who kept laughing at inappropriate points but over all i’d say shin kamen rider was good. It definitely lost itself at the end. the cg was actually really cool and felt like an artistic choice more than anything, especially in the hachi-aug fight which was also the highlight of the film for me
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I don’t begrudge it for being CG heavy but I feel like a tent pole tokusatsu film like this should have one or two great practical effects scenes instead of attempting fast close up shots that I could see working in animation but feel messy here. I think the tunnel scene should’ve gone a little harder and just make all the colors on the suits neon instead of just the eyes and load the screen with akira light trails.
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Yeah, the tunnel scene being so damn dark felt like a weird misstep, but I chalked it up to being a homage to an old episode that went over my head.
I swear that dam where the fight with the first villain resolved at was the same one they used in one of the early multi-rider crossover specials.
whenever i hopefully look up info on shin kamen rider reaching the uk i just find the same article from some gaming website titled “Doctor Who Is Basically British Tokusatsu, And That’s Fantastic” and it feels like being singled out for punishment from god
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yeah i totally missed shin ultra here, i expect the same will happen this time
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after 20 episodes of ultra q, it’s bewildering the main cast would just dismiss a ufo sighting as fantasy
not super familiar with tokusatsu but i wanted to watch this and the original ultraman and kamen rider, and like, ultra q was kinda boring at first but either it’s gotten a lot better or it’s grown on me. maybe both? favourite eps so far are the spider mansion, kanegon and ragon
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i love the spider mansion episode
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So about what episode does UltraSeven start to hit? I’ve barely started (I’m up to ep 4) and Dan/7 is barely a character yet. Body snatcher episode was kinda fun. I don’t want to call it rote but it feels like it’s going through the motions. How much of this show is banking on you following up from ultra Q and Ultraman? Right now the most amusing part is that ultraguard doesn’t do background checks on unassuming passerbys that prove to be a boon to missions of national/planetary security.
Is it worth hunting down the deleted episode when I get into the 10ish range?
OK, Dark Zone about space city Pegassa gave me something to chew on with an alien willing to talk and staging a the drama around the moral quandary of choosing earth over a space city.
Originally, seven was planned on being an entirely separate universe, so the tie ins to the original shows are minimal. It wasn’t until Return of Ultraman that they started trying to make at least Ultraman and Ultraseven into a single canon.
Dam develops more as the show goes on. It is really funny that nobody notices what a weirdo dumbass he is a lot of the time, but being an alien himself, it’s something that comes up somewhat regularly. I think this is sorta dependent on the original show for that to land, because Hayata is always portrayed as knowing what to do, whereas Dan is much more…innocent? The show gets wilder as the season goes on, though. I do need to watch the “missing” episode at some point myself, though.
I think my favorite is probably 43, Nightmare on the Fourth Planet. That one is wild.
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shin kamen rider is the best superhero movie i have ever seen
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what the fuck was dairanger’s ending