Yeah i think the movie is well shot, but i was mostly noticing all the stock Anno shots like ‘fisheye lense closeup looking down at someone’s head’.
Teito monogatari and the sequel are both on YouTube with English subtitles. The quality is pretty average but it’s watchable.
episode 27 of space sherriff gavan is a cool bit of classic kid-horror, with the plot seeing the entire teaching staff of a primary school getting posessed and turning evil and also trying to drown kids in a really grim looking ashpile/wasteland/wastewater pond
episode 28 has a cool weekly villain, a female assassin whose tragic backstory is told via voiceover and a series of great sci-fi paintings
My bluray of Mechanical Violator Hakaider just showed up in the mail.
Which version is best to start with, the theatrical or director’s cut? Surprised that the original is apparently only like 51 minutes long, that’s like not even feature length lol
something nice about space sheriff gavan is that while retsu’s earth friends don’t know that he’s gavan, he’s still the guy they turn to when there’s danger. just a tough and dependable guy in the neighbourhood you can rely on if a monster turns up~
i’ve also recently been enjoying hidari shotaro’s hard boiled delusion diary, which was originally bonus features on the japanese kamen rider w dvds. it’s a bunch of shorts where the main cast of kamen rider w are in various silly imaginary scenarios that always end with a monster showing up and everyone getting into a big comedic brawl
unfortunately i have no idea 
but i felt bad that this post had gone so long without a reply
All good, I ended up going with the theatrical first and then the director’s cut a day later which I think was the better choice. The former is really lean and mean with no extra fat whatsoever. The plot is wafer thin so I think the tighter pacing works more in it’s favour.
The director’s cut fleshes out the plot a bit better and adds a bit extra to the fight scenes, but it also feels a fair bit padded out with extraneous shots of driving etc. Some of the extra special effects look unfinished as well, but the main issue for me was that the video quality is noticeably way worse, like they just took an old transfer from laserdisc or something.
Both are still pretty good in their own ways though. I think some aspects benefitted from the extra content in the DC but the theatrical overall feels like the better version
I picked up the bluray a year or two back and have only seen the Directors Cut version with some friends during a movie night so I can’t compare them. It’s a delightfully chunni movie. The running joke in my group is that this movie is the film the ROTOR poster promised. Terminator in Mad Max world is still a good pitch IMO.
it’s annual “we aren’t really making the cool thing” day
so, back when kingohger started, the actor for yanma said that dekaranger was his favourite show as a kid and he had a crush on one of the actresses.
toei’s april fools joke was a romantic drama starring the two of them. but then they also announced an actual crossover special featuring their super sentai characters meeting?!
weird
mill creek are releasing ultraman taiga on blu ray next month, and it’s been revealed that their partnership with tsuburaya has been extended~
also i forgot to post about this when it started: britain-themed indie hero avalon, who was first announced a few years ago, recently had his series start on youtube:
if anyone wants a good one of these i wd recommend the mobile cop jidan special episode “monster factory of fear” which maybe has the most Stuff Happening of any 25min tv episode i’ve ever seen. works even better if youve never seen any other episodes. love that the villainous plot just involves grabbing a live horse, some cats, a monkey and various other animals and vaguely stating plans to create an “ultimate lifeform” from there
i’ve also been watching ressha sentai toqger, the train themed powerrangers type thing. they really go in on the train theme! it’s quite cute. every episode they load up on bentos and they have to tap on a turnstyle with a little plastic rail card to activate their special powers. the end of each episode has audience-submitted footage of people’s favourite local trains.
i think monster factory of fear was actually a movie, intended to be shown in a triple bill with short movies of whatever other kids shows were popular that year! those movies were often action-packed to the point of having almost no plot, since they assumed the kids watching were already fans
also i didn’t know that about toqger and the sent-in clips. that sounds so nice!
power rangers would be a license to print money, if only it didn’t keep ending up in the hands of companies who inexplicably paid billions for a thing they hate.
the best thing to do with it now is to just let it die and start putting dubbed super sentai on streaming services. there’s just no need for this robotech bullshit in this day and age
Terrible counter-argument: Robotech bullshit is TikTok applied to television-making, and therefore its day and age is actually now.
im currently watching kamen rider kuuga. other than power rangers on TV as a kid, ive never watched a tokusatsu thing. i remember trying to get into kamen rider black sun as it was coming out but back then but the effects and costumes were a bit too jarring and i couldnt get into it so i didn’t go past the first episode.
im really liking kuuga so far! im watching one arc per day, which is like two episodes. i like the setup and the costumes, i like the villains and their outfits and and their little game of how many people can you kill in two days, which seems to be a big deal. i love how yaoi it is and i love godai yusuke! he’s so dreamy . . . .
it took a while to acclimate myself to that type of writing and fight scenes, but im on board now. i wonder if i screwed myself over by watching this one first because ive heard people say this is the best one. if i like this all the way to the end i do wanna check like, zi-o, ryuki, gavv and stuff
i usually recommend w to be people’s first kamen rider
i really want to watch kuuga, i love the very 2000 look of it. i’m gonna get the bluray when i have the money spare sometime
ive seen theres a manga based on this one that looks cool!
