EPISODE 7
The episode that's really only notable for Kenta Satou guest-starring as Koutarou's childhood pal, who unknowingly went to work for Crisis and ended up helping make them some laser beam that spreads poison or some horseshit like that. Oopsie!
Kinda funny we never heard about this friend before, huh? It's like we just met Koutarou Minami, not like he's had a year of show already. Where did Satou fit in with Nobuhiko as Koutarou's one best friend, eh?
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| Koutarou uses this awful disguise in this episode. And it works, fooling Reiko. Poor Makoto Sumikawa... |
EPISODE 8
This might be the first episode of RX, in this rewatch, that I didn't totally despise. A former classmate of Shigeru -- him again?! -- suddenly displays super-intelligence, only to find out that her dad was from Crisis' world. She develops powers in a real Stephen King Carrie/Firestarter way, lashing out at people in anger and mistrust, and she ends the episode by attacking Koutarou. Koutarou/RX is awesome here, he tells her to let it all out on him and purge herself of her abilities and hatred, and he takes a lot of pain for her.
This is the first of two episodes written by Ken'ichi Araki. I'll have to take notice of his next episode...
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EPISODE 9
Horrible, stupid stinkfest. A lot of people criticize whenever Kyoko Sagiyama writes a toku episode, but she's usually much better than this. I don't even know...who the hell gets the assignment to write the latest Kamen Rider episode and sits down like "Yeah, I think we need to tell the story of a girl who's obsessed with cacti, and Maribaron tricks her into thinking her dead mother is alive in a giant cactus and that if the girl is willing to transform herself into a cactus, it will bring her mother back to life and...hey, guys, where are you going?"
This is just about the lowest a toku can go. It's worse than the pig school episode of Liveman. It's worse than the tomato episode of Jetman. It's not as bad as the ET Baby episode of Blue Swat, though.
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EPISODE 10
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| Shigeru, traumatized by the events of RX, grows up to be a delinquent terrorizing his teacher, Gaku Hoshikawa. |
Another Shigeru-focused, teach-the-kids episode. Great. Shigeru must learn there's no shortcuts in life. You can't always find an alien that can create clones of you and get good grades and be good at baseball and stuff. You gotta do the work yourself! Henshin and fight Crisis, Shigeru! (TSUZUKU)
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EPISODE 11
An episode that's damn close to the cactus girl one in its stupidity and pointlessness. Crisis makes a robot out of scrap who decides to go around and punish people who discard their items too easily by transferring them into those items. A lot of silly speechifying about not being wasteful. It's another episode that Jetman learns from, because the Walking Garbage episode is soooooooooooo much better.
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EPISODE 12
A pretty silly episode, but one I like mainly because it focuses on Reiko, and is the latest attempt at ripping off of A Nightmare on Elm Street. (Remember, Black itself had two episodes like that.)
Man, Makoto Sumikawa's just so wasted in this show. It's always been my number two complaint about this series. First is "Why did they think that was a worthy successor to Black?!" Second is "Why did they waste Diana?!"
Crisis has gotten Rita Repulsa-levels of obsessed about Koutarou and keep trying to target him and those closest to him. So, this time it's Diana -- er, Reiko -- and they place a monster in her subconscious that will give her nightmares about Koutarou. The day is saved by a mysterious dude who ends up being from Crisisland, who lets Koutarou use the wacky dream machine he has to enter Reiko's dreams and kill the monster. (The mysterious dude is played by Kenji Fukuda -- Changeman's Icarus. He's pretty cool here, and it makes you wonder why he never had a bigger toku role. He'd have been a better Dasmader, let me tell you.)
The monster of the week's design is just terrible, though. Cheap. The face is making these unintentionally comedic wide eyes. If it's an Amemiya design, I'd be surprised. It has Ryu Noguchi written all over it, it looks like a generic BEM alien. Freddy Krueger this guy ain't.
Random thought:
I believe this is the last appearance of Hayami, the unfunny, mugging, terrible detective. I never knew the point of the character, but we last see him and his men get attacked by Maribaron. Maybe she killed him? If so, congratulations, Maribaron! You win Crisis Employee of the Week.
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EPISODE 13
Sagiyama returns with another episode about a random girl of the week, this time focusing on Shigeru and his four-eyed buddy. Yay! (I will never learn whether the four-eyed friend is Kengo or if that's the name of the one who is about 10 years older than Shigeru and four-eyes.)
Proving Crisis is terrible at their job, this girl and her father are the latest to escape their clutches, taking with them some dumb MacGuffin that Crisis needs for their Alan Parsons Project laser or whatever. Yeah, Crisis aren't even good enough to be compared to the most cartoonish Bond villains -- they're the parody of those self-parodies.
Episode 7 - I like the design of the Kaima warrior of this episode... I confess that I had not recognized Kenta Sato as Kotaro's friend.
ReplyDeleteEpisode 12 - Sometimes I wonder if the producers and writers thought Hayami could be a new Hanpei Hattori. If they had this idea, they missed the mark.
And next... let´s go to Kaima´s world.
Now my current thoughts and flashbacks to childhood...
ReplyDeleteEpisode 7 - I do like the episode where Red Turbo appears as a guest character. That was way before he became Red Turbo. It was trying to find Crisis' rather good plan and well they do end up doing the typical stupid plans!
Episode 8 - A good episode actually. Though too bad it won't be explored for long!
Episode 9 - That gave me a lot of nightmare fuel if you ask me -- even as a kid and didn't understand Japanese. I started developing a fear of cacti!
Episode 10 - That mutant slime that cloned Shigeru was just THAT creepy. I remembered having a nightmare that monster crawled out of our faucet!
Episode 11 - More nightmare fuel. I started getting scared when I saw those appliances fly around. It was THAT SCARY for me.
Episode 12 - Although the monster was terribly designed but I did get scared of it as a child. I really didn't want to sleep out of fear that the monster would attack me in my dreams.
All that when I was around 8-9 years old remembered!
I'm surprised to discover this, that RX managed to scare kids...
DeleteWell I admit I was pretty much a scaredy cat as a kid. Hehe. I admit, some Fiveman episodes even scared me like the Sidon flower monster or when "Shigeru" got possessed by Tiger Rugin!
DeleteDisclaimer: the only episode of RX I’ve seen is the one with Satou, so my thoughts will only reflect that episode/trends that I saw there.
ReplyDeleteMy big question with that Satou episode (besides why he disassociated himself from Kotarou and Nobuhiko) centers on timing. Was this before or after he was cast as Riki? If it was before, I guess that’s the one good thing to come from RX. He’s got decent chemistry with Kurata, despite the height difference (is it weird that I noticed that?).
Even though I only got a small dosage of la familia de Shigeru, I didn’t like what I saw. The kid is a tad on the annoying side, especially for a regular kid character. He’d be fine as a one-off guest, but not as a scene-stealer like the later scripts make him out to be. I’d like to think that Toei learned to tone down regular kid characters, like the Winspector kid and Ichitarou.
I can see where the Sagiyama dislike comes from, even though I was A-OK with her Changeman and Solbrain episodes, but I can see how she can go off the rails into crazy “girls and magic” town. Did she ever write for Fushigi comedy?
The impression I got from what I’ve seen and your recaps is that the show goes even further than RX in trying to mimic ‘70s toku, but it doesn’t have any of the charm that made those shows work.
IIRC, Satou once said that he learned he got Turboranger while filming that RX. I don't know if the timeline works out on that, though. But with my theory that RX originated as its own show, I've kinda wondered if Satou might have auditioned for the lead Rider of that show, which I just call Kamen Rider RX.
DeleteThe sad thing about the Sahara family is that the kids aren't as annoying as the parents. With Shigeru, it's a problem that they devote so much time to him -- and it doesn't help that I kinda can't shake the bratty character he played in Fiveman, since that's where I first saw him -- but the first cours seems worse about it. RX gets a couple of other characters along the way that they then shift more focus to.
Sagiyama, as far as I can tell, didn't write for any Fushigi Comedy, which is surprising. I still think she gets a bad rap. She did good episodes of Bioman and Changeman; I liked quite a few of her BLACK episodes. (She also did some Winspector I liked, but also one I really DIDN'T like, so I don't count it!)
I don't even know if I'd say that RX mimics '70s toku. Despite how many people working on it had already worked on a few toku shows, it feels more to me like they kinda don't get where toku was going by that point, they're going off of memories of what they knew toku to be, or they just have a vague idea how the shows (used to) work, so they go with that style. I don't know the reason, but...yeah, RX definitely seems like a step back, and not in a good way.
Kamen Rider Black RX's seventh episode aired in december 4 of 1988 Turboranger is the series of the next year it could be before he was cast
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