I'm interested to hear your view on this: Why do you think they picked him at his age?
My theory is that, going into this, Takebe's plan was to make a fan-pleasing show that answered a lot of typical fan complaints about Sentai. I believe this was the case since that was clearly how she approached production in OOO and Kiva, where many story elements reflect exactly what people said they wanted to see in Rider at the time.
One of the traditional fan complaints about modern Sentai is that Toei casts too young, and that as a result, people simply can't take the characters seriously as heroes. They too obviously look like models or idols, and lack any of the ruggedness you'd see in someone who was fighting a massive battle against an invading enemy.
I think Blue Buster was cast specifically to please that segment of the audience. While Hiromu and Yoko are the traditional age of modern Sentai protagonists, Blue Buster is pretty much an adult and clearly meant to be identifiable to older viewers. And even Hiromu, though he's in the typical age range, has much more of a rugged look to him than, say, the last three Reds.
In short: we complained, and Takebe made the horrible mistake of listening. Rider can coast by simply doing what fans say they want to see, because the goodwill toward that franchise is massive. If you do what Sentai fans say they want to see, you'll end up making a boring show because Sentai fans will literally say they just want to see stuff from old shows repeated mindlessly.
I think that for a rejuvenation like W they actually need someone that's an outsider to Toku.
Well, that's the thing. W really wasn't the result of newcomers to toku. Tsukada was an old hand at Sentai at the time, and just new to Rider. Hasegawa was a veteran, highly acclaimed Ultraman writer. Sanjo was probably the newest, but even he had written fill-in episodes before.
W I think was the result of Tsukada realizing that he was a newcomer to Rider, and that he had to form some opinion of the franchise to write about it honest. W is pretty much the result of Tsukada and his writers studying classic Rider and forming an opinion about it.
Where Go-Busters goes wrong, I think, is that it doesn't really have an opinion about Sentai. It's shaped like "first principles" shows like W and Kuuga because Takebe knows that works, but Takebe never really expresses strong creative opinions in her shows.
She usually leaves that up to the writers... and Kobayashi has simply worked in Sentai too long to make some sort of big statement about it in Go-Busters. Her big statement about Sentai already exists and is called Gingaman. Beyond that, Kobayashi clearly doesn't view her projects in pure genre terms.
Clearly the show is doing badly but I don't think it's just "oh kids don't like the military theme". Kids would have no reason to come to that idea with any biased view.
The "military theme" idea has mostly come up because of Gundam AGE. In doing market research to try and figure out why Gundam AGE wasn't the next Danball Senki or Inazuma Eleven, Bandai basically got a lot of statements from kids to the effect of, "I don't understand military stuff or space stuff so I don't want to watch a show about it." Basically I wonder if the factors that hurt AGE are ultimately hurting Go-Busters, too.
Especially when you consider what the exact same combo did with Kamen Rider just six months earlier.
So here's the thing. With OOO, as far as I can tell, Takebe just set out to make the show that Rider fans at the time said they wanted to see, adjusting the planned story and concept in accordance to feedback. So when fans made it clear they thought that Uva was boring as ****, for example, he disappeared until fans started going, "Oh man, where's Uva??"
OOO probably would've been pretty dreadful, except Kobayashi was there with her usual Big Character Ideas. And among those big character concepts was Ankh, and Ankh was a good enough character that he almost carried the show by himself. Eiji even acquits himself as a strong character concept by the show's end.
I imagine Toei thought a duo like this would do great things to make Sentai exciting again. Except... for whatever reason, Kobayashi has no truly great character ideas this time around. Enter's as close as we get, and he's the villain, so it's kind of problem that he's the most charismatic and memorable guy in the cast.
Without Kobayashi to give her substance, Takebe doesn't have anything to prop up the show. Attempts to modify the show in accordance to fan feedback simply made it worse in every way, since it went from a weird take on Sentai to one that was more generic and therefore
even more boring. I think on some level Takebe doesn't know how not to be boring.
While I am one of the minority who enjoy Go-Busters, I do sometimes wonder if Kobayashi is just getting slightly burned out?
Kobayashi's writing schedule is fairly light, as a Japanese anime/toku writer's usually workload goes. I don't think she's burnt out, but I do wonder if she accepted the Go-Busters writing gig and then realized she had no ideas for it. Takebe isn't a producer like Tsukada or Utsunomiya who will give you ideas when you don't have your own.
One thing I find a bit annoying is that Enetron is basically a magical macguffin without much thought put it into it
Enetron really is a genuinely bad McGuffin. I expect it was designed thinking that it could work like the do-anything McGuffins that fans readily accept in Kamen Rider stories. Sentai is far more setting-driven, though, and fans in Sentai expect that stuff like mojikara and geki and mahou will be satisfactorily explained at some point.
People have been speculating about whether Toei will keep asking Kobayashi back after this show.
I can't see Toei turning on Kobayashi after this, and if they do it's as stupid and short-sighted a move as their alienation of Takatera. The person I'd really expect to see take the fall for Go-Busters's failure is Takebe. Toei hyped her to the moon and back before Go-Busters aired, not Kobayashi. I'd be fairly surprised if they used her again after this embarrassment.
And yeah, since their acting skills are nothing to write home about, i don't think they were after "not pretty, but talented" people. The actor playing Ryuuji is older because the script needed it, and it's more believable if the actor actually looks like he's 28. Or did they change the plot just to match his age? That, i doubt.
Actually, you'd be wrong there. Toei changes up the plots of its henshin hero shows all the time based on casting. Takatera did this on purpose, tailoring the characters of the cast to what he saw as the strengths of the actors playing them. Takebe has unquestionably done it. Eiji was completely rewritten as a charater to fit Shu Watanabe's strengths as a performer. (He was supposed to be basically another iteration of Takumi from Faiz.)
So for Ryuuji to be so old, it couldn't be something Kobayashi insisted on. The producer has the final say over that. If Takebe had wanted to reduce Ryuuji's act to say 24 or 25 and cast accordingly, she easily could have. She just didn't, and my guess at her motivation is outlined above. That said, we don't really know what she was thinking until she decides to tell us.
i heard the japanese sentai otaku didnt like this show. are they hate-watching ? :laugh:
They'd have to be! From the numbers, the only group that tunes in consistently to Go-Busters is M1 and a bit of M2-- that is, fanboys who grew up on Sentai and make a point of watching it every year. The Kids ratings are as usual erratic, but when they do tune in it's just not in large numbers.
I get the impression that Escape was not a popular character, and that a lot of the attempts to make her seem sexy to fans just made her seen annoying instead. My guess would be that her awkward stunts in the first episode put off the hard-nosed Sentai fanboys most likely to find a character like that super-sexy, but I haven't seen a lot of specific feedback on that yet.
