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- Mar 20, 2012
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It seems to me that in the last few years Toei has been taking a little more notice of their older peripheral audience. Obviously, we've had the "retro" craze ever since Kamen Rider Decade began, which is still going strong in the Rider franchise, with barely a film going by that doesn't include at least one past Rider or a re-imagined version of characters from another old Ishinomori toku show. Sentai caught the nostalgia bug too with Gokaiger, which culminated in the 'Gokaiger vs Gavan' movie, which seemed to pleasantly surprise Toei by becoming the highest-grossing 'Vs. Series' film, despite the usual target audience for Sentai being far too young to really have any knowledge of the Metal Hero franchise.
Then in 2012 we got a trio of projects which IMO had at least one eye on an older audience: Go-Busters, Akibaranger, and the Gavan movie. Of those, only Akibaranger really seems to have been deemed a success, and it's the only one that didn't even try to be a "mainstream" toku, even actively discouraging a child audience ("good kids shouldn't watch this", etc). The comments about Go-Busters being "too dark" seem to suggest that someone at Toei and/or Bandai seems to think that not concentrating solely on their core audience has had a commercial impact, and Kyoryuger seems to be a definitive re-focusing of Sentai on it's child audience. While Toei hasn't given up on the Metal Hero franchise yet, it seems less likely that we'll get another film or a TV show.
One of the opinions that seems to be the most commonly voiced in these forums is for the Kamen Rider franchise to return to the kind of tone it had when it was initially brought back at the turn of the century, which (at least here on HJU) seems to have more appeal to the older fans. Personally I doubt it's really in the cards right now, as the franchise seems to suffer from a lack of ambition at the moment. But let's suppose for now that it was one of the proposals put before Toei for the next series following Wizard. My question is, has the performance of Go-Busters (and possibly Gavan) harmed the chances of that happening? Do you think their lower commercial success has dissuaded Toei from trying something similar with Kamen Rider, at least for the next few years?
Then in 2012 we got a trio of projects which IMO had at least one eye on an older audience: Go-Busters, Akibaranger, and the Gavan movie. Of those, only Akibaranger really seems to have been deemed a success, and it's the only one that didn't even try to be a "mainstream" toku, even actively discouraging a child audience ("good kids shouldn't watch this", etc). The comments about Go-Busters being "too dark" seem to suggest that someone at Toei and/or Bandai seems to think that not concentrating solely on their core audience has had a commercial impact, and Kyoryuger seems to be a definitive re-focusing of Sentai on it's child audience. While Toei hasn't given up on the Metal Hero franchise yet, it seems less likely that we'll get another film or a TV show.
One of the opinions that seems to be the most commonly voiced in these forums is for the Kamen Rider franchise to return to the kind of tone it had when it was initially brought back at the turn of the century, which (at least here on HJU) seems to have more appeal to the older fans. Personally I doubt it's really in the cards right now, as the franchise seems to suffer from a lack of ambition at the moment. But let's suppose for now that it was one of the proposals put before Toei for the next series following Wizard. My question is, has the performance of Go-Busters (and possibly Gavan) harmed the chances of that happening? Do you think their lower commercial success has dissuaded Toei from trying something similar with Kamen Rider, at least for the next few years?
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