Any statement you try to make about THE SHOW AS A WHOLE is invalid, because you HAVEN'T watched the entire show.
But was he speaking about the show, or the
brand? I read his original post in the latter sense.
I don't think you need to sit through the original tie-in series to evaluate OOO as a brand, especially since the majority of OOO merchandise
had to sell to people who didn't watch very much of the TV show. Likewise, the majority of people who saw the Wonderful movie also had to be people who hadn't seen very much of the TV show. There's no way to square those numbers.
As foreign fans dependent on bootlegs, the TV shows are central to
our experience of the product, but they are not the totality of the product and they certainly aren't the totality of the brand. As these franchises are intended, you experience them through the toys, the TV show, the various tie-in magazines and manga, the films, and waves of merchandise and special attractions that never get outside of Japan. From a Japanese perspective, we as foreigners do not really know OOO.
I think it's very difficult to evaluate OOO
as a brand and not say that it encourages consumption. In the TV episode I've seen, I would certainly say that encouraging desire and consumption as basically good things is presented as a theme. Certainly the show has gobs of toys it really wants you to buy, it has more toys than they could fit into a year-long show!
You have to put OOO in the context of ongoing problems in Japanese society. One of them is young people basically dropping out of society and refusing to want to buy consumer goods, or even to want to start families or own houses. So they don't want good jobs, which keeps most of the money in the hands of the "bubble generation," and perpetuates a great number of very serious social problems.
I think Eiji is meant as a stand-in for this generation, and the idea of "helping the people within reach" is trying to encourage young people to be satisfied not with solving the world's problems, but just solving the problems of their community. That's not a bad theme, I think, from a Japanese perspective. From my personal perspective as an American viewer, it picks up connotations of mindless, shallow consumerism. My cultural experiences are very different than those of a young Japanese person's, though.
At the end of the day, I can't get into OOO because I can't get into a brand that's basically about how it's awesome to want things and then buy them. You cannot argue that's
not something inherent in a great deal of the show without, I think, engaging in a great deal of projection. And while most Rider shows encourage projection, you can't really apply those feelings to critique.*
*Unless you're Igadevil and can write about subjective emotional experiences in a way that's compelling and enlightening. Most fans? A pretty long way from Igadevil.
For the comparison you made with W and OOO I would swap it around; because Bayformers is something I really find despicable for what they did with the Transformers franchise.
Yeah, it's awful how Michael Bay made popular action movies that a lot of people really enjoyed, and breathed new life into the Transformers franchise which allowed Hasbro to fund several other high-profile projects like Transformed Animated and Transformers Prime. That evil Michael Bay, making people like Transformers again!
Look, I personally find the Bayformers movies ****, but Bay did nothing despicable to the Transformers brand. He made people like it, he made all the various editions and arms of the brand more visible and marketable, and he even brought in some new ideas that some people hold very dearly. Bad movies can do good things for a brand, and to evaluate that brand reasonably, you really have to set aside useless personal opinions like "the movies were ****, ergo everything that came out of them must be ****."
His only desire is to obtain enough power to help those that he can and can't reach, just like how Cap. started out as the little helpless guy who couldn't help with the war until he got his powers.
I do not see how this comparison is in any way valid. Cap is a character about transcending limitations; he is the Eiji who wanted to go to Africa and save people he'd never seen before. Cap is just successful at this, where Eiji's efforts were a miserable life-destroying failure. Eiji doesn't save anyone in Africa; Cap rescues the Howling Commandos with the aid of only one other person, relying on the gifts of the Super Soldier Serum and his own heart.
The character most like Eiji in Captain America: The First Avenger is Bucky Barnes. He is the man who does not believe in transcending personal limitations, he is the man who simply wants to solve the problems that are within his reach. I think it says a lot about the fundamental differences between these works-- and the cultural assumptions that inform them-- that Eiji is the hero of OOO, and his viewpoint seems to be ultimately triumphant there, while Bucky is the sidekick in Captain America, and his viewpoint ultimately shown to be
inferior to Cap's.
Incidentally, if there is a character like Steve Rogers in the Rider mythos, it is Joe Shigeru, Kamen Rider Stronger. Joe is a man who wanted to change the world, needed power to do this, and so went out to get it-- no matter the cost to himself. It is very difficult to argue that, while Joe paid a high price, he was still ultimately successful in his goals.
If Eiji has a true Marvel Comics counterpart, it would be a guy like Spider-Man who tries to do as much good as he can with the power he has, but keeps making mistakes and getting all sorts of crazy people involved in his life. He never has enough money and even when people seem to be doing him favors, it's not necessarily with his best interests in mind. "The ol' Hino luck" has a certain ring to it...
IMO W is the more flashy one, and he even states it out loud in the first episode, I mean come on, which other rider have you seen that stands there and point at the villain lecturing him/her before dispatching them ?
A lot of them? Hongo lectures villains in the original manga, yelling about being the warrior chosen by nature. V3 I seem to recall lectures villains, though in a taunting way. Stronger doesn't just lecture them, he
laughs at them! Of course, the villains of early Showa were much blacker bad guys than you saw later on, and the lectures were just pomp and circumstance. Early Heisei Riders tended to fight unknowable menaces that simply couldn't be lectured, while later Heisei Riders didn't really have the right personality for it. With Showa, it was quite variable and not a constant thing even in shows that did it.
But anyway, it's very strange to act like W was doing anything but following genre conventions with Shotaro's behavior. That's the point: Shotaro is behaving like
his idea of how a hero behaves, which is entirely derived from novels and media. Shotaro is a dreamer, and probably has a bit more in common with Nobuo Akagi than he'd like to admit. He's a fundamentally deluded man. Compare W's behavior to, say, Skull or Eternal's... those are guys whose behavior is informed by their
experiences, not by things they've read or dreamed about. They are explicitly what they are to contrast Shotaro, and probably wouldn't seem as cool in a franchise focused on a different sort of protagonist-- say, a more practical man like Kenzaki, a shrinking violet like Ryotaro, or an embittered loner like Takumi. The same contrast just wouldn't be there.
Hell even G3 didn't try to arrest anyone in that suit of armor.
... because the function of G3 was to destroy monsters, not to go after criminals like he was Signalman? Seriously, what the hell does this mean? Are you saying it's morally wrong for the hero to say anything to a monster at all?
My favorite characters were Skull and Eternal, and I honestly thought the show should have been just about them, instead of revolving around hat-man and his walking wikipedia friend.
Skull was cool. Eternal was cool. Yet I would defy any writer, no matter how talented, to get 26 hours of TV scripts out of either of them. I dunno, maybe Inoue could pull it off with Eternal, but expect a lot of blindness and rivers and dicking around with secondary characters to kill time.
The characters are simply not designed to be able to support that much running time. They were designed to be shown in movies, and each have about ninety minutes of story time built in to each of them. To fill up an entire TV show, you need a guy like Shotaro or Eiji who can go through some form of meaningful character arc. You need a guy, like Shotaro or Eiji, who can have friends, move around pretty freely, and take interest in the problems of guest characters for whatever reason.
The entire point of Eternal and Skull is that they're both men embittered by their experiences, isolated by their circumstances, and alone in a hostile world. An entire TV show about their adventures would, I think, quickly become more repetitive than any episode Showa Rider. They're both characters designed to do, more or less, one thing. The more time you spent with them, the more this limitation would become obvious and painful. Guys like Hongo and Shiro are very layered in comparison, and I don't think either of them were designed to be especially complex.
OOO on the other hand felt like it have some shades of the first five heisei series...
Which all stuck, very rigidly, to the two-episode format that you just complained W using! OOO used it, too, it just did a few things to try and disguise it. For instance, a monster would only appear in two episodes, but some unrelated B and C runners would extend through the next several arcs.
The core of the two-episode format is that it's something Kuuga did to cut production costs, because it meant you could use the same monster suit for two episodes. That meant the series as a whole only had to construct around 26 weekly monster suits, instead of around 50.
Heisei Rider has stuck to this very religiously in the years following Kuuga for the same reasons. You can say that one show or another handled it better or best, but you are kidding yourself if you think any of Kuuga's successors hasn't pretty much stuck to it.
