Rider has a habit of dragging out its' anniversaries. If you look at some of the initial promotional material for Double, it touts itself as "part two of the Rider tenth anniversary project". With OOO, it seems pretty clear that they were caught a bit unawares by the anniversary. To be fair, it seems pretty impossible to have known that the 1000th episode would have landed bang on the exact anniversary date (IIRC OOO had a week off for a sporting event at some point before the anniversary, which is kind of out of the producers' hands and yet without it they would've been an episode over on the date).
Lol that sounds a bit like Metalder. He was a robot created as a weapon for the Japanese armed forces in WW2, only for Japan to lose the war before he could be deployed and so his creator hid him away in a secret base until he was activated in the first episode. Having said that, I'm not sure how you integrate collectable toys into a WW2 soldier gimmick? After all, no toys, no funding for the show to be made.
Well, that and the last time Toei tried to make it's own Captain America they ended up making Battle Fever J :laugh:
Well keys and batteries were done by Sentai recently enough that kids might still have some (especially as Go-Busters and Kyoryuger both got their own special Ranger Key sets). Hibiki had disk animals, although that show infamously wasn't a big toy seller so that may be why Toei still hasn't tried disks again?
