Time Travel stories in Toku

Shougo Kuroiwa said:
Great, now we're going to have to suffer through the lesson of the true definition of tokusatsu...:rolleyes:
Tell me about it. Tokusatsu includes daikaiju, too! You wanted tokusatsu with time travel, you asked for it. :P

If there's any other tokusatsu with time travel, off the top of my head, there's Toei's Sengoku Jieitai (Self Defense Forces in the Feudal Wars) starring Sonny Chiba. It's also known as Time Slip (its international title) and GI Samurai (its US home video title). Masaaki Tezuka (who directed three of the "Millennium Series" Godzilla movies) did a remake this year for Kadokawa and Toho! It's titled Sengoku Jieitai 1549.
 
ryuuseipro said:
Tell me about it. Tokusatsu includes daikaiju, too!.

I was actually being an asshole, but, OK...:laugh:

It's just that, truth be told, 99.5% of the American tokusatsu fans only like/count the henshin heroes and the daikaiju are just...well, boring lousy movies to them. I don't make the rules, I know it's all tokusatsu to the Japanese, but it's not Japan and that's the way I've noticed things.
 
Shougo Kuroiwa said:
Great, now we're going to have to suffer through the lesson of the true definition of tokusatsu...:rolleyes:

I didn't mean it like that, but it seems that most people consider Kaiju and "Toku" different genres.
 
Bolt said:
I didn't mean it like that, but it seems that most people consider Kaiju and "Toku" different genres.
Which they aren't. People have to appreciate this. Tokusatsu has always been the term used in Japan to describe live-action special effects fantasies, movies and television (and all other multimedia). (In Japan, Star Trek and Star Wars are called tokusatsu, too!)

It's like saying that:

-The works of Willis O' Brien and Ray Harryhausen aren't special effects, just "crappy clay animation."
-Comics are only about superheroes, and nothing else. The word "comic-book" is commonly associated by some with "superhero." And not any other genre!
-Fantasies are only about angsty teenage wizards and a quest for a magic ring.

But anyway, back to time travel. It's getting way off topic here . . .
 
Yeah, I think you've proved your point, but had you asked anyone here what the first thing that came to their mind was when you said "Tokusatsu," I guarantee it would've been a Kamen Rider or Sentai. The majority of the fans posting here and watching these shows in the US consider tokusatsu to be live-action superhero shows, not anything with special effects in it. It's okay to be PC, but don't forget that not everybody is so informed.
 
So okay, here's my list in no particular order (Some Spoilers ahead)

Cho Sei Kantai SAZER-X
-Obvious reasons, Ad and Kane go back to 2005 to stop the Space Pirates blah blah blah and can't return after having come through the wormhole. In which case I wonder how the hell they're going to play off the appearance of Commander Shark.

Jiku Sensh SPIELBAN
-This was more Time Dilation/Theory of Relativity though if I remember right.

Correct me if I'm wrong here; Spielban and Diana were the only survivors of their home planet and were put into stasis aboard their base ship, Granaska (Now that's the French name of the ship as that's how I saw this, again correct me if I'm wrong :P).

After that, it travelled at light speed to Earth to arrive at just the right time to stop the invasion of Earth by the Warler Empire. Only thing was that their bodies had aged and they had learned all of Earth's history in the meantime.

Makes sense?

Mirai Sentai TIMERANGER
I'd list the reasons other than the obvious here but then I'd be giving away one of my favorite plot twists in the whole of sentai.

Dennou Keisatsu CYBERCOP
-Another plot twist that you'll have to see the series for or read up on

Kamen Rider RYUUKI
-Oh this one's been a debated for ages; the "Time Vent Theory". This came about through fan speculation and then a magazien article that appeared after the end of the TV run.

It goes something like this:

At the end of the final episode of Ryuuki, we saw that Kanzaki Shiro was about to use the card and "try again", hinting at the fact that this might not hae been the first time Shiro bent/manipulated time. So thanks to this, it's been believed that we are left with three attempts by Shiro to try and bring his sister back using the Advent Card/Rider System;

Record 1: TV Series up to a certain point -> Episode Final
-13 Riders are chosen although not all of them are seen (We assume either Verde got killed off sometime before the start of the series or that he was killed during the gap of time between the series point and the movie), Shiro issues the challenge and everybody pretty much dies save for Shinji and Ren who, after Yui kills herself and Shiro vanishes, go Survive mode and take on the massive Monster army.

Record 2: 13 Riders Special
-Total retelling of the story. We see all 13 Riders, the first Ryuuki which I see as an attempt by Shiro to try and get Shinji out of the mix, mainly because he starts up the whole "Riders shouldn't fight!" philosophy. Femme, Verde for the first time and everybody else, save for Alternative. Only difference is that we as an audience or as an outside influence decide the outcome. We chose Shinji taking Ren's deck and taking on the Riders rather than doing the sensible thing and destroying the damned Mirror World (*mutters to self for a bit*).

Although if you got the DVD of the special, you'd get to see that Shinji was screwed no matter what option he/we chose.

Record 3/FINAL: TV Series from Beginning to End
-There's a reason I list this last.

Third time's the charm: Shiro once more chooses his 13 although it looks like he tries to do things a little differently again IMO.

For starters, it looks like he was trying to keep Shinji out of the mix again but fate interveined once more with his finding the deck. We're sans Verde once more, probably killed off screen. Either that or perhaps Shiro wanted to experiment and tried taking him out of the mix for different results. No Femme either, again perobably killed off screen (IMO, it'd probably would have been Asakura this time around, finishing the job he started with her sister).

So the series plays it course but the same end result as the movie; Yui refuses her new life and all hell breaks loose. Only this time, Yui gets Shiro to coem to his senses and he plucks himself and Yui out of the timeline and all is well, it's as if nothing ever happened, hence my reasoning for this being the last record.

Kinda makes sense doesn't it? Sure there are a couple of parts that are kinda sketchy but I guess that depends on your point of view. However, the magazine article gets you wondering if maybe Shiro messed with the timeline more than just those three times....

Uchuu Keiji SHARIVAN
-There was a wohle arc in the series where Den had learned of his heritage from Iga Star and through circumstances that escape me at the moment, he meets up with a group of girls that are also from Iga. I don't remembner how this happens either, I think they were struck with a beam of sorts by the baddies and it casued them to Time Slip all over the place and even through dimensions and Den was hot on their trail.

Oh and Gavan had that Urashima Taro episode where this turtle Double Monster made a time machine to get to this palace in the past, all just to raid the palace and steal her riches. Dunno if that counts :P

And there you have it. Wow this was longer than I expected o_o
 
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Bolt said:
Yeah, I think you've proved your point, but had you asked anyone here what the first thing that came to their mind was when you said "Tokusatsu," I guarantee it would've been a Kamen Rider or Sentai. The majority of the fans posting here and watching these shows in the US consider tokusatsu to be live-action superhero shows, not anything with special effects in it. It's okay to be PC, but don't forget that not everybody is so informed.
Yeah, well, they have to be. Same deal with some anime fans. (More on that in two paragraphs.)

I never thought I was being PC, I was telling the truth. We can't maintain the current status quo if people outside Japan keep distorting these terms. What we know best is that if it's an animation from Japan, it's anime. (Before that, it was "douga/doga", "terebi manga" or "animeeshon", and those terms are still being used there.) If it's a special effects spectacle from Japan, on the big or small screen, it's tokusatsu. I know you know this, but that doesn't mean that everyone else can't. I'm sorry, but ignorance is not a virtue. People have to understand the difference between one's ass and one's elbow.

Besides, it was already bad enough that all Japanese superhero shows were called "sentai" here for a while. And American anime fandom is hijacking the term "anime," limiting it only to an elite selection of anime genres. Someone would have a cow over me saying that, say, Rankin-Bass/Toei's The King Kong Show (which was the first ever anime to be commissioned from the US) is an anime show, but it is! It's animated in Japan, so it's anime. :laugh:
 
Well said. From now on I will personally decapitate anyone who denies the title of tokusatsu to Dai Kaiju!

What we know best is that if it's an animation from Japan, it's anime. (Before that, it was "douga/doga", "terebi manga" or "animeeshon"

Don't forget the horrible "Japanimation." :laugh:
 
Bolt said:
Well said. From now on I will personally decapitate anyone who denies the title of tokusatsu to Dai Kaiju!
Just spread the word . . .

It could be worse; You could be in Godzilla fandom dealing with certain fans who still have no idea what, say, "Showa" and "Heisei" mean. ;)

Don't forget the horrible "Japanimation." :laugh:
Which was in America, but I do like that term. (I always thought it was "JAPAN-imation," not the bastardized "JAP-animation")
 

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