Aw, thanks.
As a Kuuga fan, it was disappointing for me to find out all of the ugly details about the "Joe Odagiri saga." I've made my dislike of his statements and similar statements well known. I've tracked the ordeal and will present the shebang here, and as objectively as I can. (And I will lazily copy and repaste this whenever the topic comes up.)
It's 1998 and Odagiri is just starting his career. Like many a Japanese actors at the start of their career, his manager looks to tokusatsu as a nice, steady regular gig for a newcomer, and arranges for Odagiri to audition for a Super Sentai. (From Joe's comments referring to the show as being a "year prior to Kuuga," it is presumed that it's GoGoFive he was sent to auditioned for. However, I've wondered if it was really Gingaman, considering Gingaman and Kuuga share the same main producer, Shigenori Takatera, and the story goes that some high up at Toei kept Odagiri in mind for when Kuuga was being cast.)
Odagiri balks at the idea of doing a tokusatsu. He balks hard. "I'm a real actor," he says. "Henshin heroes make me sick," is his reasoning, and one of his oft-quoted lines. When thinking of doing a tokusatsu he wanted to "either die or just give up acting." He's still made to audition and, according to him, he purposely gave a terrible audition in the hopes of never being called back to audition for a tokusatsu series.
It didn't work. Somebody at Toei liked him and made note of him and thought of him when it came time to cast Kuuga. Like Black, Kuuga was a big deal, the popular Rider series' first time on television in quite a while. Pretty much every actor of a particular age in Japan tried out for the lead role. Thinking he was clear of ever having to audition for a tokusatsu, Odagiri's not too happy about his agency arranging for his being seen about Kuuga. But he has to listen to his manager and agency, so he goes...
As we all know, Kuuga was a different approach to tokusatsu, unlike anything tokusatsu had done at that point. That was the goal of Kuuga producer Shigenori Takatera; he wanted to change the face of tokusatsu and he and writer Naruhisa Arakawa wanted it to feel more like an American drama. Odagiri meets with Takatera and finds his pitch fascinating. He doesn't like tokusatsu, but this sounds like something he could see himself doing, something he feels he could sink his teeth into. Takatera's pretty sure he's found his Godai. Odagiri admits that he's never seen a single Kamen Rider series, so Takatera arranges for several episodes of the original series to be sent to Odagiri. Odagiri claims he only watched a little before being completely turned off of the idea again. ("I can't do this kind of stuff!" is his quote) Takatera reassures him and lays out further plans of how his show will be nothing like those old ones. On a leap of faith, Odagiri decides to take the role.
Odagiri has said many, many times that he ended up enjoying the show, he's proud of the success Kuuga had, and that he made friends with a lot of the cast and crew and remains friends with most of them to this day. (IIRC, he even attended the wedding of the actress who played Godai's sister.) Up until that soundbite he gave a TV show (the one that the Tokusatsu Network reported about), he never said anything negative about Kuuga, the show or its quality, itself. His negativity was directed at tokusatsu as a whole, with his own show exempt.
There's been some misunderstanding about his feelings on Kuuga. In some interviews, he's mentioned how difficult and nightmarish it was to make Kuuga, but in a lot of those instances, he was referring to the shooting schedule and the physical demands of the series. Those sentiments, over the years, got entangled with his negativity about the genre as a whole and was warped into a "Odagiri hates Kuuga" thing when that wasn't the issue. Like I said, he had gone on record numerous times saying he liked Kuuga itself. Even with that interview he did that Tokusatsu Network reported about, I've wondered if he was taken out of context slightly or if he was misunderstood. (A lot of what he said was the same thing he always said. "I hated doing it at the time" could easily have been referring to his early feelings.)
If you want to give Odagiri the benefit of doubt, then a majority of his toku-bashing quotes came from that issue of Pict-Up magazine from 2005, just as his popularity was taking off. Could his toku bashing have been bravado, since he's after an indie movie image, an image that doesn't line-up with the star of a hero show? Nobody wants to be typecast, was it his attempt to separate himself from the past and branch out? The general public has their own simplistic idea of what Kamen Rider and tokusatsu is all about, can Joe really be expected to go into all of the minute details about how different Kuuga was each time his being a Rider was brought up?
Still, the idea of him doing one of these Rider movies, right now, is out of the question. Kuuga producer Takatera would definitely need to be involved, and he still has some bad blood over Hibiki. (Which might be letting up, since he recently Tweeted to Toei producers Hideaki Tsukada and Takahito Ohmori the idea of doing an early Heisei VS later Heisei Rider movie.) I think Odagiri will "stoop" and come back to tokusatsu on his own when his mainstream popularity dips and his mainstream roles dry up, or if his kids end up talking him into it. Fans will have to be patient -- Godai won't be returning in a Taisen flick any time soon, but fans could possibly end up seeing a Godai who's nearing 60 in a Rider movie down the road.
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(End of objectivity.)
I think there's interesting ways to involve Kuuga or Hibiki characters in these movies, though, but it involves creativity and storytelling capabilities, which Shirakura and Yonemura strongly lack. You could bring back Ichijou and give him G3-Unit armor, keeping that blasted Kuuga and Agito "connection;" you could take the idea from Arakawa's novel of having Mika be a new Kuuga warrior. For Hibiki, you could RIGHT THE SHOW'S WRONGS by bringing back Asumu and having him be the new Hibiki. But these movies just aren't interested in building onto a show or writing a good storyline around old characters and actually USING characters; they just want old faces to slap onto the poster to drum up interest in their 90 minute fighting game masquerading as a movie.
And for the record, I don't like misinformation. I do my best to research and squash that ****.
