Because I am going to tell you.

I am now watching three of the four TV Asahi Sunday morning kids shows on a weekly basis, Kamen Rider Wizard, Doki Doki Precure and most recently, Zyuden Sentai Kyoryuger.

A curious thing that has happened recently is that all three, within weeks of each other, have dealt with idea of a superhero’s secret identity and the most usual reason given in US superhero comics for having one. Namely, to protect those around you.

Spider-Man’s excuse for keeping his identity secret is he feels that if people knew, villains would target his loved ones. Plenty of other heroes have a variation on this, but Spidey’s is perhaps the most archetypal in this regard.

One aspect of this choice that Spider-Man rarely deals with head on is guilt over constantly lying to his friends and family.

In episode 2 of Doki Doki! Precure, Mana thinks she should keep her identity as Cure Heart a secret from her best friend Rikka, for pretty much the same reasons as Spidey. Only her case it’s from advice given to here by magical cute animals who turn into magic cell phones. However, straight away the lying affects her friendship, so she ignores the advice and reveals her identity. Friendship is saved and no one is placed in any danger.

Later in episode 4, we get a different take on secret identities, more in line with a superhero like Batman, where we learn Alice (Cure Rosetta) is using her family’s wealth and influence to ensure no one captures their transformations on film. It’s not so much to protect family and friends as it is to ensure their effectiveness as superheroines.

Alice is very much Batman, right down to the faithful butler.

Meanwhile over in the newest sentai show, Zyuden Sentai Kyoryuger, the first episode ended with 4 of the 5 heroes refusing to reveal their identities to one another. In episode 2, the focus is on the Blue and Pink Kyoryugers and why they hide their identities. Blue, 32 year old handyman Nobuharu Udo, keeps his hidden to protect his sister and his niece. Like Mana, by the end of the second episode he’s learnt the error of his ways and now his niece knows he’s a superhero (they still keep it secret from her mum).

Amy Yuuzuki (Pink) on the other hand, is trying to keep up the pretense of being ladylike in front of her butler, rather than the badass martial artist she really is. Like Blue and his niece, by the end of the episode, her butler is fully aware that she’s a dinosaur summoning superhero.

From previews of episode 3, it looks like we’ll be dealing with Green’s reasons for keeping his identity secret, his disapproving father.

And talking of disapproving family members, the current arc of Kamen Rider Wizard deals with Beast trying to keep his superhero identity secret from his disapproving, over protective, grandmother. This has strong echoes of the Peter Parker / Aunt May relationship, though Peter Parker never pretended that Spider-Man was actually Spider-Woman in order to throw his Aunt off the trail.

And I’m pretty sure that Aunt May never offered to be turned into a monster and fed to her nephew to save his life. Which is where this arc appears to be heading.

As I said at the beginning, it’s curious all three should hit similar notes within weeks of each other. It makes me wonder if there was some sort of network or studio note to have something to discourage the kids watching from keeping secrets. Or they all liked the ending of the first Iron Man film. Or maybe it was just a coincidence.

I will say that watching all three of these shows together has really made me appreciate them more, as you start to see elements and influences they share.

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JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure 15 – This contained an early contender for line reading of the year, as Joseph loudly “AHEMS” off screen to get Wham’s attention. On top of that it’s a really great episode, that gets to the core of this arc’s, and Joseph’s, appeal. Joseph has no shame. He’ll lie, cheat, do sneak attacks and even play dead to win a fight. It doesn’t exactly work out for him exactly as he was planning this episode, but he saves his friends lives and manages to survive against an opponent that greated out matched him (for now).

Kroll Show 1 – A really strong first episode for Nick Kroll’s sketch show. What fascinates me is how many of the sketches operate on different levels. For example The Sex In The City For Dudes sketch starts as pretty much what you’d expect to be, but eventually starts parodying itself as the musical stabs get more and more ridiculous.

Dan Vs. – Started watching this, the later episodes seem better paced than the early ones, but Curtis Armstrong’s performance as Dan is fantastically rage filled. So rage filled in fact, watching more than one episode at a time is a little wearying.

Problems – Also started watching this thoroughly strange sketch show from Australian comedian Sam Simmons. It is strange.

1994 – Here is the shortlist of shows I am planning on bringing up in my Golden Ani-versary contribution. There’s one more I am 50/50 one, but can you think of any other notable shows from 1994 I’ve missed? (Just TV, no OAVs/Movies)

• Magic Knight Rayearth.
• Macross 7
• G Gundam
• Sailor Moon S
• Little Red Riding Hood ChaCha
• Blue Seed

Top 100 Lists and the like – While looking for indicators of what were big 1994 shows (both then, and from the vantage point of history), I was trying to find any more recent Top 100 Anime lists than the TV Asahi 2005 one that were actually worth looking at. I did not find any. I did however find the 100 Anime Recommendations list that animestyle.fm is very slowly producing.

It got me thinking about trying to create my own top 100. I got to 35 titles I’d include without any further thought, and then realised I’d have to rewatch a lot of the stuff from the 90s that I’d not seen in years. For the curious the 35 are in alphabetical order:

• Akira
• Baccano!
• Cowboy Bebop
• FLCL
• Gag Manga Biyori
• Giant Robo
• Gunbuster
• Gurren Lagann
• Interstellar 5555
• Kemonozume
• Kuruneko
• Letter To Momo
• Lupin III
• Mind Game
• Mononoke
• My Neighbor Totoro
• One Piece
• Panty&Stocking with Garterbelt
• Paranoia Agent
• Patlabor
• Ponyo
• Porco Rosso
• Poyopoyo
• RE:Cutie Honey
• Read Or Die
• Redline
• Samurai Champloo
• Sexy Commando Side Story: Amazing! Masaru
• Spirited Away
• Summer Wars
• The Girl Who Leapt Through Time
• The Tatami Galaxy
• Tiger & Bunny
• Tsuritama
• Urusei Yatsura
• Wolf Children

Currently heavily weighted to the last 10 years as you might expect due to memory and quantity of anime available to watch. The question is can I be bothered to rewatch some of things I really ought to in order to make such a list? Or get around to watching some things that are sitting on my shelf right this second for the first time?

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If like me you came into Kamen Rider by Fourze and have found the heroes of Wizard a little more low energy than the Kamen Rider Club of Amanogawa High School, then you may want to check back in with Wizard at episode 17.

This episode introduces us to Kyosuke Nitoh, a young man with far too much energy, a unhealthy love of mayonaisse and a catchphrase about turning a pinch into a chance that he is going to ram down your ears. He is so full of shonen adventure energy he makes Shunpei, the series’ clown, seem positively sedate in comparison.

He is also the series’ secondary rider, Kamen Rider Beast.

The effect is somewhat similar to the arrival of the super-serious Kamen Rider Meteor in Fourze, but in reverse. Here you have a cartoonish superhero, suddenly appear and shake up the tone of the entire show. It really has a completely different energy with his arrival. The sense of reversal also plays out in the episode’s story. Up until now we’ve had Phantoms trying to cause despair in humans, here a Phantom is the one despairing. The Manticore Phantom (a great guest appearance by Soichiro Akaboshi), sent to turn Kyosuke into a Gate, repeatedly hits the brick wall of his optimism and becomes more despondant as the episode progresses.

Finally we get the reveal of how Beast completely flips the premise of the show so far on it’s head. As the Phantoms prey on humans, Kamen Rider Beast preys on the Phantoms, devouring them and the mana they contain.

Now, obviously there’s more to this guy than a Joseph Joestar in a mask (he borrows Joseph’s “you’re going to say…” schtick at one point), as his hunger seems to only be satiated by Phantoms, so what happens when his food source dries up? Is it in his interest to allow new Phantoms to be made? But for now it feels like the show has been given a much needed energy boost in the form of BEAST.

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When creatures known as the Greeed reappear on Earth after 800 years of sleep, one of their number, the disembodied hand Ankh, allies with the itinerant Eiji Hino to battle them. Given a belt and three magic medals, Eiji transforms into the superhero Kamen Rider OOO. Meanwhile a mysterious organisation run by the cake loving Kousei Kougami seeks the same medals that the Greeed do leading to their paths crossing with Eiji and Ankh.

Kamen Rider OOO was the 2010-11 installment in the franchise and the most recent that had Yasuko Kobayashi (Kamen Rider Den-O, JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure) as head writer.

It shares a number of elements with Den-O, notably that of possession and the theme of human desires. Ankh possesses the body of the detective Shingo Izumi, altering his appearance just as radically as the various Imagin possessing Ryotaro did in Den-O. In OOO though, the possessee themselves does not play such a significant role, though similar to Den-O he does have a sister who does. 

In Den-O, the creatures known as Imagin travelled back in time and grant a human a wish in return for part of their history. In OOO it is a little less voluntary, as the Greeed open up a slot in a human, insert a medal as if it was a vending machine, and from that human’s desires a creature called a Yummy is created. 

It’s different enough to not seem a rehash, but similar enough that you can see a through line in the themes of the shows.

Tonally it’s definitely operating in a murkier moral area than Den-O, and while the laughs are there, they aren’t as plentiful as Den-O’s. Ankh is firmly in the anti-hero mode, and even seemingly pure hearted Eiji has a few missteps even the early episodes I’ve seen (such as trying to trick the detective’s sister into thinking he’s on a secret mission, rather than near death and being kept alive by a monster’s floating hand). 

At the same time, it is a show with a restaurant run by a constantly cosplaying woman, a hero who carries a spare pair of boxer shorts on a stick, a man who ices plot exposition onto cakes, vending machines that transform into motorcycles and a heroine who has comical superstrength. So it’s not super serious either.

That is probably enough Kamen Rider to keep me going for the time being, but if that changes I’ll let you know.

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Kamen Rider Den-O

The exceedingly unlucky Ryotaro Nogami, finds himself possessed by a creature from the future called an Imagin, and mixed up with a mysterious woman and time travelling train. All this leads to him becoming the superhero Kamen Rider Den-O and battling other Imagins sent from the future to destroy the past. 

After reading the claim of its star Takeru Satoh that Den-O‘s success was due to its comedic timing, I decided that Den-O was going to be the next Kamen Rider I should check out. He was not wrong, and I made the right choice.

So effective is the show in its use of comedy, I am now 20 episodes into the show and we are still have yet to meet the archvillain of the show or get a real explanation of why the Imagins are attacking the past. And I don’t care.

Instead of using drama to bring you back episode after episode, the show is funny. A big part of its success in doing this lies in with the two lead actors.

Takeru Satoh’s character Ryotaro Nogami eventually gets possessed by four main Imagin, with each one altering his personality and appearance when they possess him. This means Satoh plays five different characters (in fact more than five given that he’ll occasionally get possessed by other Imagin), and it’s a credit to him how well he differentiates between them all.

The other lead actor is Seiji Takaiwa, who normally is the suit actor for the main Kamen Rider. However in Den-O, as well as playing Den-O, he also plays the main Imagin who possesses Ryotaro, Momotaros. With all the main Imagin living on the time travelling train, DenLiner, this means he has significant screen time each and every episode. As fantastic as his performances are as the various Kamen Riders he’s played, Momotaros really makes you appreciate just how good he is. The physical acting he does with a costume with a fixed mask, is on another level. Combined with voice actor Toshihiko Seki as Momotaros’ voice, it’s the most outstanding performance in all the Kamen Riders I’ve seen so far.

The rest of the cast is no slouch either, the other Imagin are funny, the secondary Rider has a tendancy to have childish tantrums, you’ve got a couple of goofy suitors for Ryotaro’s blissfully unaware sister as recurring comic relief in the real world, and the staff of the DenLiner are oddball too. Finally, you have Hana, the mysterious woman acting as the straight woman admidst all these silly characters.

This is definitely my favourite of the Kamen Rider shows I’ve seen so far, and I’m hoping it keeps up that standard even with the unplanned cast (and plot) change that it apparently has later on in the series. 

At first I thought that watching three Kamen Rider shows at the same time would be enough for me. Curiousity got the better of me and I made the mistake of looking at the staff on the show. When I did this I discovered that Yasuko Kobayashi was the head writer. I had never heard of her at this point, but looking at her credits I noticed that she is currently head writer on the JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure TV show. Now that I knew she was writing the two television shows that I most enjoy watching at the moment, I got greedy and decided to check out another Kamen Rider show that she’d been responsible for…

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Kamen Rider W

The forward thinking ecological city Futo is facing corruption at the hands of the wealthy Sonozaki Family and the Gaia Memories they distribute to turn men into monsters known as Dopants. Protecting the city is the superhero, Kamen Rider Double and its dual secret identities of detective Shotaro Hidari and his amnesiac partner Philip.

The main secondary writer on Fourze had been Riku Sanjo (Beet The Vandel Buster), and he’d been the head writer on the 2009 Kamen Rider series, Kamen Rider W. In addtion it had been W that Fourze‘s Kazuki Nakashima had first written for Kamen Rider. So that was enough to get me to check out this part of the franchise next.

Now while Fourze was airing, I definitely noticed that some fans of the franchise didn’t like that this children’s show was being aimed at children. The first two episodes of W kind of gave me an idea of why that might have been, featuring as it does a murderer and the death of the Dopant at the end. This sort of bleak outlook was lacking in Fourze at first, and even at it’s darkest felt more optimistic than this. 

Not that W is unremittingly bleak, there are still plenty of gags, mainly from the interactions with the new landlord of Shotaro’s detective agency, Akiko Narumi (the daughter of Shotaro’s dead partner), the various wacky informers Shotaro has around town, and the two police detectives (one of whom is comedian Takeshi Nadagi).

The main things I’ve liked in the series so far have been the Rider design and the Sonozaki Family.

The Rider design is my favourite of the shows I’ve seen so far. It doesn’t feel over designed and the gimmick of two people controlling one body is reflected well in the design and suit acting. Its Rider Kick is kind of weird, but overall the look and concept feels very elegant.

I like the Sonozaki Family in part because they remind me more of Fourze‘s Horoscopes than they do Wizard‘s Phantoms. They are humans who are deliberately creating/turning into monsters rather than creatures from beyond preying on humanity. That in turn makes them easier to relate to as villains, plus you get the opportunity to have them move among the heroes more easily. Plus even the family cat turns into a monster!

The main things that made me move onto a different series were the monster suits and the fact it’s not all that funny.

For some reason, the monsters don’t feel like they are all coming from the same place. It makes sense with in the story in that each is based on an exhibit in the Sonozaki’s museum, but I wish there was a bit more visual unity. 

The humour in the show gets pretty tired, as it resorts far too often to Akiko bonking Shotaro on the head with a shoe, Philip hiding in his room or Philip becoming obsessed with whatever the clue in the story. I suspect if I watched it weekly that might not be so obvious, but as it was it was enough to sent me in search of a funnier Kamen Rider show…

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Kamen Rider Wizard

Magical creatures called Phantoms force humans into despair so that more of their number might be born. Protecting humanity from this fate is a survivor of their ritual, Haruto Sohma. Possessor of the Wizardriver, he transforms into the magic ring wielding Kamen Rider Wizard.

Following on from Fourze came this show, the current and ongoing incarnation of Kamen Rider. What it lacks in the sheer enthusiasm stakes compared to Fourze, it makes up in… Well, no, it hasn’t made up for the comparative lack of snowballing excitement, but it does have a few things going for it.

One thing is that it has a very Kamen Rider-esque element that Fourze and other shows kind of half-arsed, namely motorcycle stunts. Other Rider shows I’ve seen might do a courtesy nod towards the idea that a Kamen Rider rides a bike. Maybe they use it to get from A to B, ride through the occasional inexplicable explosion or have it part of some cheap CGI effect. Wizard though has had some sequences with some significant physical stunt work involved, giving the biker element of the character more weight.

The acting on the whole feels stronger than Fourze did, and while not as riotously funny as Fourze could be, the show has its own sense of humour, which is often surprising in its subtlety.

The big problem I have with the show so far is that each individual story (typically two episodes long) tends to feel really low stakes compared to Fourze and other Rider shows I’ve seen since. With the Phantoms trying to drive a single character to despair each time, there is rarely much in the way of collateral damage or sense of danger to mankind as a whole. Plus, as they have failed every single time in their attempts to create a new Phantom so far, there’s not much in the way of stakes being raised as the show progresses.

That is going away a little in recent episodes, as gradually it is becoming clear there’s possibly different reason for everything that’s happening that the Phantoms themselves are unaware of. Hopefully with the introduction of the secondary Rider, Kamen Rider Beast, next week we’ll see things escalate a little faster.

The one big speed bump early on was in sequences where Wizard would go into the mind of the victim to fight the emerging Phantom. Said Phantom would not be a man in a suit like the ones encountered in the real world, but instead a dreadfully cheap looking CG monster. Thankfully they don’t use them for every story, so it turns out to not be that big of a problem.

It was however enough to leave me feeling a little disappointed with Wizard early on, so I decided to check out what other Rider shows some of the Fourze writers had worked on, which led me to tomorrow’s Rider…

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Kamen Rider Fourze

Gentaro Kisaragi transfers to Amanogawa High School and is determined to make friends with everyone there, even the students and staff who are turning into horrifying monsters. Thankfully there is a secret school club fighting the monsters, who turn Gentaro into the superhero Fourze and restore friendship to the school.

This is what got me to watch a Kamen Rider show. Specifically, it was down to the fact that the show’s head writer was playwright, director and anime screenwriter Kazuki Nakashima (Gurren Lagann, Oh Edo Rocket). I’ve enjoyed pretty much everything related to Nakashima that I’ve seen, and was interested to see what he’d do with a venerable franchise like Kamen Rider. The show was directed by Koichi Sakamoto, who had spent much of the last 20 years working on Power Rangers and associated shows.

This mix resulted in the main setting of Amanogawa High School being a strange hybrid of American idealised TV high schools and Japanese TV idealised high schools. It’s a stew of Saved By Bell-style California TV high school, anime cliches and Ishinomori superheroics. This often results in something resembling a live action cartoon, complete with cartoon sound effects and visual effects.

This was totally my cup of tea. The acting of the teenage cast was highly variable, often breaking down into what can only be described as gurning, but most of them got better as the series progressed, and some were pretty good from the start. It really benefitted in the middle part of the run from a really good guest star in the form of Soran Tamoto playing that segment’s arch-villain. Also around the same it had escalated the visual quirks and gags to the level that the show is likely to be remembered for. For example, early in the show the filming of the 3-2-1 countdown to transformation is quite sensible, but slowly it begins to put more and more OTT cuts and reactions into the sequence.

All in all it was a lot of fun and felt like a show that was very much of the time, in that its hero Gentaro Kisaragi feels somewhat like Luffy from One Piece in his mix of enthusiasm, friendship and bone headed stupidity. 

More importantly, I had been hooked on Kamen Rider shows, and so stuck around for its replacement…

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BROADCASTING AT THE FREQUENCY OF LOVE

It’s 8 o’clock on August 11th so that means it’s time for…

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The 2011 anime series Tiger & Bunny takes place in NC 1977 to NC 1978. While this clearly isn’t our 1970s, there is no such place as Sternbild City after all, there are definitely thematic and plot necessities for it taking place in a version of the 1970s.

First of all, it’s a superhero story, and the story of the superhero starts in the 1930s. Which is where it starts here too. We’re told that the first being with superpowers (a NEXT in the parlance of Tiger & Bunny) appeared 45 years earlier. So around 1932, the year that Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster created Superman. Other key plot elements, such as Mr Legend (the first superhero) inspiring a young Kotetsu, Kotetsu and Barnaby’s age difference and the age of Kaede mean that it has to take place in the 70s on a practical level, if you are starting from the 30s.

However, even without those plot elements, thematically the Seventies is the right era to set the story in. Far more than being a superhero show, Tiger and Bunny is a buddy show. And the Seventies were the golden age of buddy shows. An era that started in 1969 in the cinema.

To cash in on the popularity of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the great Roy Huggins and Glen Larson created Alias Smith and Jones, a buddy western TV show.

The difference between this and an ITC buddy show that appeared a year earlier, The Persuaders, is the chemistry between the male leads. There’s a closeness in the friendship you don’t get from a Roger Moore and Tony Curtis playing millionaire playboys (though the anime Licensed By Royal does owe The Persuaders a debt). The Persuaders did have something that Tiger & Bunny inherited though, and that’s a bickering between two seemingly mismatched characters. The obvious source for this is in another feature film (and the original play and subsequent TV series), namely The Odd Couple.

You can’t really go to far wrong copying The Odd Couple‘s formula. Red Dwarf at its best was just The Odd Couple in space before it started thinking it was a sitcom about sci-fi, rather than a sitcom with sci-fi set dressing. 

So what happens if you take the chemistry of a Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid, combine it with the mismatched leads of an Odd Couple, and then throw in a load of action too? Well you get THE buddy show of the Seventies.

Starsky & Hutch, more than any actual superhero project, is the most obvious predecessor to Tiger & Bunny. It even has the fanservice. Did the open credits need David Soul and Paul Michael Glaser wandering around in just towels? No, but it certainly helped its popularity. If you have any doubt, please check out these samples of Starsky and Hutch doujins.

Adding to the need for Tiger & Bunny to be in Seventies, is the character of Lunatic. He’s definitely the sort of vigilante you started to see in superhero comics in the Seventies, most obviously in the Punisher. Moreover, with the gimmick of being part of the law enforcement process by day and vigilante by night, he also is a reflection on another David Soul role, namely that of the cop turned vigilante in Magnum Force. He marks both the darkening of “justice” in both comics and the wider pop culture of the Seventies.

The lack of resolution in Lunatic’s plot also reflects that it didn’t go away in the Eighties. Lunatic doesn’t surplant Wild Tiger’s version of superheroics, but at the same time Wild Tiger doesn’t end Lunatic’s vigilantism. Instead they end up existing side by side.

So where does Tiger & Bunny go from here, as they head towards their fictional 1980s? Well, I’m hoping that Kotetsu’s cousin from Greece arrives in Sternbild to team up with him.

BONUS: As I’d been sitting on this post since November, and I’ve still not figured out a segue to talking about The Professionals, which was basically Starsky & Hutch if they were UK television James Bonds and the main character was actually their boss, here’s a link to some recent-ish Japanese fan art of The Professionals. 

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