Kamen Rider Amazon (1974-1975) Episode 1 “Man or Beast? The Cool Guy Who Came from the Jungle!”
Maybe the best thing ever transmitted on television, Kamen Rider Amazon takes the rider formula and completely turns it on its head. Here, our hero is basically Japanese Tarzan turned into a magical transforming hero by Incan magic to fight a giant floating red head (that has ten faces sticking out of it). Japanese Tarzan—calling himself Amazon—is tasked with traveling to Tokyo, where he meets with an old geezer named Professor Kousaka and his family. Another evil spider man appears, and we get more tragic deaths and insane violence. Amazon here transforms into a lizard-themed rider who bites off the spider’s arms! Absolutely bat-guano nuts, the story takes the brave choice of creating a main character who can’t talk and who bounces around and eats bananas, and when the massive demon head swings into the picture, serious questions about drug use amongst the creators started blossoming in my noggin. Truly a joyous frolic of unexpected garish, bloody, joyful nonsense, and topping X as my favorite so far!
Kamen Rider Stronger (1975) Episode 1 “I am the Electric Human Stronger!” and 2 “The Secret of Stronger and Tackle”
A memorable first episode with a wacky monster-of-the-week and a MUCH lighter tone than previous entries. Stronger opens with a slinky-metal kangaroo monster (with a joey in its belly) attacking a hovercraft. A dude on a motorbike, Shigeru Jo, chases down the hovercraft and he, with the help of Electro-Wave Human Tackle (a ladybug-themed female Rider), temporarily defeat the attacking thugs. It turns out Jo is actually Kamen Rider Stronger, and we later witness him fight an army of underlings on their own bikes—a first that I have seen in the series. The baddies are called Black Satan this time, and the goodies are constantly bantering and one-upping each other for the best hero as they take out the goons. Certainly not as wild as Amazon, nor as dark and brooding as the first three entries, nevertheless the carefree spirit carries a charm of its own in the first episode. In the second episode, “The Secret of Stronger and Tackle,” we get the two heroes’ backstory in truncated form—as a college student, Jo volunteers to become a subject to Black Satan’s experimentation and thus is transformed into a cyborg, introducing the first Rider to become Cyborgized completely by choice rather than necessity. However, Jo has a device that prevents Black Satan from taking over his mind as they intended, and so after his augmentation, he kicks all sorts of enemy hinder. On his way to the exit, he stumbles on Tackle, who was a victim of Black Satan, and they end up escaping together and becoming a battle unit for justice! It’s all kinds of wholesome, even if Jo later exhibits some pretty extreme sexism towards his partner, and Tackle in general is presented as less capable as Jo. As for horror elements, the transformation of the machine monsters is shown, with spidery creatures crawling into victims’ ears to take over their minds (ala Heinlein’s The Puppetmasters or the flesh-eating creeps in the Parasyte manga)—but ear-wrigglers is about as yick as the episode gets. If anything, Stronger feels like a clear precedent for late Heisei and Reiwa riders and their hyper-colorful antics and revving motions to power up.
Kamen Rider Shin/Skyrider (1979-1980) Episode 1 “The Cyborg Flies in the Sky”
After the previous shows increasing silliness, Toei strikes back with an attempt to return to their roots with Kamen Rider in 1979—often known as Kamen Rider Shin (“shin” means “new” in this case) or Skyrider. The hero in this case is Hiroshi Tsukuba, a hang gliding enthusiast out camping with friends who spots a group of motorcycle bullies harassing a lone car while he is up in the air. He somehow manages to descend upon the embattled vehicle and attacks the assembled baddies, who reveal themselves to be the latest group of minions working for the latest iteration of SHOCKER, this time called Neo-Shocker. In the scuffle, he saves another righteous scientist, but eventually as must happen in these stories, he is injured and his body reworked to become a new Rider with a design similar to the original, but with brown pecs instead of green. A novel aspect from this version of the hero include his newfound ability to fly with the twist of a lever, soaring through the sky ala Superman. The show also rebounds back into a horror vibe—particularly in a sequence wherein a group of campers are pulled into the dirt and murdered (evoking for me The Night of the Demon and Drag Me to Hell. I couldn’t help but wonder why the villains don’t pull that hellish stunt on any and all foes they want to put on ice, but I digress.) Though some of the action feels poorly staged, with a particularly cheesy accidental transformation by Hiroshi into his rider form when he just happens to punch a minion with his fist at the right angle, the episode still rushes by at a breakneck pace with imaginative set pieces and (I thought) some of the grooviest background music in the series yet. Not nearly as narratively punchy as some previous entries, with little in the way of overt mystery, the return of the tragic tone and harder-edged creep factor do re-imbue some of the unique qualities of the Rider mythos into the series, and I like that.
