Kamen Rider Decade (2009) Episode 1 “Rider War”
In 2023 we are well into the world of multi-verses and cinematic universes, with Marvel doubling down on the concept with the recent Ant Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and DC diving straight in with The Flash… but the Kamen Rider multiverse has tinkered with these ideas for years, and their Endgame of sorts was Kamen Rider Decade, which featured the previous ten shows’ worth of Riders, as well as an idea that their respective universes are colliding—and the heroes are being destroyed. The opening battle sequence is a dream in which all of the previous decade’s worth of Riders are killed off in spectacular fashion by newcomer Decade, which is both awesome and disheartening at the same time (especially as Decade’s design is not one of the cooler ones in the Rider pantheon).
As the show progresses, the concept is laid out with breathtaking speed: Another idiot male lead (this time a loser photographer instead of a man with bad luck/dumbhead violin maker/quote-unquote “professional dream-chaser” etc) is charging shmucks on the street for his brand of out-of-focus photography. Somehow he has roped the local photography joint into subsidizing his bad pics, and the cute hothead girl Natsumi comes to beat him up with her special attack (she was also the one who had the dream in the beginning). The idiot male lead is named Tsukasa, and he gets Natsumi pulled into the maelstrom of multiverses, resulting in a wacky sequence wherein she dashes her way through multiple baddies from multiple universes and Decade eventually saves her with powers from previous Riders (anyone who has seen some of the latest Ultraman shows will know the deal—cards with the powers of previous heroes somehow saved inside endow Decade with other Riders’ abilities when scanned). Perhaps the most interesting wrinkle here is that Decade is tasked with traveling to the other Rider worlds and exterminating the other Riders—not saving them, exterminating them, in order to save Natsumi’s world (and his own? Maybe?).
The ambition is obviously there with this series. Natsumi is pretty likable, too, and at least the hero isn’t collecting sludge and cooking it up to make slop soup. It is exciting to see previous Riders arriving on the scene again, though a lot of my excitement was tempered from… well, living in 2023, where the multiverse gimmick has kind of soured a bit. Still, this idea was much more novel at the time, and it holds some promise.
Kamen Rider W (2009-2011) Episodes 1 and 2 “The W Search/Two Halves of One Detective” and “The W Search/Those Who Make the City Grieve”
Film noir Kamen Rider? Seriously? I love this idea! I enjoy a good film noir (I recently watched The Glass Key and totally digged it—including the bits that apparently inspired Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo), I love the stylings, and even though Kamen Rider W approaches the genre in a very goofy manner, I love that those trappings are incorporated into the Rider mythos with this series (which came out the same year as Decade—so much Rider that year!). We get a jazz-heavy score, a pseudo-detective suit for the hero, even a femme fatale! Shotaro Hidari is a self-proclaimed hard-boiled detective, and he works with his researcher Philip to investigate crimes—and monsters, this time called Dopants. When Akiko Narumi, his new landlord and a violently nosy woman, comes to evict Hidari, she ends up roped into dangerous encounters with the monsters, and we discover that Hidari and Philip can fuse together to become Kamen Rider W (double, get it? It’s a similar conceit to Ultraman Ace back in the 70s). Outside of the film noir backdrop, the hero-fusion conceit is probably Kamen Rider W’s greatest claim to originality. Essentially half of W’s body has one power set (like “cyclone”) and the other has another power set like “fire”), and they can switch out the power sets using mystical thumb drives. In this way, we get a step away from Decade’s straight up transforming into the heroes’ themselves, and the pastiche imagery of W transforming half at a time. The absurd action sequence possibilities that sometimes arise make for a memorable gimmick. While the episodes I watched feel a little heavy on the catchphrases, and the acting is still a bit overly cute, I really dug this one.
One Reply to “Kamen Rider Impressions, Part 9: Kamen Rider Decade and Kamen Rider W”
Comments are closed.