Masked Rider (1995-1996)

God help me.

 MASKED RIDER

 SYNOPSIS
 On the distant planet Edenoi (where man evolved from insects for whatever reason), Count Dregon has been waging a brutal war of conquest twarted only just by his nephew, Pince Dex, who has the powers of the Masked Rider, Dex escapes just as Dregon destroys Edenoi and escapes to Earth with his pet hellbeast Ferbus and and ends up being adopted (sort of) by the Stewart family of Leawood, that bland suburban everywhere which, one is allowed to assume, is just next door to Angel grove or something. There, where he attempts to hide from Dregon, who plans to make Earth his next target by doing the usual thing of sending bad guys one at a time so Dex can change into Masked Rider and destroy them in between wackily trying to fit in on Earth.

 Things pretty much stay that way with a few bits where Masked Rider gets a new form or something, until the finale where the past Masked Riders show up and save the day. Beyond that, not much else is resolved so . . .Yay. I guess.

 ANALYSIS
 This was one of two Kamen Rider series that got adapted for airing in the United States, and my God is it terrible.

 Let me get this out of the way to start, as this is the most common canard that gets thrown out when reviewing a translated series. I don't hate it because it "violates the sanctity of the original," or whatever BS. Partly because the original series, Kamen Rider Black RX, really isn't all that great, and partly because this show is just so excruciatingly bad. It's an action show that's not particularly exciting and a comedy show that's not all that funny.

 Anyways, before I get too deep into all of that, some background: Kamen Rider RX was a sequel to Kamen Rider Black, and was an attempt to lighten up the original series substantial (Black is a pretty good series, all told, but it's not at all what you'd call cheery) Black RX did slightly better in terms of ratings, and was a much more successful export, and so, with Power Rangers riding high in the US around 1995, Haim Saban decides to scoop up the Black RX footage (and some from ZO for the pilot for some reason) and create Masked Rider. To further sell the awesomeness of this, they did did a crossover episode with Power Rangers to launch the show, which is kind of amazing, given there wasn't an explicit Japan didn't even do until 2012 (and, in fairness, is pretty damn good and when it aired, really did get me psyched up for the premiere of this show. It's not the stupidest thing I did in 1995, but God it's up there)

 It made sense, in a way. After Power Rangers became such a hit, there was a pretty fevered effort to replicate its mix of action and comedy. And you got stuff like Tattooed Teenage Alien Fighters and Superhuman Samurai Syber-Squad, both of which weren't really all that good either because aping the surface elements wasn't enough to generate the level of success. Saban  was also trying to Xerox its own success.

 Saban was also trying to capture lighting in a bottle. During this time, they'd launched VR Troopers, which cobbled together 4 Japanese series together to make a coherent show, which was a middling success, and followed that with Masked Rider. They'd eventually succeed (kind of) on a small scale with Big Bad Beetleborgs, which came after this, and thankfully I don't have to revisit why Jay Leno in a haunted house is giving out kid's superpowers. Anyways, VR Troopers and Masked Rider were hobbled by a problem that Power Rangers didn't have: Power Rangers was adapting a sentai series that had just finished airing in 1992 before Power Rangers came out the next year. So it was easy to get the stock footage and the monster suits to create action footage that would more easily join the Japanese and American footages together.

 VR Troopers was using footage from shows from 1984, 1986, and 1984 for a series made in 1994. There were no suits available, and the apparatus in America didn't allow for building new ones of sufficient quality, and therefore they were wholly dependent on the stock footage, which was from three different series, which meant you usually ended up with American actor looking at footage from one series, which was watching another series and thus, burned through their stock footage quickly.

 Masked Rider doesn't have that problem so much--Black RX was from 1989 and they had some suits on hand--but the tone of the show (It's ALF with karate bug men!) that the result is much the same--since none of the comedy's all that funny, you're just waiting for the Japanese footage to kick in so something exciting that you care about will happen. But conversely, because the comedy is so broad and nothing is really meant to be taken all that seriously, even that doesn't have the punch it should. It's a crappy syndicated sitcom that someone dropped Japanese footage into to give it an extra frisson of weirdness, and after spending too much time watching these, your overall feeling will be "well who gives a damn?" 

 NEXT WEEK
 We begin our look at the second American adaptation of Kamen Rider by actually looking at the original Japanese version first (we didn't do this with Masked Rider, because my ability to grab a decent sub of RX is a bit wanting) Join us in seven, as we meet Shinji Kido, who, while investigating the mysterious disappearances of people who being killed by monsters leaping out of mirrors to grab people. But beyond the mirror is a contest between Kamen Riders. And even beyond that there's a even deeper mystery driving everything. Coming up next, Kamen Rider Ryuki: