Post by Yuri Petrovitch on Mar 22, 2014 14:39:51 GMT -5
"Let's ride."
KAMEN RIDER DRAGON KNIGHT
SYNOPSIS
While a mysterious man named Len is hunting monsters as Kamen Rider Wing Knight, troubled teen Kit Walker is being bailed out of yet another jam. Kit claims that all of his troubles aren't necessarily his fault, and is visited by images of his absent father, who urges him to "search for the dragon" and "don't forget the contract card." Soon enough, Kit finds the Advent Deck and contracts with the Dragon, becoming Kamen Rider Dragon Knight. This sets him in conflict with Wing Knight, but they soon enough ally themselves when Len explains that the man he's hunting, General Xaviax, is the same man who was responsible for his father's vanishing act.
Xaviax is playing a long game that involves enslaving the human race. The world he comes from Ventara, is a parallel world t ours. Only someone with an exact DNA match to the Ventaran who wielded the Advent Deck can activate its powers. Len, being Ventaran, doesn't have to worry about a double. Kit is able to wield the Dragon deck because he's an exact match to his counterpart from Ventara, Adam, who kinda started this whole mess with Xaviax in the first place. Xaviax uses his monsters to kidnap people one by one while he builds up his own database, and to assist him, located the Earth counterparts for the Ventaran Riders, promising them whatever they want in exchange for helping him further his goals, not that he really cares all that much.
It's up to Len and Kit to persuade as many of the other Riders as they can to stop helping him, possibly join them in fighting Xaviax, or at least help clearing out all the monsters Xaviax has working for him while all that's going on. In addition, the government is getting more curious about the nature of this alien threat, and the Ventaran resistance is beginning to come to our world as well, potentially escalating the conflict out of all control, and it's on that very precarious point, we hang our series:
ANALYSIS
As promised, this week we conclude our look at Kamen Rider in America with the other half of the side-by-side comparison we started with Kamen Rider Ryuki last week. Dragon Knight aired in this country six years after Ryuki finished its run, and is notable for a few things we'll try to cover as we go.
First, Dragon Knight is not a straight adaptation of Ryuki. There's no way certain elements of Ryuki would have flown over here, so a whole new story had to be created for it, and while it's VERY dark for Saturday morning kid's TV over here (several of the Riders "die" or are removed from the story, and the whole show takes place in the shadow of genocide, in a sense, so there's that) it never quite gets as bleak as Ryuki did, and it's nowhere near as lightweight as Masked Rider was, for sure.
Dragon Knight was not done by Saban, as Masked Rider had been (because at this point, Saban had sold off its interest in the Power Rangers property to Disney, and were out of the business more or less completely. This would change two years after, of course, but this was how things stood as of 2009) It used the same formula (relying on the fight footage from Ryuki to do most of heavy lifting, but soon frequently expanded on the Japanese footage and added greatly to it (for instance, some fights and special attacks were wholly original to the American footage, and many Riders who only got a fraction of time in Ryuki have vastly expanded roles in Dragon Knight) so, it could be argued that even if you liked or were familiar with Ryuki, there was plenty in Dragon Knight that would still appeal to you (in fact, Dragon Knight--redubbed in Japan with several of the original Ryuki cast--actually did better than Ryuki in the ratings, I believe) There is a lot to like here.
Dragon Knight's main driving force is Steve Wang, a guy who's got quite an impressive resume in the makeup line (he's worked with Rick Baker, and Stan Winston, among others) and is a big Kamen Rider fan from way back. He first came to my attention with a movie called Guyver: Dark Hero, based on an anime that had a very dark Kamen Rider-esque sorta plot to it. Dark Hero was a superior film to the original, primarily because of its imaginative creature effects and mind-blwoing fight choreography, as seen in the film's final battle:
Wang brought that to Dragon Knight in spades--the stuntwork in this show is so amazing that Dragon Knight was the inagural winner of the Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Stunt Coordination, and when you see sequences like this, it's not hard to see why, because it is the essence of badass:
Dragon Knight is actually a pretty decent show, all things being equal. The stunt work is incredible, the suit acting meshes well with (and often exceeds) the quality of the Ryuki footage they built it from, and the show gets full marks for trying to do something a little more ambitious than is usual for kid's shows (even in a time like this where low ambition is the rule anyway).
Story-wise, Dragon Knight holds together as well as Ryuki does, on average--the general story is pretty well sound, but the details can muddle everything, and the last ten episodes, which introduce the Ventarans, Master Eubulon, the government agents, and Kit's duplicate might be a bit too much to cram into two episodes (having so much plot you needed three clip shows--one of which was the final episode--was probably not the wisest call either. Hell the clip shows actually flash back to previous clip shows which is on the level of The Hills Have Eyes II's "dog having a flashback to the first movie" moment) and maybe trying to pull all of this together in a satisfying narrative arc in 40 episodes.
. . .and probably being cancelled 2 episodes before the end doesn't help with that. Yes, Dragon Knight never even finished its initial run on broadcast television, owing to punishingly low ratings (as Power Rangers was during this time, Dragon Knight was usually shunted to the end of the network's Saturday morning block, where it would often be pre-empted for sporting events and the like) lack of visibility (the toys didn't really start coming out until after the show had been cancelled) and the fact that Kamen Rider is just going to be a hard sell in general at first--it's not quite at the basic bold colours, constant action, that the Power Rangers shows typically operate at.
In the wake of Dragon Knight's failure, at the time of this writing, no one's tried to revive Kamen Rider for America sense (there have been rumours that Saban was going to try again, but they've not come to anything at present. It may not be possible--the ideal age for Kamen Rider would probably be like, 12-14, and I doubt they'd buy enough toys to make the shows profitable or be allowed to even pitch something that has a toyline that dark. It's a bit of a feathered fish, is Kamen Rider--too kiddie-fied in certain moments to be taken entirely seriously, too dark to work as flashy entertainment for the kids.
I'll be very happy to be proven wrong about this, however.
NEXT WEEK
In anticipation of next week's release in Japan of Heisei Riders vs. Showa Riders: Kamen Rider Taisen Featuring Super Sentai (which commemorates the 15th anniversary of the Heisei Riders' debut) I thought I'd pick a movie that has quite a bit to do with the plot of the new film and also reach back and talk about some Showa Riders once more. The Badan Empire is perfecting their Space Break weapon, and the only force that can stand against it are the first 9 Kamen Riders, but the true key to victory may be the renegade constructed as their agent. Join me in seven when we wander all the way back to 1984, and meet the Paul McGann of Kamen Rider, Kamen Rider ZX (pronounced "Zed-Cross") in Birth of the 10th! Kamen Riders All Together!