Post by Yuri Petrovitch on Jul 12, 2014 22:18:40 GMT -5
"Kamen Rider V3, Shiro Kazami, is a cyborg. Mortally wounded by Destron, he is rebuilt by Kamen Riders 1 and 2 and reborn as Kamen Rider V3!"
KAMEN RIDER V3
SYNOPSIS
One would have thought that not long after Shocker and the Great Leader had perished at the hands of the Double Riders, that things would be peaceful. But alas, nothing gold can stay. Shiro Kazami as the bad luck to witness agents of a new and more powerful evil organisation known as Destron. This marks him for death, and Destron apparently likes to be thorough in such matters--after planting a bomb in his coffee, sabotaging his motorcycle during practice, and poisoning him, fail to work, they decide to kill his whole family by using their cyborg agent, Scissors Jaguar.
It seems like Shiro will be next to die, but his former teacher, Takeshi Hongo transforms into Kamen Rider 1 and drives Jaguar off, followed by Kamen Rider 2. Shiro demands to be turned into a cyborg as well, so he can exact his revenge on Destron. The Riders tell him they won't, as they know it means the loss of a large part of one's humanity, and they hope even without his family, Shiro might be able to live in the world again someday, rather than apart from it.
But fate soon takes a hand, and while attacking Destron's headquarters, Shiro is mortally injured. The only way to save his life is for the Riders to rebuild him as a cyborg--the ultimate cyborg, incorporating all their refinements and surpassing them as well. The Riders even incorporate secret powers that Shiro will discover the more he uses them. Now re-built as Kamen Rider V3, Shiro is able to exact his vengeance on revenge on Destron, and he proceeds to do so with great relish.
As the war between Destron and V3 heats up, Joji Yuki, a loyal follower of Destron who was rescued personally from disgrace by the Great Leader is transformed into Riderman, Destron's counter to V3. While V3 eventually gets Riderman to join him in battle against Destron, Riderman's motives are initially just to revenge himself on the Destron chief who sold him out, not necessarily the organisation itself, and this leads to tension between the two initially. This rises to such absurd extremes that Riderman actually blocks V3's final attack against the Great Leader, only to learn at last that he's been worshiping the devil (metaphorically speaking) and ultimately must make the supreme sacrifice to atone. As Riderman dies, V3 decalres that Riderman was Kamen Rider 4 and a true comrade at last.
In the wake of Riderman's sacrifice, V3 stands alone against Destron's leader for the final battle. . .
ANALYSIS
Kamen Rider V3 is pretty much the peak of Kamen Rider's popularity in the Showa Era. The original series had just concluded, and V3 managed to be that rarest of successes, as it was just as popular, if not more, than the original show. V3 was even imported to other counties (a friend of mine recalls seeing it subtitled in Thailand when he was a young child) where it caught on pretty strongly, leading to later shows (not just Kamen Rider--Kikaider and the early Super Sentais also leaked out of Japan in this fashion) So if Kamen Rider started the big sea-change, it could be argued that V3 solidified it.
V3 doesn't really reinvent the wheel very much with regards to Kamen Rider--the general look, style, hard-hitting fight choreography, and structure of the episodes and its various arcs are generally the same--V3 fights Destron and the cyborg of the week until he fights the general in charge, destroys them, a new general takes over, and things continue from there, but it's surprisingly not formulaic. Part of that is that Hiroshi Miyauchi, who plays Shiro Kazami, cuts a much different kind of Kamen Rider than his predecessors (Miyauchi would go on to become of the of the most legendary actors in Tokusatsu history--playing a major role in the first 2 Super Sentai shows, as both a regular Ranger and the first extra Ranger, then guest starring or supporting in hundreds of other series) with a charisma that makes him more immediately winning a character than Kamen Rider 1 and Kamen Rider 2 tended to be.
Perhaps the real innovation (oddly enough never really duplicated in later Showa series) is the ongoing Conflict/uneasy alliance/team-up between V3 and Riderman, which evolves the alternating Riders from the original series (created by necessity there, by design in this series) Riderman begins as an antagonist, as Kamen Rider 2 and the Shocker Riders were, but unlike them, even after his face turn never really stops being loyal to Destron--he mostly seems to be pursuing a vendetta against the Destron general who wronged him personally and beyond those moments when their goals align, there is an equal chance that Riderman would work against V3 as soon as work with him. The show does a great job playing that out and evolving their relationship, to the point that when the final moment between them happens, it feels earned and is one of the seminal moments in the entire history of Kamen Rider.
As a introductory show to the world of Kamen Rider, I would say this is an excellent entry point, even without all the background from the first series. Moreover, you're starting with old-school Kamen Rider at the peak, so you have all the strengths from the original show with a whole host of new innovations and the strong Riderman arc to look forward to makes for a strong hand to beat. I recommend it very highly if you want the best of the early Showa Era.
NEXT WEEK
We look at our final movie of the Showa Era, and perhaps the darkest iteration of Kamen Rider yet. Shin Kazamatsuri volunteered to participate in his father's experiments to strengthen the human body, as part of an attempt to cure the ills of the world. But Shin has no idea of the true purpose of this experiment, not the ends the people who bankroll the experiments want to pursue. In seven, join us as Kamen Rider gets maybe a bit too dark as we look at Shin Kamen Rider: Prologue