Tokusatsu

@megasigil

Just finished it and I thought it was a blast. Love what they're doing with this classic monsterverse thing!

@milo#24296 yeah, I had a good time! It‘s probably my least favorite of the MonsterVerse so far, but it’s still pretty great. Unfortunately I was let down by the music - that Junkie XL dude suuucks, and I really was not into his “just try not to get us sued” Godzilla theme song. Godzilla: King of the Monsters‘ soundtrack really spoiled me. Also didn’t really dig the movie's design for ||Mechagodzilla||. ||I hated Ready Player One, but he looked way better in that movie lol.||

It did have some cool fight scenes! Kind of a neat approach to shooting the monsters to emphasize scale without actually shooting from ground level. Godzilla and Kong felt a lot more anthropomorphized in terms of personality in this movie than any other, especially Godzilla, which was cute. I read Adam Wingard based Kong's personality on Bruce Willis in Die Hard and Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon, which was funny to look out for (Kong jumping off the aircraft carrier before it explodes was totally the rooftop jump in Die Hard). Also really loved Hollow Earth, and I'd totally watch a whole movie of battle axe Kong getting into Conan the Barbarian adventures up in there. For a while last night Hollow Earth was trending on Twitter which I found hilarious.

Also weirdly, even though the actual plot of Godzilla vs. Kong is kind of more over the top than Godzilla: King of the Monsters, I found it felt refreshingly more restrained at times? KotM had this smug, MCU-ified approach to dialogue where every moment was punctuated by dumb improv or punched-up jokes that just deflated whatever emotional undertones or drama in every scene. I hated the part where we found out Ghidorah's name and someone made a joke that it sounded like gonorrhea. Godzilla vs. Kong is way less afraid to just let characters vomit out outlandish dialogue, it doesn't try and beat audiences to the punch with self-deprecating barbs like it's embarrassed of itself. More of that, _please_.

Glad to see the movie is doing well at the box office. Hope the series continues. My dream is that Legendary will shell out for Gamera and finally get us a Gamera vs. Godzilla crossover someday, lol

@megasigil

Yeah I definitely liked the human characters better than in KOTM. And I'm usually not on for big blockbuster action movies, but the effects were really great and emphasized the scale in a huge way.

[size=10](Huh, didn’t know there was a tokusatsu thread.)[/size]

Wow, Kamen Rider Black Sun is _not_ fucking around!

[upl-image-preview url=https://i.imgur.com/Nibx16D.jpeg]

@chazumaru whoa

Oh man, is this handled well or…?

I have gotten into tokusatsu over the past year after being intrigued by it for a long time via Kamen Rider. I have seen the original and I‘m like halfway through Kuuga (absolutely fantastic and Godai is the most likeable protagonist ever). After watching SSSS.Gridman last year and loving it, I decided to finally start to OG Gridman last night and in hindsight, SSSS.Gridman was such a loving tribute/quasi-sequel and they absolutely nailed every last detail of the sets in perfect detail when converting it to animation. The kaiju designs and aesthetic of the computer world are amazing, and I love the show’s whole vibe of the 90‘s computer aesthetic that I love and the idea in 90’s pop culture that computers and especially hacking were just magical things that could do anything.

Kamen Rider Black Sun is really good. the screencap posted above [ >!aside from being pretty spoilery! it‘s from the last 5 mins of the series! !< ] does tell you about the sort of tone and topics they’re working with.

well, not really. it sort of blends topics together. whitewashing of atrocities like unit 731 and racism/xenophobia. it's messy and clumsy. but it's interesting!
the action has some really cool moments, strong character work throughout and the principle cast all have interesting arcs. i really enjoyed it! i don't think i've enjoyed something in quite this way since battlestar galactica. it's a little too long and the sheer amount of flashbacks are tricky to keep track of but those last couple of episodes really did it for me. whatever trick they pulled it worked on me! spoilery tweet i enjoyed

we get Shin Kamen Rider on amazon prime tomorrow and i am HUMMING with anticipation.

I got to program/hand-pick a 24-hour streaming block alongside a bunch of other tokusatsu alum as part of the Thanksgiving Takeover special on Shout Factory‘s toku streaming service, TokuSHOUTsu. Right now, we’re about to dive into a big ol' block of really interesting Ultraman deep cuts, Godzilla vs. Hedorah and the Ultraman Zero trilogy to wind down the night (wish I had remembered to swing by sooner; already played War of the Gargantuas and Q: The Winged Serpent). A free and good Sunday.

Does anyone know of any tokusatsu related podcasts out there? Bonus points if there's one specifically about Kamen Rider, but anything is cool!

this topic is awesome - like a lot of you, i saw old godzilla flicks as a kid and fell in love, though i've honestly not yet seen any ultraman (beyond the games!) or kamen rider, open to suggestions on highlights of those!

so minus one was really great, felt like a lot of nods & one of the only times i recall rooting for the humans, haha. i'm reminded of how tim rogers adores final wars, but most other kaiju fans online seem to kinda hate it? i imagine that one was polarizing, need to get around to it as well

i'd also wanted to ask y'all, because i have hopes of at least finding a loose disc for a decent price one day: how did anyone here like the godzilla ps4 game? i'm a huge EDF fan so i'm cool with jank/etc, but the more i'd heard about this game, the more it was about it being specifically for fans of the old movies. as the desired demographic, did anyone here dig it?

https://www.threads.net/@kaijunewsoutlet/post/C0fXTwFueBV/?igshid=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==

i've been sort of eating a kamen rider hotdog by alternately biting each end. been chipping away at the OG series for the last 18 months, watched KR black, the amazon shows (Amazons and Black Sun), Shin KR.

every time i hear about one of the series that's considered best, i bounce off it. Faiz looks pretty good from the first few episodes but i found KR Build too goofy. The goof is in the format! you don't need to lean into the goof like a south park parody.

after having read some of the Ishinomori manga, it seems like that might be the fork in the road for the two flavours of KR - the goofy and toy-advert friendly ones versus the violent and darker ones. so much of what happens in Shin KR that _isn't_ from the series is basically lifted from that manga, which is much more loosely structured compared to the TV series.

anyway i love the bug boys and even slipped some of the [interstitial music](https://youtu.be/l6Ga1YC83iY?list=PLrObYvWDFIPNnZ8QvOExwpMMjMjc8_6jA) into a DJ set the other weekend.

on a more toku-specific note, i hate that i haven't seen G-1 yet and the internet keeps posting the awful hollywood Zilla to promo the next GxKong. it looks so bad! it's like the neil degrasse-tyson "actually an aquatic lizard would be more like blah blah blah." it's supposed to look like a dude in a suit! that's the character!

@megasigil I saw someone liked this post today and reread it after having seen Takashi Yamazaki‘s Letterboxd Top 4 Godzillas, and it’s the same as my list but without Hedorah lol. I think this means Yamazaki and I are best friends now

In case my avatar didn't already spoil it, I do love my tokusatsu. However, I only recently discovered the ultra series thanks to Shin Ultraman and all the promotional material for it. Before that, I was mostly a Kamen Rider fan.

@"IrishNinja"#p143061 Minus one deserves the attention it gets. It is a big goofy monster blockbuster, but the heart of the story and all the character performances by the human cast is top notch. Hopefully Toho continues to have faith in producing more G.

@"rootfifthoctave"#p143082 There is a significant shift in styles with 1st phase Heisei Kamen Riders (Kuuga-Decade) and 2nd phase + Reiwa riders (W onwards). Both eras have their duds, but also have produced fan favorites. Faiz is a good starting point, although it can get hilariously depressing at times. I'd say continue onwards with Faiz, especially since it's having a revival movie next year with the original cast.

Ryuki might be one of the strongest series, with consistent writing throughout. Blade is my favorite series, but it is a very, very controversial. The first half attained a legendary meme status amongst japanese fans, but after they retooled the series for the second half, it became one of the most emotional series yet.

The shift could be traced to Hibiki, which was too different for it's own good. The showrunner wanted to make a completely different show, but they slapped it with the Kamen Rider IP in order to profit off of toys. Then a lot of production shenanigans happened and they switched the creative team midway, resulting in a complete shift in overall story tone. The first 30 episodes are some of the best Kamen Rider stuff ever, with the rest of the show being a mid-tier monster-of-the-week toy commercial. Hibiki being a failure made Toei and Bandai rethink their approach for the show. The following show, Kabuto, was a return to the low-tech sci-fi that the Heisei series was aiming for. Then came Den-O which became wildly popular with it's more comedic tone and ensemble cast. Den-O set the stage for the Kamen Rider series becoming a bit more light-hearted than it had been.