Shotaro Ishinomori

It's just...

You know, it's based on Shotaro Ishinomori's work and Toshiki Inoue wrote the screenplay, but it's just all over the place that way.

It's chaotic.

It really is.

But there are a lot of tenuous connections that get us to a place where I feel like it honestly will eat at me more to not talk about this show than it will to wait for a stronger connection, so here's a quick list of things that I think give us a good enough connection to Dragon Ball to talk about this show.

In our Ginyu Force episode, we talked a little bit about Shotaro Ishinomori, the creator of Kamen Rider and Super Sentai, largely because of Super Sentai, and an understanding of Super Sentai is crucial to understanding the Ginyu Force.

We also discussed Toshiki Inoue on our Curse of the Blood Rubies commentary, and he worked as a writer on more than 10 Kamen Rider series.

We've had characters explode for absolutely no reason than just because they were beaten, which is something that Kamen Rider does quite a bit as a trope.

So it's just time to stop dragging our feet and take a look at the awesomeness, to spoil my thoughts on this show, that is Kamen Rider Black Sun.

And before we get started on this specific show, let's go over Kamen Rider itself a little bit.

So Kamen Rider is a Japanese superhero transmedia franchise created in 1971 by Shotaro Ishinomori, uh, with the release of Kamen Rider, that has spawned over 35 mainline series, dozens upon dozens of films, multiple anime adaptations, manga serials, DTV releases, spin-offs, unofficial bootleg adaptations from countries like Taiwan and Thailand, an attempted Power Rangers-style series in the '90s, video games, and more over the past 55 years, and it shows no signs of stopping anytime soon.

Kamen Rider's u- as ubiquitous in Japan as the X-Men are in the United States, and with regards to the show we're going to talk about today, that example was chosen for a somewhat specific reason.

Shade closes out by saying, oh, I'd like to add some more context for people to understand why this collab is cool as hell, because the reason goes beyond just two cool things joining together.

Kamen Rider's creator and legendary manga artist Shotaro Ishinomori was somewhat familiar and maybe even inspired by American comics like Batman.

In the Kamen Rider manga, the original Kamen Rider even has a secret base and a butler-like character similar to Batman.

Ishinomori would then go to meet a couple American comic book creators such as Stan Lee from Marvel and Toei and DC's Batman comic artist Jerry Robinson, where they both supposedly discussed a possible Batman and Kamen Rider crossover.

And, you know, I probably have to get into the weeds again, [laughs] get into the to- tokusatsu weeds about how they originate.

Like, um, how Ishinomori, like, wrote things like Sentai and Power and, and Kamen Rider as an answer to...

As a way of actual m- making of Japanese superheroes, like the way American superheroes have come to be.

Like, tokusatsu is essent- like, the way we think about Sentai, Ultraman, uh, Kamen Rider, or even Metal Heroes, like Gavvane or Sh- or Sheriff Gavan and stuff like that, um, is very much how, by comparison, are all our cape superhero comics here in the US.