Where it all began



In a small garage studio between one floor plantation style homes in Hawai'i, I was binging as a college student. Not on beers and drugs, as the description may conjure, but on Tokusatsu and Anime like Kamen Rider and Fist of the North Star. I’d been watching the like since my childhood in NY. Escaping from the suburbs, my brother and I would venture into a cavernous Chinatown basement in Manhattan. Walled with VHS tapes that could come collapsing down on us at any moment, 5’ x 2’ booths offered a variety of goodies from overseas. With some risk of sounding…well.. not young… I’ll say, this was before the age of streaming, and even downloading. This was when a 2 second clip of the poorest quality video would break your internet in half. It was here that we would ask the vendor to unstack some of his enclosure, playing, a jenga like game, to get us the tapes of our choice. The contents of the tapes were cartoons and other shows from China and Japan which simply did not exist in the US.



Why Tokusatsu?



Why go to such great lengths? The series were like nothing we had seen before. A breathe of fresh air with crisp animation, engaging stories and relatable characters. Most of their stories anchored on characters’ development over the course of a series. Starting off weak you’d follow characters’ growth towards prowess in various strengths; physical, mental, spiritual and (my favorite) moral. The stories were subtle, yet powerful in their narratives and presentation.



The next stage in acquisition of these series was using the internet, not to watch, but to buy rare and bootlegged DVDs via China. This was a new frontier and helped expand my interest to Tokusatsu and Masked Rider. With Mighty Morphing Power Rangers as the gateway to Tokusatsu in my youth, I was then left unsatiated by the kick of Saban’s Masked Rider release in 1995 (note pun). After acquiring an Agito DVD in 2003 the floodgates opened and I haven’t turned away from Tokusatsu since.

The tokusatsu series of this world would come to complement each other: Super Sentai, Kamen Rider, Zaborger, the Chinese Inframan, the newer Demeking - were all weirdly inspiring. Approaching adulthood I found myself perplexed. While most Americans were only just slowly coming around to accepting revamped superheroes tailored for adults in the mainstream, how is it that I unabashedly continued watching these blatantly campy childish tokusatsu shows, tailored for preschool and elementary school kids, as an adult? The answer I found was simple. They were pure. Seigi no Mikata. “正義の味方” They were (unapologetically) Allies of Justice.

Invitation



Follow us on our journey, from our childhood of watching Tokusatsu to producing our own. From story, character, script, and costume development, to production and promotion we will blog about all of our experiences with tokusatsu as fans and film makers.



We invite you to share your stories while taking this journey with us, and to support Rider Real Movie. Together we can protect justice, together we can start the #TokusatsuRevolution!

