Few things in life bring me joy like re-watching my favorite shows for the umpteenth time even though my backlog looks more like a catalogue at this point, and complaining about Kamen Rider. Mind you, I don’t hate Kamen Rider, if anything I love this show dearly, but every year it becomes increasingly clear that the long running franchise doesn’t loves me back.
This is not an issue of me pushing my Adult Sensibilities™ onto shows made for children, but about consistency; when you watch Ultraman, Super Sentai or even Precure, even if the quality varies you always know what you’re getting into. But Kamen Rider?
Kamen Rider is anyone’s guess.
Sure, some elements like fighting monsters and being set in Japan are consistent, but you’d be hard-pressed to find a franchise that can be so thematically different in every iteration; from Police Drama to Mystical Knights to Police drama but now with a talking Car, the setups in this show vary so wildly that trying to make sense of it is an exercise in futility.
Look, I get it, we are here to sell toys and children are notorious for being fickle bastards, but we’ve reached the point where Kamen Rider is little more than a name slapped into whatever Toei and Bandai think will make money this year.
If it’s starting to sound like this article is a diatribe on the death of creativity within a capitalism society, well, first of all, every single one of my articles IS a diatribe on the death of creativity within a capitalist society, and second, even if the franchise has become almost unrecognizable to older viewers, you gotta respect its commitment to reinvent itself to the point of insanity while somehow still keeping the elements that made it unique 50 years ago, up to and including Hiroshi Fujioka.
When you have a franchise that has existed for this long, it’s always interesting to see how it evolves over time to keep up with society. Super Sentai is the single best example of this, but the Heisei Era of Rider, particularly the shows produced between the years 1999 and 2019, do work as this bizarre barometer of how both storytelling and cultural trends have evolved in Japan for the last 20 years.
And most importantly, how to make money out of them.
Which brings me to today’s subject, Kamen Rizer Zi-O, the show that marked the end of the Heisei Era of Rider after Emperor Reiwa got cold feet a couple of times, and that achieved something I thought impossible: it told a Kamen Rider story that is actually kind of brilliant.
It is all His fault.
Look, a lot can be said about the 2009 anniversary series Kamen Rider Decade, mostly by way of shouting, but you have to understand that, at the time, Toei had never really done anything like it. Sure, there had been celebrations, homages, and whatever the hell Boukenger was doing, but an entire show built around the concept of crossing over with all the previous seasons?
That was literally unheard of.
Which is why fans were so excited about the show; just the prospect of going back to those seasons and reuniting with the old characters was a too good to be true.
Kamen Rider Decade was simply a show that tried to bite too much for its own good. It could be fun and played with some great ideas, but when all was said and done its story didn’t make a lick of sense; the plot posed several interesting questions but stubbornly refused to answer any of them, characters had no clear direction, and once the show ended all we were left with was a cliffhanger, a trailer, and the promise that everything would make sense once we watched the follow up movie.
A movie that, unless you lived in Japan, you would not be able to watch for another six months.
And once we actually got to watch it, it turned out that nothing from that trailer ended up in the movie, and the only answer we got was joke’s on you, the story never really mattered!
I will say that, as the years have gone by, I have grown to appreciate the show and I admit that I quite enjoy what it did; as much of a mess as it was, Decade got to do some genuinely cool things that an actually coherent show would have never been able to pull off. But that doesn’t change the fact that watching it as it aired was one of the most frustratingly infuriating experiences I’ve had with any form of media.
If you weren’t in the fandom back then it is hard to explain how much of an impact Decade had not just on the franchise, but also on Toei itself; while the company had dipped its feet on the crossover pool before, it had never been done so to this extent. Kamen Rider Decade was a lot more than a crossover, it was a celebration of the franchise, a monument to Kamen Rider’s continued success.
It also made a truckload of money.
So much in fact that Toei has taken literally every chance it gets to celebrate an anniversary ever since, no matter how tenuous. Naturally, when the Kamen Rider Heisei clock hit 20, you can be damn sure they would try again.
A Decade OId Sequel.
Kamen Rider Zi-O, a show made to commemorate the 20th anniversary of moms across the nation discovering Joe Odagiri, had the no easy task of bringing together 20 years of Kamen Rider in order to sell some genuinely awful-looking toys.
If I sound a bit too cynical about it, well, that’s what watching 20 years’ worth of Kamen Rider does to a man. But also, Zi-O is the kind of show that really does wear its nature on its sleeve; while it never becomes a straight up parody, Zi-O relishes on being a TV show, so even if it has a fairly interesting premise, it never shies away from the fact that it is mostly a vehicle to revisit previous series and bring back Tetsuya Iwanaga before he grows too powerful to control.
I’ve always said that a story doesn’t have to make sense with the rules of the real world in order to be good, but it does have to make sense with itself, so you should never judge something for what you want it to be, but rather for what it wants to be. Of course, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t apply certain standards when you criticize something, but never make the mistake of thinking that perfection equals greatness.
And that might as well be Kamen Rider Zi-O’s slogan.
Even by Toei’s own standards, Zi-O is not a well put together production; unlike shows like Ex-Aid and Build that were flawed in their execution but had a very clear sense of what they wanted to be as a story, Zi-O feels like someone came up with a premise for an anniversary show but never really thought it through.
Usually that is a recipe for disaster, but somehow Zi-O managed to turn that into one of its biggest strengths; the story never really goes were you expect it to, but that freedom to do anything is more fun and compelling than a traditional approach could have been.
And then by the end, the show somehow evolves into a direct sequel to Kamen Rider Decade, something I never even thought was possible.
Zi-O is not an epic story, hell, it is barely a story at all, but more than any other series of its type, Zi-O understood why people cared about these shows. Why they still care about them now. Maybe Zi-O is not what I’d call peak Kamen Rider, but it definitely embodies why audiences continue to be drawn into this franchise even after so many decades.
I think the reason why Zi-O works as an anniversary season is not just because it fulfilled Decade’s promise of bringing back past seasons into the fold, but because it completely embraces the absurdity of Kamen Rider; contrary to what some fans may think, Kamen Rider is not supposed to be serious, realistic or, God forbid, good.
I know what that sounds like, but I have a point here; Kamen Rider series are full of great and ambitious ideas that often times collapse before getting anywhere, but that makes the experience of watching it far more interesting than if they did. I don’t think there’s a single iteration of this franchise that has truly achieved its full potential, all of them are diamonds in the rough to some degree, but there is a beauty to that roughness that no other Toku can truly replicate.
Zi-O is incredibly rough. There are too many aspects in this show that I can nitpick and criticize, but that is what makes the experience of watching it so compelling; when Zi-O works, it REALLY works, and that makes all the scrutiny incredibly rewarding. Seeing how this show succeeds where others fail in spite of its shortcomings is what makes it truly memorable.
You can like it or you can hate, but I assure you cannot forget it.
One Continuity to Rule them All.
One of the cool things about being a fan of Tokusatsu, besides being constantly drowning in pussy, is that since these shows are produced on a limited budget with relatively few resources and in a VERY tight schedule, you can often see how they all come apart at the seams. It might be cheap entertainment, but part of the appeal of the genre is being able to see the craft behind it in real time.
Of course, this extends beyond the practical side of things and well into the production process; there is a point in every Toku fan’s quote on quote life where they start realizing how physical and logistical limitations affect the development of a series. I am talking about things like how actor availability can change the production order, how budget allocation actually plays an important part in the narrative and how certain filming locations end up being used a quadrillion times.
This is why doing continuity within a series, let alone multiple ones, can be such a daunting task in Tokusatsu: even with the best laid of plans, you never truly know how things will turn out in the end. Sure, you could just wing it, but there’s no real guarantee that will work out. Unless you’re Tsuburaya.
It is no secret that Toei only cares about continuity when they can profit it from it, otherwise it’s barely an afterthought. They have certainly tried, but there’s a reason why that has never really been one of the selling points of their franchises, which does put Zi-O in a weird spot: how do you build a show around the continuity of a franchise when said continuity doesn’t really exists?
Well, the answer is simple: you don’t?
Like most marriages, continuity is something you need a lot of long-term commitment to make it work, and, also like marriages, adding time travel into the mix only makes things more complicated than they should be. You can absolutely make a time travel story that works within a continuity, but that requires a lot of planning and a budget to fit your ambitions. Which I guess also applies to marriage.
Toei is not exactly known for their planning and budget. I could literally end the article right there. But the big takeaway here is that while reconciling 20 years’ worth of Kamen Rider continuity using time travel is possible on paper, on a production level it was always too impractical to work.
Which is why Zi-O never really tried.
I think something most people don’t understand about continuity is that it’s never about making every single element and plot point fit together, but about giving meaning to events through legacy. Today’s story matters because yesterday’s stories happened, and Zi-O achieved this not just by bringing back past characters, but by bringing back what was most important to us: our memories of them.
You don’t need to make all the pieces fit together, just bring back the ones people remember the most, the ones they care about. It sounds a bit obvious when I say it like this, but nostalgia is a hell of a drug. Sometimes all you need to do to celebrate a show is to remind people why they loved it in the first place.
If you put the story of Zi-O under a microscope, too many pieces simply don’t add up. But the pieces never really needed to add up, the story never needed to make sense with what came before, it only needed to make us care about what was happening now.
And therein lies the brilliance of Kamen Rider Zi-O; by making a story centered around time travel while playing fast and loose with its own continuity, Toei made the most coherent time travel story ever produced.
About damn Time.
The problem with depicting time travel in any kind of media is that our understanding of time itself is based directly on the way our mind operates; for humans, the present is what we’re currently experiencing, the past is that which we can remember, and the future is what we can imagine.
This gives our understanding of time a sense of linearity where everything works on a system of cause and effect, but that is a far cry from the way reality actually operates; time doesn’t advance as much as it reiterates itself, any sense of progression is entirely a matter of perspective, and cause and effect are entirely overridden by the paradox principle.
I know most people are not very good with all this wibbly wobbly, timey wimey stuff, so to put it in a far less pretentious way, when it comes to time travel you should think less Back to the Future and more Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.
The point of this nonsensical tirade, which also happens to be the name of my band, is that real time travel is nowhere near as streamlined and convenient as most movies and TV shows would have you believe. Unless the point of the story is to explore time travel as a concept, most of them only use it as a way to revisit a particular setting, fixing convoluted plot points without actually putting in the effort of fixing them, or as the setup for the single greatest clip episode ever made.
I know this will probably shatter everything you know about reality and ruin the only good Harry Potter movie, but the tired “change the past to change the future” trope that almost every time travel centered narrative uses is, in fact, impossible; history is not a river whose course you can correct at your leisure, it is a fish bowl where once you change the water, you cannot change it back.
As any real time traveler would tell you, you cannot actually travel through time; the time line as we understand it doesn’t exist, there is no “road” you can traverse. There is no defined past and future, there is only the present you’re currently experiencing. So you do not “travel” through time as much as you create new versions of the present by replacing the old ones.
In other words, Time Travel works exactly as it is depicted in Kamen Rider Zi-O.
From a story telling stand point Zi-O can be incredibly frustrating as the show seems to reinvent itself every handful of episodes; plot points that are deemed important are dropped and introduced at the drop of a hat, established rules are either ignored or just completely forgotten, and even the base premise of the show becomes irrelevant after a while.
Under normal circumstances those would be the telltale signs of a troubled production, heck, I basically just described Guyferd, but because this is a time travel story, all of those incoherences are actually coherent.
When the characters in Zi-O travel through time, they are not changing history, they are changing to story itself. All the plot holes and random changes the show goes through are actually the result of the characters moving through different versions of reality and destroying the old ones. I can’t believe I am saying this, but of all the characters who have traveled through time in fiction, Kadoya Tsukasa is the one who actually got it right.
Zi-O is a mess that collided with another, bigger mess and then someone filmed it and put it on TV. But there’s a brilliance to that disaster that is really hard to put into words, and believe me, I’ve been trying. I know it sounds incredibly convenient and maybe it’s not a perfect explanation, but it is because this a Time travel story that all the plot holes and contradictions born during the production process actually make sense.
And the most incredible thing about it is that it all happened completely by accident.
A Producer’s Credit.
When it comes to Tokusatsu, few figures are as divisive among the fans as writer Toshiki Inoue, but Shinichiro Shirakura, who has been a producer at Toei since the early 90’s, sure comes close.
If you have watched Tokusatsu at some point in your life, chances are you have watched something he was involved with, Shirakura’s just that prolific. And whatever your opinion of him is, no one can deny he’s good at his job, whatever that job is; just looking at his body of work, he has been involved with some of the most notorious train wrecks in the history of Tokusatsu, but also with some of the most influential works in the genre.
Either way, he is easily one of the most experienced people working in the industry, and his name does carry a lot of weight; whenever he is attached to a project, fan reaction is often a combination of excitement and apprehension. It doesn’t matter what kind of project or franchise it is, the only certainty is that there won’t be anything else quite like it.
He’s basically Toei’s Maverick, a man who is not afraid to break the rules if he thinks it will make for something entertaining, and in a genre that is all but defined by its reliance on formulas, that says a lot. Sure, him being involved in a production is always a coin toss, but in spite of that, or maybe because of that, Kamen Rider became the bestselling plastic-belt juggernaut that it is today under his tenure.
What I am trying to say here is, Shinichiro Shirakura rules.
When other Producers double down on their creative vision for a show, even as sales and ratings decline, Shirakura is not afraid to drop whatever idea he’s been working on and come up with something new, even if the end result is a complete disaster. The man has no integrity as a Producer, and he wields that fact like a goddamn weapon.
Shirakura is the kind of man who is not afraid to take risks even when there’s no guarantee they will pay off, and when they don’t, he moves on and tries something else. Most of his productions are messy, incoherent and even infuriating, but no one can deny his work is NEVER boring, and in a lot of ways, Kamen Rider Zi-O is the Ultimate Shirakura Experience.
Any other producer would have taken this project seriously and make an actual, epic crossover, but Shirakura? He made a show that is essentially a vainly disguise in-joke; Zi-O has all the failing a Kamen Rider series could possibly have, and I would never dare to call it good, but it absolutely loves being a show ABOUT Kamen Rider and it’s the most fun I’ve had with the franchise in YEARS.
It is hard to imagine anyone but him making a show like Zi-O. Sure, his approach is unorthodox, many of his decisions are questionable, and I think that in some level he only keeps making Toku to see what he can get away with, but for better or for worse, no one in this world knows how to make a goddamn Kamen Rider show better than Shinichiro Shirakura.
Hell, at this point he might as well be a Kamen Rider himself.
Fanboyism Extraordinaire 
Whelp nice insight as always. I guess it does make me appreciate Zi-O a bit more, I feel like this show frustrate me more than even Ghost, which I didn’t think was possible. Mainly because, it give me hope by bring back Blade….then mess up the perfect ending lol.
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