Kamen Rider ZO review.

 ZO was quite an ambitious project when it was proposed. Following the success of Shin Kamen Rider (and yes, contrary to the still widely held belief that Shin Kamen Rider was a failure, the film did insanely well on home video and was well received) there were talks of a sequel to Shin which would have incorporated the previous 11 riders, but that fell through and it was decided a new original Rider would be created.

Toei Video president Yoshinori Watanabe, and Bandai Visual president Makoto Yamashina, met with the intention of a joint operation. Bandai would assist with multiple campaigns to promote the movie and merchandise, while Toei focused on the production in-house. The initial vision was to release a 90-minute feature film during Golden Week in Japan, as Toei had great success doing that in ‘91. But after some shaky performance by other Toei Productions in ‘92- likely due to the bubble bursting that same year- it was decided that a shorter direct to video method would be safer than a box office release.

Early story ideas for ZO ranged from the outlandish to the more traditional. Ishinomori wrote a short synopsis where ZO was an extraterrestrial in origin, and this even got as far as concept designs for a spacecraft by Katsushi Murakami. But this was shot down for budgetary and scheduling reasons.

Keita Amemiya’s take was more familiar and even went as far as incorporating Hongo undergoing a new operation that would become ZO. Amemiya wanted to create a Rider for the Heisei era and in doing so literally recreate the original. This was also dropped, but the finished product more closely resembles this concept with a Rider that goes back to the basic premise of being modified. It's funny how that original idea was sort of incorporated for the Rider 1 movie, though.

With a 90 minute runtime out of the question, it was decided the best manner of premiering the film would be at a festival. This led to the creation of the Toei Super Hero festival in which three short films would be shown. ZO would be joined by extended “film” cuts of Janperson and Dairanger episodes.


But that’s enough backstory, let’s get into this properly.

Mechanical Violator Hakaider: Hyper Destroyer Edition. (Blu-Ray)

 

Well now, this is quite the odd beast. I’ve reviewed Super Sentai, Ultraman, Kamen Rider, anime, and cartoons. But not really anything like this. Hakaider was a one shot film directed by Keita Amemiya and written by Toshiki Inoue for Toei's '95 Superhero fair, where it was shown alongside the movies for Ohranger and B-fighter. What a strange but fun time that must've been.

The film isn't connected narratively to Kikaider and is more of a reboot or original story that simply uses a character from the series, with the assumption that you already know the basic premise of Kikaider. Although outside of Hakider being an android antagonist, there isn’t much one needs to know going in.


Hakaider was notable on several fronts, the most prominent of which was gaining something of a cult status overseas when it was released in dub form on VHS in 2000 by Tokyo Shock. That version along with the DVD counterpart has long since been out of print and is ridiculously expensive. Thankfully MediaBlasters (which owns Tokyo Shock) managed to get a new transfer and release back in March of this year, which is what I’ll be taking a look at today.