Still More 00s Movies 2: 2002 - 2004

I'll be adding to this as I go along.  As with all the other "Still More..." entries I'll be listing these films from "best" to "worst."

1. We Were Soldiers (2002)

Say what you like about Mel Gibson, he knows his way around a war movie.  This particular war movie follows the U.S. Army into scenic Vietnam, where predictable tragedies occur.

This movie's no Full Metal Jacket or anything, but I think it does a nice job of balancing the soldiers' lives against what their wives were going through at home.  The Viet Minh forces, for that matter, are also shown in a more sympathetic light.

The director, Randall Wallace, also wrote Braveheart and frequently collaborates with Gibson.  At the time of writing he's trying to crack a sequel to The Passion of the Christ, and if that sequel's as bonkers as I hope it will be I'm sure I'll love it.

Fun Fact: Clark Gregg is in this.  It was years before he appeared in Iron Man.

2. Hulk (2003)

It's one of the clunkiest comic book movies ever made, but keep in mind that back in 2003 there weren't a lot of other examples to draw from.  Sam Raimi's Spider-Man had come out, but up to that point the other big comic book movies consisted of 1989's Batman, its sequels and the Superman movies.

Ang Lee and his scriptwriters were cutting from whole cloth, and this production had a very troubled history to boot.  The dialogue is on par with the creature features of a much earlier decade, some of Hulk's backstory is butchered, and much of the plot relies upon Thaddeus "Thunderbolt" Ross making inexplicable decisions.

There's also that "drama class" scene near the end, which is both ridiculous and completely out of left field.  "Oh yeah, never mind the fighting we were doing just minutes ago.  Let's give Bruce a moment alone with his father!"

With all of that said I still think that Hulk is an inventive movie with some redeeming features.  Eric Bana might not have done as much with the character as Ed Norton, but he's a solid lead and the cast is definitely stacked.  Jennifer Connelly and Sam Eliot also deserved awards for mouthing some of those lines with straight faces.

I can remember seeing this one in the theater.  My verdict back then?  I gave it a passing grade.  My verdict now?  It's still worth seeing.  It might be a failure in some respects, but it's an interesting failure nonetheless.

Fun Fact 1: Sam Eliot appeared in this the year after We Were Soldiers (above).  In both movies he plays an Army Ranger.

Fun Fact 2: A sequel incorporating Grey Hulk, the Abomination and the Leader was planned and quickly shelved when Universal failed to meet its 2004 deadline to start filming.

3. Anger Management (2003)

I've started and stopped this film so many times.  I finally watched it straight through recently.  It's not bad.  Jack Nicholson's character is interesting, and Adam Sandler holds his own as the straight man.  It's not hilarious or anything, but as comedies go it's miles better than some other examples of the genre listed below.

4. I Spy (2002)

Owen Wilson and Eddie Murphy star in this largely unfunny adaptation of the 60s TV show.  To give Murphy some (possibly undeserved) credit, he actually is funny in this movie, but in terms of plot and character development it goes absolutely nowhere fast.

Fun Fact 1: The 60s show featured Robert Culp and Bill Cosby.  Knowing what we now know about Cosby, I kinda hope they take another pass at the concept.

Fun Fact 2: Famke Janssen appeared in this between X-Men and X2: X-Men United.

5. Big Trouble (2002)

Dave Barry - remember him?  In case you don't he was a noted humorist at the time, his syndicated column appearing in newspapers all over the States.  Come to think of it, newspapers - remember those?

Tim Allen, an actor I've always found annoying, stars in this big screen adaptation of one of Barry's novels.  It's all very Pulp Fiction-y, right down to a mysterious case that various characters lug around.  Heavy D's and Omar Epps' scenes are amusing, but the rest of this film is a real drag.

It was, like I Spy above, a massive bomb.  Tim Allen would live to fight another day, but I doubt many studios were banking on him after this point.

A Red Flag: Check the runtime: 1 hour and 17 minutes.  With the possible exception of lower-budget horror, any feature film shorter than 1 hour and 30 minutes made after the 70s is probably bad.

6. A Walk to Remember (2002)

Insipid teen romance involving a small town, peer pressure, angsty, angsty late 90s and early 00s Alternative music, and THE LORD.  It was adapted from a Nicholas Sparks novel, so if you've seen The Notebook you'll know where you stand with this one.

This movie, unlike some others discussed here, was a financial success.  It made over $47 million against a $11 million budget.

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"Shakespeare: The World as Stage" by Bill Bryson (2007)

"...and all other London playhouses, with the exception of the Globe, relied on other entertainments, particularly animal baiting, to fortify their earnings.  The pastime was not unique to England, but it was regarded as an English specialty.  Queen Elizabeth often had visitors from abroad entertained with bearbaiting at Whitehall.  In its classic form, a bear was put in a ring, sometimes tethered to a stake, and set upon by mastiffs, but bears were expensive investments, so other animals (such as bulls and horses) were commonly substituted.  One variation was to put a chimpanzee on the back of a horse and let the dogs go for both together.  The sight of a screeching ape clinging for dear life to a bucking horse while dogs leaped at it from below was considered about as rich an amusement as public life could offer."

Bill Bryson's One Summer and The Body were also reviewed here a while ago.  He's good for a quote or two, though I can't think of anything he's written that's really stuck in my memory.  He definitely has a way with words, but in the realm of ideas the books of his I've read seem to fall short.  Maybe he's said more meaningful things in other parts of his extensive bibliography?

Whatever the case, this slim volume introduces what we know and don't know about Shakespeare.  As it turns out we don't know much, but nevertheless what we don't know is enough to take up 196 pages.  This approach to Shakespeare's life is something of a cop-out, but it's consistently engaging and never overstays its welcome.

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Super Sentai in the 70s

The Super Sentai series is the last of the big 70s tokusatsu shows I'll be discussing here.  I'll work my way back through the Ultraman and Spider-Man episodes I haven't yet seen in the near future, but it seems unlikely that I'll revisit Super Sentai or Kamen Rider anytime soon.

To recap some of what has come before, tokusatsu was (is) a specific genre of effects-heavy show which aired on Japanese television.  This genre owes some of its stylistic leanings to the ancient Japanese art of Kabuki.  There are examples of the genre from the very beginnings of Japanese film to the present day.

In the popular imagination the first tokusatsu show was Godzilla in the 1950s.  The Godzilla series, influenced by the Western King Kong, featured giant monsters doing battle, a science-based team of "experts" tasked with protecting Japan from these monsters, and other motifs that will be familiar to anyone who's seen giant monster movies.

Godzilla was followed by Ultraman in the 60s, a show in which a giant alien does battle with a "monster of the week."  After a brief lull in the genre, Ultraman was followed by Kamen Rider in the 70s.  Kamen Rider introduced the transformations, cybernetic humans and other tropes often associated with tokusatsu today.

Super Sentai, released in 1975, also helped formulate the genre.  In Super Sentai we see a large cast of unlikely heroes, these opposing shadowy groups bent on world domination.  Super Sentai, created by the same man who created Kamen Rider and often shown alongside that earlier program, ups the ante on Kamen Rider, giving us an entire team of costumed superheroes instead of just one.

Super Sentai would, two decades later, give rise to the American show Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, a distinctly Western take on the genre which intercut footage of American actors and actresses with footage from the original Japanese TV shows.

Anyway, on to the show itself!

Gorenger Episodes 1 and 2

This is the original series, also known as Himitsu Sentai Gorenger.  The plot of both episodes is extremely minimal, involving four individuals (a kind of Mod Squad, if you will) recruited by a secretive military guy who gives them battle suits.

The funniest part of both episodes is the weird soccer thing they do at the end.  The pink one makes an explosive ball, they kick it back and forth, and then the red one jumps and kicks it into the bad guy, thus rocking him like a hurricane.  Neither of the two bad guys who conclude the first two episodes are especially smart, and the assorted henchmen who attack our heroes seem to do so entirely at random.

J.A.K.Q. Episodes 1 and 2

Check the company logo on the playing cards.  Yep, Nintendo!  In the 70s that's what they were better known for.

As an occasional player of poker it bothers me that the best hand we can muster with this team (assuming that their leader Joker is "wild") is a straight.  They're all wearing suits, after all - why not make them wear the same suit?  Royal flush to the ace - that would feel much better.

Besides, Texas hold 'em is a better game anyway.  Change Joker's name to "Ten," make them all clubs (seems appropriate, given how much they fight), and then you'd have a nice royal flush to the ace.  Five cards and five cyborgs suited up nicely.

The bad guys in this series are named Crime with a capital "C."  It gets a little confusing sometimes, but yes, that's both their name and what they do.  They spread crime so that they can call themselves Crime.  Seems like the name might make it hard to keep a lower profile, but whatever.

The more ridiculous parts of this show are their helmets, which they'd have quite a bit of difficulty seeing through.  There's also the "Covack" finishing move, which combines "atomic, electric, gravitational and magnetic forces" in one go.  Our four heroes don't have a giant robo - at least not in the first two episodes - but rather a flying plane which looks decidedly uncool and less than aerodynamic.

All of the above said, the girl in the hot pants is kinda hot, even if she can't, in my humble opinion, hold a candle to Spider-Man's "Amazoness."  I think what really does it for me with Amazoness is the scowling.

Battle Fever J Episodes 1 and 2

This is the Super Sentai series which would close out the 70s.  It ran in 1979.

Weirdly enough, like Spider-Man this show was also a co-production between Toei and Marvel.  It was supposed to feature Captain America (!), but that idea fell apart somewhere along the way.

Instead of Captain America we get Miss America, an American-born espionage agent who does battle in a revealing leotard.  At some point in the tokusatsu shows producers got wise to the fact that having a sexier member of the team was more attractive to young boys, and given the popularity of shows like Sailor Moon this might have been a selling point for young Japanese girls as well.

Battle Fever J pits our cybernetic heroes against Egos, an organization that wants to get rid of "bad technology" in favor of their own "good technology" which predates modern civilization.  If you ask me the whole thing sounds a lot like a metaphor for Scientology, but even if it's there such a metaphor would have been lost on a Japanese-speaking audience - at least in the late 70s.

The bonkers part of Battle Fever J is that each of the cyborgs have dance moves representing their geographical region.  Oh, and they also (somehow) jump into the sky and make letters with their bodies before launching their final attack.

Gotta love how the team puts together seemingly random facts to uncover a sinister plot in the second episode.  Some guy in a car accident?  A girl's suicide?  A man who gets a promotion at work?  Way to connect the dots, Battle Fever!

This team, by the way, does get its own giant robo.  It doesn't get used in the first two episodes, but there are scenes of it under construction.

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Kamen Rider 1 (1971- 1979)

Thoughts on 1966-1967's Ultraman TV Show 1

Still More 00s Movies 1: 2000-2002

NOTE: It's not that I wouldn't enjoy more Super Sentai and Kamen Rider.  It's just that Toei keeps a tight grip on those shows, and what I've discussed here was all that I could find on YouTube.

(Japanese) Spider-Man (1978-1979) 1

You'd think that the American Amazing Spider-Man TV show would be some kind of influence on this show, but no, this doesn't seem to be the case.  American comic book culture had enough purchase in Japan to make the licensing of the character in Japan possible, but after those responsible for the Japanese TV version acquired the character they pretty much ran with the idea, retaining only the costume and character's powers.

The biggest influences on the Japanese TV show were, rather, the tokusatsu shows that preceded it.  Given Spider-Man's buglike nature Kamen Rider was an obvious influence, but the creators really threw everything they had into the show, giving us a kaleidoscopic vision of Spider-Man complete with transforming robots, aliens, monsters, and characters who feel the need to announce their superpowers with special words.

This show ran for 41 episodes.  I'll be reviewing 14 this outing, and the remaining 27 might get reviewed in future entries.

Episode 1

Spider-Man does NOT live in New York!  Spider-Man is NOT bitten by a radioactive spider!  Spider-Man is NOT a high school student!

Instead he is, like Kamen Rider before him, another "70s motorcycle dude."  This particular 70s motorcycle dude, Takuya Hamashiro by name, finds an alien who's been imprisoned in a cave for 400 years with a whole lot of spiders, and this alien, a refugee from planet Spider, gives our hero spider extract which, of course, gives him spider powers.

Then some of the bad aliens show up and sh*t goes DOWN.  Suddenly Spider-Man has a weird bracelet thing, and he uses this bracelet to summon Marveller, his flying ship, or his sweet, sweet spider car.

There's also some kind of revenge subplot in there, but I can't quite remember what happened.  Wikipedia says his father was killed by the bad aliens, but I must have blinked and missed it.

Episode 2

Professor Monster's henchwoman is kinda hot.  I'm not that evil or anything, but I wouldn't mind serving underneath her.

Hitomi, while we're talking about the women of Spider-Man, is kinda dumb.  It's like dude, your boyfriend was here just a second ago, how are you not aware that he's Spider-manning on the side?  Aren't you supposed to be a reporter or something?

This one goes into more of Spider-Man's backstory, detailing the exploits of the guy who gave Spider-man his powers.  It is a timeworn tale of murder, attempted revenge, and unexpected cave diving.  Not that they never bother to explain WHY our hero was chosen to receive the spider extract, despite the fact that space guy was in the cave waiting to find someone for 400 years.

Episode 3

Spider-man's super car, the GP7, can also fly.  This comes in handy when the Marveller is circling overhead.  If the monster is too much for the GP7 he can switch to the Marveller mid-air.  Then?  OF COURSE it's Leopardon time!

In this one the baddies create a fake Spider-man to ruin Spider-man's reputation and draw him out of hiding.  Aside from that there's A LOT of flipping.

Episode 4

Spider-man finally meets Professor Monster!  Prof Monster gets the bright idea to write a computer program which will determine Spider-man's fate (or something), the outcome of this program being a death match with Mer-Man.

Hitomi, girl, you can probably do better than your present boyfriend.  He's not emotionally supportive and he's got a secret life you know nothing about.

Episode 5

A young boy witnesses the Iron Cross Army up to no good, and after they hit him with a truck (!) Spider-man decides to donate blood to help the kid recover.

Surprisingly the kid DOESN'T develop spider powers by the end of the episode.  I feel like the writers really dropped the ball on that one.

The robot vs. kaiju battles at the end are fast becoming the weak points of every episode.  Spider-Man struggles for a bit, he calls forth Marveller, he changes Marveller into Leopardon, and Leopardon does the same three moves before dispatching his foe with Sword Vigor.  Was all this done for the sake of merchandising?  Or just to save film?

Episode 6

This is one of the more boring ones.  Professor Monster's sexy henchwoman spends a lot of time in the forest chasing people.

Episode 7

If I ever buy one of the toys its' going to be Spider-Man's car, the GP7.

If you're watching this show for the sake of sheer ridiculousness you might start with episode 1 and then skip to episode 7, because episode 7 is where things REALLY get silly.

In this one a rock band writes a hit song about Spider-Man, and Professor Monster gets the bright idea to replace the band with cyborgs who will sing/play the song at a frequency which drives Spider-Man crazy.  The resulting "Spiderman Boogie" is a song I will never, ever be able to get out of my head.

Episode 8

Probably my favorite episode thus far.  Professor Monster's henchmen dig up a cat demon from the Edo Period and turn it into a still more formidable cat demon monster.  Spider-Man later gets wise to the plot and uses magic to irritate it before thoroughly stomping it with Leopardon.

Gotta love Spider-Man holding beads and burning both a statue of a cat and a magic spell written on paper.  I'll take Buddhist/Shinto Spider-Man over all others!

Bonus points for actual cats, one of which Spider-Man saves from the cat demon monster.

Episode 9

Like episode 8 another favorite.  Matters take a turn for the weird after Professor Monster uses a beetle monster to spy on Spider-Man and his immediate family.  Somewhere along the line the beetle monster falls in love with Spider-Man's sister and even steals a dress for her from a local store.

Episode 10

A snake woman lures men to their deaths in a mountain house.  Turns out she knew Spider-Man's alter ego back in the day, and her conflicted loyalties spell the end of Professor Monster's nefarious plans - at least in this episode.

Thankfully by this point in the series they vary the penultimate robot-monster showdown a bit.  

Spider-Man (Supaidaman) The Movie

The abridged version?  The one on YouTube is the standard 23+ minutes.

There are some slightly upgraded special effects in the movie, and also the addition of an INTERPOL character who appears off and on in later episodes.  The INTERPOL stuff complicates the show in a good way.

Episode 11

For all its corniness this episode is weirdly affecting.  In this one Spider-Man gets poisoned and the boy from episode 5 shows up again to provide him with a much-needed blood transfusion.

Episode 12

A young woman becomes a "modified human" as both a way of getting her boyfriend back and becoming a top model.

Oddly enough no Leopardon in this episode.  Only Spider-Man swearing revenge for the hundredth time.  For someone set on revenge he sure does let Professor Monster and Amazoness slip through his fingers a lot.

Episode 13

"Machine Bem, Biker Monster!"

A biker is turned into a cyborg-chameleon hybrid (or something) and Takuya (a.k.a. Spider-Man) resolves some daddy issues.

Not sure why Professor Monster would want to tool around town in a tricked-out hearse but oh well.

Episode 14

Big Bat tries to divine Spider-Man's secret identity by making him look like a chump.  You can probably guess how it ends.

"Change!  Leopardon!"

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"Children of Memory" by Adrian Tchaikovsky (2023)

"They tell each other how great they were and will be, because a fake future's easier to face than the truth of more dead harvests."

Adrian Tchaikovsky's Shards of Earth was also reviewed here a while back.  The two books are surprisingly different.

In the distant future a crew of spacefarers visit a colony established on a distant world long before their civilization came to be.  This colony represents an earlier, more primitive strain of humanity, separated from our spacefarers by millennia of unrest, exploration and evolution.  After one of the crew descends to the surface of the planet, events quickly spiral out of their control, and as they race to uncover a still more ancient mystery they find themselves increasingly embroiled in both colonial politics and the planet's troubled ecology.

Children of Memory is a flawlessly written book.  I admire Tchaikovsky's way with words.  He paces the whole thing to perfection, holding back on certain details until just the right moments.  He's a masterful storyteller, and this is not the kind of praise I give out often.

This said, there are a lot of "smart dumb books" in the science fiction genre, and this might be yet another example.  It's hard to discuss the ending of this novel without giving too much away, but let's just say that the book's conclusion hinges upon an artifact left behind by an earlier, non-human civilization, and the way in which the spacefarers are able to manipulate this technology seems implausible.  This aspect of the novel reminded me a lot of the movie Independence Day, in which Earth scientists somehow manage to hack a massive alien spaceship with whatever version of Windows they were using at the time.

The more linguistic/existential parts of this novel are great, however.  I just wish that the twist at the end hadn't been so disappointing.  It's the kind of story that makes a great deal of emotional, if not logical sense.  The future technologies at play in the book are never discussed or explored in any detail, leaving the whole thing feeling somewhat hollow in parts.  Even so, from the vantage point of the little girl at the center of the story this novel is still satisfying, even in the presence of its technical shortcomings.

I'd give this one a slightly higher grade than Shards of Earth.  I have issues with both books, but Children of Memory is much more involving.

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Kamen Rider (1971- 1979)

I would have been all over this show when I was little.  Unfortunately I grew up in the States, and Kamen Rider wasn't really a thing over there.

After Ultraman's (temporary) fading from the public consciousness in the late 60s, Kamen Rider represented a newer kind of tokusatsu,  tokusatsu being a genre of effects-heavy TV shows dominating Japanese television at the time.

What you see below is a discussion of the earliest 12 episodes available on YouTube.  This show had a long run on Japanese TV, and the episodes below represent only a fraction of it.

Kamen Rider (1971-1973) : Episode 1

Takeshi Hongo, one of countless "70s motorcycle dudes" gets kidnapped by Shocker, a worldwide terrorist organization which changes him into a cyborg.

This show has a lot more kung fu fighting than Ultraman, which is also in keeping with the time.  The women in it are a lot more attractive than what you'll find in Ultraman as well.  Nothing against Akiko, who is definitely the cutest member of the Science Patrol, but she seems a lot more remote and hard to relate to than the women of Kamen Rider.

That said, Kamen Rider makes about as much sense as Ultraman - maybe even less so.  The various members of Shocker appear and disappear, reemphasizing a spider/insect theme, but very little is resolved in the first episode.  They don't even bother to explain why Kamen Rider and his motorcycle are able to transform.

Kamen Rider (1971-1973) : Episode 2

Kamen Rider battles the Bat-Man, a batlike creature that infects his victims with a virus for which only he has an antidote.

By this point the professor's daughter finally realizes that Hongo didn't kill her father.  Took her long enough!

One thing Kamen Rider had over the Ultraman show is that it had a manga to draw from.  This meant that story elements carried over into subsequent episodes, making the show a lot more engaging in terms of narrative structure.  Ultraman's predictable silliness is one of its strong points, but after a while it can seem repetitive.  There's slightly more story in Kamen Rider to hold the viewer's attention.

 Kamen Rider (1971-1973) : Episode 3

Continuing the bug theme established in episode one, this episode introduces the evil Scorpion Man, a guy who - freakily enough - is able to unleash an army of man-eating scorpions against his opponents.

Never mind that the "poison" sprayed from the tails of these scorpions melts its human prey instantly.  Man eating?  What's left to eat?

Kamen Rider V3 (1973-1974) : Episode 1

There's no second season on YouTube.  Instead we skip to the third season, which was Kamen Rider V3.

This season retains Hongo from season 1, with the addition of another rider who is, I assume, the star of season 2.  Hongo plays a mentor to the new rider, cyborging him up after yet another botched assassination attempt by the bad guys.

Shocker seems to have been dispatched by this point.  In V3 they're replaced by Destron, a rather Catholic organization also bent on world domination.

Zooka, the bazooka-wielding turtle, and Scissors, the pincer-wielding agents of Destron, outshine the season 1 foes in terms of sheer ridiculousness.  Scissors is also more coldblooded than previous foes, killing V3's entire family before his eyes.

Kamen Rider V3 (1973-1974) : Episode 2

Scissors is also a real d*ck.  He and his cronies are intent on blowing up Tokyo with a nuclear bomb, and to make matters more annoying he feels the need to yell "Scissors!" every time he appears.

V3 finally gets him in the end though, just before the riders from seasons 1 and 2 haul Zooka out into the ocean, where the nuclear bomb he was carrying detonates.  They swear they'll be back, but how?  Are they nuclear bomb-proof?

Kamen Rider X (1974) : Episode 1

Lower and lower budgets, but the weirdness seems to escalate and I'm loving it.  70s weirdness beats all other kinds of weirdness.

In Kamen Rider X we meet X Rider, yet another young man cyborged (or in this case "cyzorged") up by his father, some kind of biotechnology researcher.  His father - as one does - then uploads his consciousness into an undersea lair for his son's future use.

Kamen Rider X pursues a Greco-Roman theme.  X Rider's first opponent is Neptune, a sea-thing that spits deadly bubbles at our hero, and Neptune is followed by Panic, a rather limp-wristed enemy who wields a hypnotizing flute.

One obvious upgrade: this version of Kamen Rider can flip his entire bike, not just his body.  More flipping for your money!

Kamen Rider X (1974) : Episode 2

X Rider tries to figure out who his girlfriend really is while dealing with the whole flute thing.  I dunno man, it doesn't make a lot of sense.  By the end of this one his AI "dad" decides to blow himself up in order to teacher X Rider self-reliance (or something), and we learn that next episode's foe will be Hercules.

And oh yeah, the villainous organization in this season is GOD.  This makes for a lot of fun bits of dialogue in the English translation, phrases like "tomorrow we do battle with GOD in earnest" or "GOD must be defeated."  It's like a philosophical conversation at certain points, with Rider X convincing himself that he can either outmuscle or outsmart the deity.  Can he?  Stay tuned and find out in next week's episode!!

Kamen Rider Amazon (1974-1975) : Episode 1

I don't know what the writers of this season were smoking but I sure would like some.

This Kamen Rider's more like Tarzan.  He gets a blood transfusion (?) that gives him the ability to turn into a lizard (?).  After arriving in Japan (or maybe before that, in the Amazon) he has to contend with the Ten-Headed Demon, a villain who might remind you of the floating head from John Boorman's Zardoz.

Along the way Kamen Rider Amazon befriends a young boy and his two hot sisters.  The bad guys attack these new friends (of course), and the result is a thorough ass whooping administered by the new Kamen Rider.

Kamen Rider Amazon (1974-1975) : Episode 2

Kamen Rider Amazon fights Spider Beastman in episode 1, and in episode 2 he battles Vampire Bat Beastman, a loathsome character who feasts on human flesh.  Kamen Rider Amazon doesn't even kill this foe, instead allowing him to return to his base where the Ten-Headed Demon does the job himself.  A fitting reward for failure!

Kamen Rider Amazon is, I must say, my favorite Kamen Rider series/season by a mile.  It's weird, it makes almost no sense at all, and it's GREAT.  There were 24 episodes in this series, and providing I find them online later I'll be sure to watch the rest.

Kamen Rider Stronger (1975) : Episode 1

Our newest "electric human" is Kamen Rider Stronger, a badass dude with plenty of 70s attitude and bellbottoms to match.  This Kamen Rider comes equipped with a girl sidekick (or is it "sidechick?"), Electrowave Human Tackle, who comes dressed as a ladybug in a miniskirt.

Their enemies in this iteration are Black Satan, a criminal organization also - you guessed it - bent on world domination.

In episode 1 Black Satan tries to steal a hovercraft.  Why?  I have no idea!

Kamen Rider Stronger (1975) : Episode 2

Kamen Rider Stronger and Electowave Human Tackle stop Black Satan from commandeering a lighthouse.  And why did Black Satan want the lighthouse in the first place?  Again, I have no idea.

The villain in this one is a wolf thing that can turn itself into gas.  The wolf who smelled it, in other words, probably dealt it.   Oh, and in this episode we learn about Kamen Rider Stronger's origins, which make about as much sense as all the other Kamen Riders' origins.

Kamen Rider Skyrider (1979) : Episode 1

The Kamen Rider that can fly!  A bit strange how he can basically fly wherever he wants independent of both wind conditions or any source of propulsion... but whatever.

This version of Kamen Rider seems to have scaled back the weirdness a bit, which is either a plus or a minus depending on how weird you like your Kamen Riders.  The Mount Fuji of weirdness, if you will, is definitely Kamen Rider Amazon, and from Stronger onward things are (relatively) more beholden to the laws of physics and causation in general.

Shocker returns in this installment, by the way, rechristened Neo-Shocker after the humiliations suffered in prior seasons.

One has to wonder at these evil organizations bent on world domination.  They keep turning the exact wrong guys into cyborgs.  Maybe a more thorough interview process was in order?  Followed by a background check and psychological testing for evil?

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