Kamen Rider Fourze Episodes 1-4

Linkara: Hello, and welcome to Atop the Fourth Wall, where bad comics burn. Patreon-sponsored review time again and, of course, it's something people have been wanting me to look at...or rather, to become of a fan of, for a while now: a Kamen Rider series.

Linkara (vo): Kamen Rider, for those of you new to all this, is a long-running series of Japanese tokusatsu shows, very much in the same vein as Super Sentai, a.k.a. where they got all the footage for Power Rangers from. In this case, Kamen Rider is about a single - usually, anyway - superhero known for having an insect theme to their look and riding on a motorcycle. It actually predates Super Sentai by a few years, starting in 1971, but like Sentai, it's lasted since then with multiple different series, usually going for a single season before doing something different for the next.

Linkara: And while I really have no interest in Kamen Rider, as a reminder, get the Patreon up to a certain level, and maybe the handsome devil who does History of Power Rangers might put out some videos for certain Americanized tokusatsu like Kamen Rider: Dragon Knight, hint hint wink wink?

Linkara (vo): Speaking of, Kamen Rider has indeed had a handful of attempts to cross over in the same way Super Sentai and the Power Rangers did. Saban attempted to make Masked Rider in 1995 to...less than stellar results, not helped with their choice of adapting a series that was apparently quite dark and violent into something for much younger viewers. Slightly better off was the aforementioned Kamen Rider: Dragon Knight, which, while still cancelled before finishing its run, did win a Daytime Emmy, which is more Daytime Emmys than I've ever won for over 475 episodes of this show. I never watched it.

Linkara: But I did watch Masked Rider when I was a kid...and I then realized now, as an adult, that Furbies are just the offspring of (points to a picture of) this creature named Furbis!

Linkara (vo): The Patron has requested I take a look at the first four episodes of Kamen Rider Fourze (pronounced four-zuh). You may recall that last week, I pronounced it wrong as "four-zee". My mistake - I hadn't watched it yet for the pronunciation - but my confusion comes in when people justify the proper pronunciation by the fact that Fourze is meant to be a composite word of "four" and "zero", since Fourze is supposed to be the 40th anniversary Kamen Rider series, except shouldn't it be "four-zee" going by that logic? Different people told me it was either "four-zay" or "four-zuh", but people don't say "zay-ro" or "zuh-ro". I dunno, maybe zero is pronounced differently in Japan; just seems like a weird thing when trying to justify the correct pronunciation to me.

Linkara: I got nothing else to say, so let's dig into the first four episodes of Kamen Rider Fourze and see what it's got.