WELCOME POST - Introduction to Tokusatsu

What is Tokusatsu?

Technically speaking, tokusatsu is a broad term for Japanese live-action media with a lot of practical effects. As used in western fandom, it tends to refer to the tradition of both superhero and giant monster fiction characterized by people in various suits for the action. While it's all action media, the term more encompasses a genre of filmmaking and a style than anything else. Popular tokusatsu franchises include Godzilla, Power Rangers, Super Sentai, Kamen Rider, Ultraman, but there are dozens of other shows and movies out there, many of which are exceptional in their own right.

When you see people talking about eras of tokusatsu, you'll commonly see it broken down by Showa (beginning of the genre to 1989), Heisei (1989 to 2019), and Reiwa (2019+). These refer to Japanese Era names used to split up various franchise periods. This is of... varying usefulness by franchise, but it caught on for some reason so you'll see it ubiquitously. TBH, it's more of a shorthand used out of convienience than actual truth. (The last few "Showa" Kamen Rider projects were made in the actual Heisei era, but are lumped in with the earlier productions by people, for instance.)

Franchise Breakdowns

At this point, we're in an age where basically everything from the major franchises has been translated into English, but not all of it has been licensed. Here's some info on where to watch each of the franchises in question if you're interested. I'll hopefully come back and do more detailed season by season breakdowns later.

Godzilla

The classic king of the monsters himself. :) Probably needs the least introduction of anyone here, but y'know, decades of movies about the big G and his rampages through cities and occasional forays into helping humans. The series has multiple sub-continuities, so that may be something you want to look out for.

Most of the Godzilla movies (other than King Kong vs. Godzilla, Godzilla vs. Biollante, and Godzilla vs. Mothra (1992)) are currently available for streaming on various services. A lot of the classic Showa era series are availabe on Criterion Channel and HBO MAX, but after the ones from 1975, they're pretty much available on Amazon, Vudu, YouTube, iTubes, and Google Play. Physical media releases are also available as well.

The original Godzilla (1954) is a solid introductory watch that holds up pretty well in terms of serious drama along with the more recent Shin Godzilla if you want an entry point... but there's a lot of fun stuff in the middle, too. (I have a weird inexplicable amount of affection for the 1974 Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla movie.)

Kamen Rider

Fifty years plus of bugmen on motorcycles. :P

Okay, the bug part of the design got less prominent after the early 00s. And the motorcycles are less prominent anymore due to safety laws not letting them drive customized motorcycles on public roads. But they do still technically have them.

Kamen Rider is kind of my passion - it's been running since 1971, albeit with large gaps in the 80s and basically the entire 90's, and constantly since 2000, with a new 45-50 episodes show each year. On top of which there's usually 3-4 movies per year. All of which largely have completely different casts, disconnected plots, and can vary wildly in tone and setting. (They all take place in the same setting. Except when they don't. Don't worry about it too much.) Generally speaking, Rider series tend to be about a hero (a Kamen Rider) who can transform into a monstrous powered form taking on a (varyingly secret) evil organization bent on world domination (in the 70s, they fought a lot of straight-up Nazis)... except when it's extremely not and you get a year of a cop drama (Kuuga), musical slice of life hangout with emergency responders to giant monster incidents (Hibiki), or the one show where the villain is a fake Japanese Liberal Democratic Party (Black Sun). And that all the more recent shows since Agito (2001) have at least one more hero as an ally or rival... but sometimes there's like almost a dozen of them, half of them are villains, and they're all running around shifting alliances in the best kind of absurd melodrama.

I love absurd melodrama. 00s Rider is great.

Rider is probably the least well licensed of the major franchises, but Shout Factory has licensed the original Kamen Rider (1971), Kuuga, Ryuki, and Zero-One and has them all available for free streaming on Tubi. They've also released those on Blu-ray, albeit with some video quality issues on the Zero-One BDs. Amazon Prime has the adult-targeted miniseries Kamen Rider Black Sun, which is aimed at an older demographic and is a remake of the show Kamen Rider Black but with some wild digressions into hating on shitty conservative politicians. Discotek Media released the fun 1989 show Kamen Rider Black on Blu-ray recently and the set is fantastic, but it's not up for streaming. (Discotek has also licensed Kamen Rider Black RX, the sequel, and has the Blu-ray up for pre-order.)

Rider has been attempted to be adapted for western release twice, with Saban's Masked Rider and Kamen Rider Dragon Knight. Saban's Masked Rider, an adaptation of Kamen Rider Black RX Power Rangers-style, was a spinoff of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers that lasted one season and... is not well-regarded due to sloppy editing and being way too focused on unfunny comedic relief. (I like an episode or two, but...) You can't get it legally on anything but a single European DVD of the first four episodes, so if you want to watch it, you'll need to hunt it down elsewhere. Likewise, Kamen Rider Dragon Knight, an adaptation Power Rangers-style of Kamen Rider Ryuki isn't available on DVD anywhere but ironically enough Japan, and isn't streaming anywhere. It's a shame, the show has no budget and was shot on an absurdly limited filming schedule, but it tries so hard, the new stunt action is really good, and it pulls some fun plot twists unique to itself while navigating the messiness of Ryuki being a show with 13 different Rider suits they had to work into it.

The lead actor of Dragon Knight, Stephen Ford, fully endorses pirating Dragon Knight. That show is in absurd legal limbo, from what I understand.

Super Sentai and Power Rangers

Super Sentai is a long, long-running series of shows by Toei about teams of heroes joining up to fight monsters, usually followed in almost all cases by fighting a larger version of the monster with a giant robot. Formulaic, but the formula is a good one and the shows can get really creative and fun with it. And by long-running, I mean it has been running since 1975 without missing a year. Dang. Tends to skew younger in terms of demographics compared to the other TV franchises... but these are all kids shows, so the difference is less than you'd think. Like with Rider, the show reinvents itself each year with a new cast and plot, but vaguely takes place in the same setting as the previous shows. A lot of the 90's and a few 80s and 00s Sentai series have been licensed by ShoutFactory for both sale on DVD and streaming for free on Tubi. Fair warning before grabbing the last few DVDs, Shout Factory has... issues... with video mastering and they've botched the deinterlacing for the odd release. (They've also had issues with subcontractors for translations liberally "borrowing" or just outright taking fansubs without credit.)

If you want a good recent jumping-on point, last year's Avataro Sentai Donbrothers was highly praised if... oddball for its character writing and unconventional approach. It's also a show where none of the teammembers start out having any idea who the heck each other is as they're randomly dropped into fights while wearing John Carpenter's They Live glasses. It's weird, but I love it.

Power Rangers is the adaptation of Super Sentai suits and fight footage into an American TV show with a different cast of characters, different plots, and all the footage outside the suit action being new. Some of it's pretty good, but it can sometimes veer too much into just being a lower effort version of the same plot as the Sentai show. Or it goes to the other extreme, and you end up with Power Rangers RPM which took the show about teaming up with robot vehicle buddies to fight alien polution robots across the multiverse and instead used the footage to make a show about the last remaining human city after the robot apocalypse. RPM is weird. Good weird, but weird. Power Rangers has been passed around between Saban, Disney, Saban Brands, and now to Hasbro as a property, and they all put their own spin on how they make it. I'm not really caught up on the current series. A lot of it is available on Netflix for streaming at the moment, including the original Mighty Morphing.

Ultraman

I'm... less familiar with Ultraman than I am other franchises, to be honest (if someone wants to contribute a description, I'd gladly take it), but a huge amount of it is available for free streaming on Tubi. There's also Blu-rays available from Mill Creek.

Current Shows

Kamen Rider Geats

The current Kamen Rider series, airing from 2022-2023, about people fighting in a gamefied competition to save the world from mysterious monsters, with whoever scores the most points along the way being granted a single reality-reshaping wish. Yes, it's one of those series. :P (Given Rider's inherent history with this concept with the foundational Kamen Rider Ryuki, it's amusing they did it again.) Geats is a show with about a half-dozen main Riders, from confident and experienced protagonist Ukyo Ace, to a jerk with a grudge against all other Riders who wants to destroy the entire mess (Michinaga, personal fav), a YouTube influencer who wants away from her shitty parents in an understandable way (wish seems kinda overkill), and the mandatory nice guy who wants everyone to be friends. There's always one of the last ones, I guess.

Geats is pretty fun and worth checking out, although it wouldn't be my suggestion for a first Rider series. The fandom as a whole seems to really like it. It's got a fun cast of characters, but the main plot can be less interesting than seeing what's going on with your favorites and generally more invested in Ace than the rest of the cast. Which means depending on how much you like Ace... shrug

I'm enjoying it, but it's a show I consider a fun mess where I'm enjoying the chaos and bemused by rather than deeply invested in the plot. Your mileage may vary, though.

Geats is currently being subbed by three groups (I've been watching EXCITE!):

• Anon, an older fansub group with a very 00's fansub feel, for better and worse. Releases a lot of extras the other groups tend not to touch, if nothing else. (Seriously, I found a DVD extra from them I grabbed when looking them up for this.) Posts directly to the cat site (nyaa).
• EXCITE! Subs, who takes longer to release (usually comes out in the back half of the week). Their stuff tends to go torwards a more adapted approach.
• IzuSubs, who releases very quickly, so if you're jonesing for the next episode, they're your choice. They tend to be a bit more literal, but are still good.

Ohsama Sentai King-Ohger

The current (2023-2024) Sentai series. I haven't been watching this one, but people I hang out with seem to like it.

Currently being subbed by:

• Anon, a fansub group with a very 00's fansub feel, for better and worse. Releases a lot of extras the other groups tend not to touch, if nothing else. Posts directly to the cat site (nyaa).
• Chou Eiyuu Subs, a newer group. I don't have any experience with them.
• Over-Time, a very established fansub group that's been around since the early 10's and is considered pretty much the gold standard for Tokusatsu fansubs. Doesn't tend to get all the movies and side material, so you may need to branch out for those. Posts directly to the cat site (nyaa).

Fansubs

Western tokusatsu fandom loves its fansub drama. It's died down in recent years, but oof. Generally speaking, you had a lot of fights between the people who loved the fansubs with flashy fonts, karaoke opening texts, and a tendency towards "literal" translation, and newer groups that adapted stuff to flow better in English and were more low-key in their presentation. (My heart goes out to the groups that tried to be flashy and have nicer translations, but none of those stuck around.)

If you see references to a group called "TV-Nihon", they're a particularly infamous fansub group who were the epitomy of the "flashy literal translation" type who had some rather ardent defenders (and it predates my time, but their first head was apparently rather abrasive). TV-Nihon was also notorious for... dubious translations, infamously translating a line that should have been "Ladies and Gentlemen, madam and monsieur!" as "Ladies and Gentlemen, banana new shoe!", among many, many other issues in their early days. They got better, but were never the best. I still respect them for being the first major toku fansub group; I got into toku through TV-Nihon releases of a bunch of shows, the friend of mine who got me into toku got into it through TV-Nihon releases, and for years they subbed basically everything under the sun. There's still shows we only have TV-Nihon subs for because they subbed so much and from everything from the major franchises to semi-obscure one-offs from companies, but most of it has been either resubbed or transferred onto better video by other groups due to the age of the video files in question.

When you see references to the "cat site" as where stuff is posted, this is referring to torrent tracker Nyaa. After an incident where multiple major fansub groups doing the current series got takedown notices from Toei to their websites, multiple groups got paranoid and discontinued their social media presence and just posted torrents directly there. Over-Time moved there, TV-Nihon deleted all their Toei tokusatsu catalogues and stopped releasing, and we got new fansubs just marked Anon on there from some people. Pretty much everything toku fansub either appears on Nyaa or Anidex to be honest.

"Scrubbing" is a tokusatsu fandom term for taking an existing translation and moving it to better footage or retranslating parts of it. This is especially prevalent in the toku fandom due to a lot of 00's-era fansubs being on poor VHS quality footage, but there aren't enough translators going around to do entirely new footage, so... Then the term moved onto DVD -> HD transfers or streaming -> BD transfers. Generally speaking, the fansub groups don't tend to handle taking the fansubs they produce and redoing them for Blu-Ray footage once the Blu-Rays are out, instead other groups handle that. The big name in that space used to be OZC-Live but he hasn't been active in years. It's now a lot of smaller groups handling that.

When evaluating releases, keep in mind that not all shows should be released in 1080p; a lot of 00's and 90's content tops out at 480p due to being mastered for SD television digitally on tape, a lot of late 00's and early 10's content was mastered at 720p, and a lot of stuff shot on film from the 80's and earlier is released at 720p due to the film being so poor quality stock 1080p doesn't actually help it any (Toei is notorious for this). Even if it's a Blu-Ray release, the group may have downscaled the video back down to its native resolution to save everyone time, bandwidth, and disk space.

For the longest time, the best way to keep track of new fansub releases was the (WARNING: twitter link) TokuSubReleases twitter account, which is still around but well... Twitter. I'm hoping a successor pops up somewhere else that's less hellsite.

Who's that guy with the guitar in the group logo?

That's Hayakawa Ken, the Magnificent Zubat, from the 1977 Toei show Kaiketsu Zubat! A cowboy/private eye detective wandering Japan playing his guitar seeking revenge for the death of his best friend by fighting with every single criminal organization he comes across to find the man who killed his best friend by process of elimination, apparently. With his gear, a prototype powered spacesuit developed by his best friend that will explode if he wears it for more than five minutes at a time, and a flying car. Also, every episode involves him fighting a henchman who declares himself the best in Japan at something...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vs5-8SMFPZQ

Only to find out that he is in fact, only the second best, because Hayakawa Ken is the best at everything.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_jUqL24DSU

Look, Zubat is the greatest show ever made, it's just pure cheesy joy from start to finish with an insanely charismatic lead.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LPr8T_J4FQ

Check it out here.