Saturday, December 6, 2008

Kamen Rider Dragon Knight

Just watched a long trailer of Kamen Rider Dragon Knight, the english bastardization knock-off of Kamen Rider Ryuuki. Wow, what a brainless trailer with many characters spoiled already, including Survive forms. Even funnier, a show pretending to be "Kamen Rider" where none of the actors can even pronounce "Kamen Rider" properly. Yup, that's right, for whatever reason (maybe they are trying to pretend to be cool by using some Japanese words that they cannot even pronounce?) they are using the words "Kamen Rider" to transform. I guess it's easier to say than "henshin"? But it's laughable watching a bunch of caucasians yelling "Common Rider." To their credit, at least they pronounce "Rider" correctly, unlike "Raidaa" in Japanese. The episodes themselves are already spoiled as the synopsis of the first 14 episodes are already available in wikipedia. Flashy new CGI effects won't cover the fact that this is a Ryuuki knock-off. Do you think they are brave enough to kill the main protagonist like in the original?

Typical lack of creativity of western entertainment. So in addition of bastardizing Super Sentai series yearly, they are bastardizing a Japanese show from 6 years ago. Maybe they're hoping that people forgot about Kamen Rider Ryuuki already so they can show their copy-n-paste knock-off. I suggest people to forget this and watch the original Kamen Rider Ryuuki, currently being fansubbed by TV-Nihon.

I'm still fabled. Western writers and entertainment industry are still capable of great CGI effects and original good writings, albeit pretty scarce lately. Yet they still fall into the same pattern of looking at other countries' old ideas, license it so nobody else can distribute the original content, and bastardize it to no end and pretend theirs to be the "original." I look into this as another attempt at censorship in the pretense of licensing. I was quite excited when Kamen Rider The First movie managed to be released officially in the US on DVD. With Dragon Knight, the chance of the Japanese Kamen Rider series to be released officially in the US becomes a big fat zero, just like Super Sentai.

Oh well, VIVA FANSUB! :P

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Yes, I saw this trailer, and was totally disappointed. It obviously looked like it was going to be some mediocre love story. They didn't even make the main character Japanese, which would have made the most sense to me. You know, at least in homage to the original. I loved Kamen Rider Ryuuki, it's my favorite yet of the Kamen Rider series. And to say "kamen Rider" instead of "Henshin" is freaking rediculous!!!!!!そんなバカな!