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Be Real

There are four "Real" influences that shaped the script and our story.  What were the motivations film?  Why were we entranced by this idea of a Tokusatsu Real Rider?

Here’s the first answer:

Rider’s Be Ambitious

Scene scouting for Rider Real Courtesy: Rider Real Team

I love film making, but projects always seemed to be stifled by negative nancies. “You Can’t”, “You Won’t”, “You Shouldn’t.” Rider Real was the project that will break the trend. Rider Real is the “can and will do” project we had been waiting for. 

More on the “Boys, be Ambitious” Reference Here!

My friends and I were always engaged in stories, comics, cartoons, books, and movies. While consuming these medias, like most other people out there, we would also develop our own ideas and narratives.  Some of these never materialized into anything, while some would spawn short stories, character designs and the like.  It felt as though we were collectively on the edge of doing a bigger project... We just needed something to push us over that edge.  Rider Real started with character design, then moved to story development and then its first physical manifestation; the helmet.

Rider Real Helmet Courtesy of Rider Real Team

With the helmet in my hand I found myself at the precipice where so many had often stood.  Should we jump head first into a HUGE creative endeavor? Or back away for fear of the enormity of the task? For fear of failure?

Helmet now adorning my head I plunged into the unknown of Tokusatsu production.  

William S. Clark made famous “Boys be Ambitious” Courtesy: Wikicommons

On top of all of that personal hoopla - people can always use a new hero! Right? 

Boy’s and Girls alike Riders of all shapes and sizes from all over the world be Ambitious!

And prosper!

Where it all began

In a small garage studio between one floor plantation style homes in Hawai'i, I was binging as a college student.  Not on beers and drugs, as the description may conjure, but on Tokusatsu and Anime like Kamen Rider and Fist of the North Star. I'd been watching the like since my childhood in NY.  Escaping from the suburbs, my brother and I would venture into a cavernous Chinatown basement in Manhattan. Walled with VHS tapes that could come collapsing down on us  at any moment, 5’ x 2’ booths offered a variety of goodies from overseas. With some risk of sounding...well.. not young... I'll say, this was before the age of streaming, and even downloading. This was when a 2 second clip of the poorest quality video would break your internet in half.  It was here that we would ask the vendor to unstack some of his enclosure, playing, a jenga like game, to get us the tapes of our choice.  The contents of the tapes were cartoons and other shows from China and Japan which simply did not exist in the US.

Why Tokusatsu?

Why go to such great lengths?  The series were like nothing we had seen before.  A breathe of fresh air with crisp animation, engaging stories and relatable characters. Most of their stories anchored on characters’ development over the course of a series. Starting off weak you’d follow characters’ growth towards prowess in various strengths; physical, mental, spiritual and (my favorite) moral.  The stories were subtle, yet powerful in their narratives and presentation.

The next stage in acquisition of these series was using the internet, not to watch, but to buy rare and bootlegged DVDs via China. This was a new frontier and helped expand my interest to Tokusatsu and Masked Rider.  With Mighty Morphing Power Rangers as the gateway to Tokusatsu in my youth, I was then left unsatiated by the kick of Saban's Masked Rider release in 1995 (note pun). After acquiring an Agito DVD in 2003 the floodgates opened and I haven't turned away from Tokusatsu since.

The tokusatsu series of this world would come to complement each other: Super Sentai, Kamen Rider, Zaborger,  the Chinese Inframan, the newer Demeking  - were all weirdly inspiring.  Approaching adulthood I found myself perplexed.  While most Americans were only just slowly coming around to accepting revamped superheroes tailored for adults in the mainstream, how is it that I  unabashedly continued watching these blatantly campy childish tokusatsu shows, tailored for preschool and elementary school kids, as an adult? The answer I found was simple.  They were pure. Seigi no Mikata. “正義の味方” They were (unapologetically) Allies of Justice.

Invitation

Follow us on our journey, from our childhood of watching Tokusatsu to producing our own.  From story, character, script, and costume development, to production and promotion we will blog about all of our experiences with tokusatsu as fans and film makers.

We invite you to share your stories while taking this journey with us, and to support Rider Real Movie.  Together we can protect justice, together we can start the #TokusatsuRevolution!