Being so close to having watched all Ultraman, naturally my eye is turning to similar franchises. The obvious pick is Kamen Rider, which has been going for almost as long telling stories of motorcycle-riding suited heroes defending the helpless from powerful enemies.
In Japan last June I eagerly looked forward to the midnightly screenings of the 1970s serial and I loved the recent Shin Kamen Rider film. This series is definitely my sort of thing!
Alas the majority of Kamen Rider has never been released in the west or even translated into English, so it’s currently beyond my ability to fully enjoy. Hopefully one day that will change.
Until then though, I can of course admire it in other ways… such as via plastic model kits! Here’s two I recently built.
This guy – Kamen Rider Double Fangjoker – is apparently from the 20th Kamen Rider series which screened back in 2009-10. The bicolour form is due to two Kamen Riders combining into one, and this specific ‘Fangjoker’ seems to be an ultimate version. Here’s a shot of the character from the show itself:
I bought this kit since it’s striking, and I knew (from experience) that having different colour arms and legs would make the assembly a bit more interesting. That said, being essentially monotone meant the runners weren’t too interesting when I took them from the box:
Assembly was easy; Bandai has perfected the design of their humanoid kits and everything fits together seamlessly. I particularly like the unusual faceted effect on the eyes achieved Dr by combining a textured back, a silver sticker and a transparent layer:
As usual I don’t paint these kits, but this one gave me the rare chance to use one of my fine ‘Gundam markers’ to add a thin black line down the very center. It looks better than I expected:
A couple of weeks later I made the second kit I’d bought:
This is from a 2015 series featuring a main character who is a dead ‘ghost hunter’ trying to collect 15 souls so he can be resurrected and take revenge on the villians that killed him. The story sounds wild and the action scenes look great:
I have a thing for black and gold and once again I bought this kit based solely on the powerful design. It’s much more complex than I knew when I bought it, with the ability to make multiple forms of the rider himself. I went with the default, and not the wacky ‘ghost’ form.
The first thing I noticed when I removed the box contents were not one but two sticker sheets. And even worse, there were loads of stickers. I don’t hate stickers on kits as much as some do, but I prefer them in moderation. But with instructions like this I was concerned:
Happily it wasn’t nearly as difficult as it looked, and the stickers aligned well and – even better – looked great when applied:
This is one stylish character, with orange parts that just pop from the black, and nifty use of transparencies. The black also helps hide what few visible seams/joints it has. It’s a very pretty kit once completed.
These weren’t too expensive for plastic model kits (about $40 each), and I loved making both. As I mentioned Bandai has got their humanoid (which includes many Ultramen as well as Riders) kits down to a fine art, and I’m happy to see them continuing to churn out new characters.
Assembling these kits and reading about the characters makes me want to watch the shows even more. Will they ever be translated? I hope so…
