Saturday, January 05, 2008

American Kamen Rider

Do you know there will be an American series of Kamen Rider coming in this year?


You know what? If you crop the three characters out from the image, they really look like the three leading characters in Terminator 3 to me XD

Called Kamen Rider Dragon Knight, this series is almost identical to the Japanese equivalent of Kamen Rider Ryuki, with (of course) different characters and names. I only managed to watch a few epsiodes of Ryuki, mid-way through the its series, so I can't tell whether the plots between the Japanese and American versions are the same as well. But the plot keywords such as 'Advent Cards' and 'Mirror World' should be able to ring a bell in Ryuki's fans.

Here's the pilot episode (the full 22-minute episode!) from Veoh.com:


Video clip from Veoh.com. Follow this link to the website if you can't see anything.

So, what do you think? ^^

Personally, I enjoy this 'new' Kamen Rider quite well. I think it's really loyal to Ryuki. I'm not sure if some of the fight scenes (as well as some other scenes) are directly adapted from the Japanese series, but at least the producer didn't follow the very silly comic-book style used by Saban in their first dreaded Masked Rider series, a spin-off of Kamen Rider Black RX, which resulted in complete disaster for this famous Japanese sci-fi character in America. Hopefully, Kamen Rider Dragon Knight will be able to restore the goodwill of Kamen Rider outside Asia.

If Dragon Knight is successful, I'm sure other Kamen Rider series will have their American versions as well in the future ^^