Cognition Dissemination: Superhero Tokusatsu Shouldn’t Be This Hard to Watch

I’ve been getting back into tokusatsu works lately, the lower-budget-but-endearing Japanese live-action works that overcome their minor presentation shortcomings with solid action and character development.

It’s why my ears perked up upon seeing the announcement of this year’s Ultraman series, Ultraman Blazar, set to begin on July 8th. They perked up even further while reading the story description, particularly the bio of main character Gento Hiruma, who will transform into the titular Blazar. Hiruma is a unique protagonist for the series and superhero TV tokusatsu works by being a struggling middle manager in his 30s with a wife and child, a sure sign that the writers have their fingers firmly on the pulse of Modern Culture. Tomoya Warabino will play Hiruma, previously Heart in Kamen Rider Drive, thus another living example of the Kamen Rider villain-to-Ultraman hero pipeline. I, lastly, want to add that the main theme is good stuff from the preview in the trailer.

This was when I started researching Ultraman series available for either legal streaming or purchase on home video, which subsequently led me to guides to see what to restart with (outside the original series, which I watched a while ago) because, holy hell, there are a lot of examples. The newest Ultraman installments have been simulcast right on the official YouTube channel with subtitles in multiple languages (including English), with Blazar soon joining them. They’re not as easy to find on there as they should be, but Playlists can be found through the search engine. Several (though not all) shows from the 2010s, 2000s, 1990s, and more are streaming on services like Tubi and Pluto thanks to Shout! Factory TV’s fittingly-named TokuSHOUTSu brand. There’s an incredible wealth of Ultraman to watch, if you’re ever in the mood.

It all begs the question: Why in the world does this not apply to other such toku works? I first researched which Kamen Rider and Super Sentai series to legally stream upon starting my new kick, and the pickings for shows to legally watch are slimmer than they should be. The only recent Kamen Rider TV series available for legal streaming is Zero-One, with the semi-recent (the 2000s still feel recent to me, an old person) Kamen Rider Kuuga (a great show, by the way) and Kamen Rider Ryuki being available on streaming services thanks to Shout! Factory. Kamen Rider Agito and Kamen Rider Faiz are also “available” from TOKU, but I used quotes there because their subtitle translations are undesirable.

There are also older TV shows like the original Kamen Rider and Kamen Rider Black (my first one through long-vanished YouTube uploads) and follow-up Kamen Rider Black RX from Shout! Factory TV for the former and Discotek for the latter two. (Black RX being the notable base for the original Masked Rider American series.) There are also streaming-exclusive shows Kamen Rider Amazons (aka Amazon Riders) and Kamen Rider: Black Sun on Prime Video.

That sounds like a lot in the way I wrote them down, for anyone unfamiliar with just how many Kamen Rider series there are. But there’s a considerably higher amount of them only available through torrenting. Only the first two episodes for each show are available on the Toei Tokusatsu YouTube channel, outside the 1990s movies (the only Kamen Rider content from the decade) in their entirety.

The landscape is even worse for Super Sentai works, for which the most recent series available is Mirai Sentai Timeranger from 2001… a 22-year-old series. (It was the base for Power Rangers: Time Force.) If you want to watch more recent Super Sentai shows legally, that’s too damn bad.

What gives here? It ostensibly feels like Toei couldn’t give much of a shit about making them all available. There’s at least the potential excuse that some recent Super Sentai shows are caught up in legal issues with Hasbro and Power Rangers, though it doesn’t seem like this should apply to the shows with themes unusable for American adaptations. No such excuse seems to exist for Kamen Rider. It’s tough not to look at the wealth of Ultraman content available and think that, damn, it would be nice to watch shows like Avataro Sentai Donbrothers (the last Super Sentai show), Ohsama Sentai King-Ohger (the current Super Sentai show), and Kamen Rider Geats (the current Kamen Rider show) without having to keep an eye on Nyaa.

This shouldn’t feel like a far-off fantasy. Ultraman/Ultra series producer Tsuburaya Productions figured out a deal to make most installments in the series legally available outside Japan and Asia. It should stand that Toei Company, an organization around three times the size, should be able to do something similar. They either can’t or, more likely in Kamen Rider’s case, won’t, and the continued lackadaisicalness is hurting the exposure of superhero toku content outside their home country, unless it’s available as part of a deal with Amazon. Perhaps Toei can fully figure something out soon, but it would be best if they did something literally as I was typing and proofreading this. They’re getting styled on by smaller competition.

I’ll just keep my fingers crossed that a deal with either Shout! Factory or others will be worked out. In the meantime, I have little to complain about when I still have enough toku content that I haven’t partaken in yet. Heck, I didn’t even get into the Metal Heroes and live-action Garo content in this post.