I say 2026 a few times. I mean 2025. Sorry about that. This is MJ Munoz bringing you a part of my
Ishinomori celebration for 2026. Again, this is the Celebrate Ishinomori Initiative for 2026 where I
have re-reviewed Skullman. I've talked about Ishinomori and why I've been thinking about him so much
and just how cool he is in general and some of the wonderful beautiful things I find in his stories,
particularly the Kamen Rider and a little bit Skullman I guess you could say. And now I want to
talk about the men who made Kamen Rider and I have heard about this thing for a long time. I've never
read it before. I don't read Japanese. It's mostly available in Japanese and fortunately for me I
was able to find a scanlation of it but only of the first chapter and from what I can tell there
are multiple chapters at least two if not three. However I can't really tell how many there are
total so I am going to talk about this with you and I'm going to start off by saying I am shocked
and relieved and I don't know I feel kind of not special because I'm not special in regards to this
because of this but I feel I don't know somewhat validated by the fact that chapter one is called
the Cry Baby Producer and before I get into that hold on real quick. So this is Kenichi Murata who
did the artwork and I think the story as well for Shin or for Kamen Rider spirits and Shin
Kamen Rider spirits which it's only called Shin Kamen Rider spirits because it moved from one
weekly magazine to another and now it's on IEDIS unfortunately in like I don't know Tonka Bon like
16 or 18 or something like that is out and yeah we're I don't know when we're getting the rest of
the story but I'd love to get more of it but hopefully one day one day it'll happen anyway
but yeah I was really pleased with this because I really like his artwork but more importantly in
the artwork it's the story that's being told of the birth of Kamen Rider and how that all worked
out so it's a well real quick it's beautiful it's beautifully illustrated and the story I feel like
is probably you know fairly accurate and fairly concise but there's more to it than this but it
does start it starts with the idea phase of coming up with a new hero for NBS which is the network
but totally was involved from the beginning which I was correct about but NBS is let me see if I
can find it the Manichi broadcasting system so they requested the show be made and they
requested the Toei make it and they told them they had no budget so they'd have to make it
on the cheap for sure which is kind of funny a lot of Western fans talk about Tokusatsu has no
budget and that's part of the charm of it and I don't necessarily agree that the fact that they
have no budget is part of the charm but there is a quote that I'm misremembering I can't remember
the exact quote that says the more come the more restrictions you have on something when you're
designing it or working on it the more elegant your choices have to be in order to make it
successful now that's very much a butchering of a quote about permaculture which is about lifestyle
design garden design and making natural and human systems interact with each other in a more efficient
more you know beneficial way but it does apply to this because at some point Hiriyama gets set up
who's this producer he's the crybaby producer he gets set up with one of his co-workers who is
let's see this is you right yes yeah he gets set up with um well I think I'm just gonna read this
Toru Hiriyama also known as the crybaby producer he's a legendary producer who would go on to
create many of Toei's superheroes and I see here Inazuman and Kikaider and those three demon guys
and the oh the giant robot twins and Go Ranger and oh what's his name Birdman Ninja who of course
is Henshin Ninja Arashi anyway and then there's this other guy he's working with here it's a head
of business office Toei Tokyo production department Yusaku Uchida he was two years younger than
Hiriyama during their time at Kyoto studio I would imagine he was two years younger than him
throughout their lives anyway so apparently giant robo was or whatever it was called was being
aired the final episode of it and Hiriyama was crying because of the sacrifice that giant robo
made to protect earth and people kind of thinking he's ridiculous for that and I gotta say I called
you know this Kamen Rider show writer tears because of both the tear marks that Kamen Rider has on
him and which is touched on in this manga and how emotional I get over Kamen Rider because there's
something in it that just speaks to me which I won't belabor right now I'll just go on and say
it's interesting MBS asks for Toei to produce a show and there's gonna be no budget for it so
Yusaku Uchida goes to Hiriyama and he asks him how to make this motorcycle show and he's saying
that they're gonna have to produce it outside and they're gonna be using an abandoned warehouse for
part of it I don't know if that's for set design or if that's for production of it or what but
basically they're gonna have to work with the barest thing they can and it's really cool one
of them says it's gonna be I think I think Uchida says it has to be a gorilla production otherwise
it won't work they won't be able to afford it anyway so that's like you know guerrilla warfare
and that means you know you get the shots wherever you can however you can and it's interesting
there was even talk about like unions and strikes and things like that that they talked about a
little bit which is interesting I didn't know that those were problems for them in Japan at the time
but yeah it's interesting they're talking about using the barest things that they can and making
this like motorcycle action show and they're trying to figure out what to do with it and they
don't know what to do with it so they go ahead and go to Shiro Ishimori who was known as Ishimori
at the time he was already successful with cyborgs 009 and some other things so Hiriyama
goes to him and Ishimori gives him the design for crossfire at the time which was a guy in a cool
motorcycle suit with a kind of four-pointed shuriken ninja star type deal on the face where
you could see his face through there and Hiriyama likes it and so do a bunch of other people at
Toei but Ishimori actually thinks it's not grotesque enough it's not realistic enough and that it's
too cool and so he gives him another design which is similar to skullman it's like a skull rider
and yeah it's a skull rider design and it's it looks pretty pretty cool but it's not what they
end up using because people at the department like the licensing and toy department so the
skull was like too extreme and they didn't want to have to work with it it was gonna be a hard
sell I guess on toys but in the manga Hiriyama says it's gonna be kind of like golden bat or
Ogon bat and anyway or also known as Fantomas in other countries and yeah he um Hiriyama tries
to sell it pretty hard to MBS and they initially like it but eventually they just they can't do
the skull thing they don't want to the sales side doesn't want to have to sell a skull so that's put
aside and they're still working on this motorcycle in the background and there's somebody uh took
aichi Hirose deputy general director of MBS he and Hiriyama have a conversation in this manga
and they both talk about their experiences in the war and because this is post World War 2 and
Hiriyama was actually a volunteer in the kamikaze program but he was too short apparently to go and
be a kamikaze pilot which I would think you know if you're gonna blind to somebody doesn't matter
how tall you are but maybe height has to do with mass and he was even heavy enough right I don't
know I don't know what that is about that's kind of strange um but this other fellow take aichi
let me see take aichi one Hirose he was like a motorcycle riding guy which Hiriyama conjectures
that's why Hirose wanted to go ahead and do the motorcycle here why he he highlighted that because
like the little kids thought it was cool and there was a good youth culture which I think
is like teens of motorcycles as well as you know fast it's daring it's exciting all that good stuff
they even use the phrase motocross in here which I don't know but that would have been a term of
the day or not but regardless it's used here and um Hiriyama actually we get pretty soon an insight
into how things were for him in the war when he's talking with his wife oh it's after he sees the
the revision of skull man into a grasshopper and each time or he's saying just off the top of his
head hey what if he you know he's a grasshopper so what if he you know actually you know uses the
power of the wind and he fights for nature and it's about you know nature versus destruction and
things like that and it was very much just like a ping-pong back-and-forth collaborative exchange
of ideas and it was not made in a vacuum it was made in collaboration it was made with I don't
know just like with this very interesting back and forth and that process is interesting to me
because as they're talking each and more he keeps adding to the sketch he talks about the
turbine on his belt and eventually Hiriyama when he presents this he says that you know even kids
can draw it which is cool for marketing and I don't know it's just really interesting to see
these different aspects all coming together and then Hiriyama talks it to his wife about how he
when he was in the war he had this horrible experience with heroes helping clean up these
corpses that you know they were taking people's dead bodies and actually I'm gonna look at the
historical context of it so I can talk about what exactly he meant by that and get back to you.
So I found a quick article or I'm gonna read an excerpt from article during the so-called
Great Tokyo Air Raid on March 10th 1945 the urban area centered around the Shidamachi part of the
city was selected as the primary bombing target the entirety of the area from the Sumida River
to the Arakawa River presently Sumida Ward and Koto Ward and many neighborhoods on the West Bank
of the Sumida River such as Asakusa and Nihonbashi were completely reduced to ash it is estimated
that more than 100,000 people died that night the cause is of death included burning suffocation
drowning freezing and more throughout World War two something Chongning Dresden and many other
cities were bombed indiscriminately note one furthermore Hiroshima Nagasaki were also hit with
nuclear bombs much like the other areas the Great Tokyo Air Raid was one of the bombings
with the highest casualties in the war so yeah and as I was looking there was like stuff that
said you know baked boiled to death like just it was awful awful bombing of civilians people
in civilian areas and there's actually a bit in the manga where Haruyama is thinking back to it
and he this actually made me cry he there's this just pile of dead bodies people trying to flee
I guess they got caught anyway and there's like a mother and child someone holding their baby
and it looks like a mother or mother or father that you're so burned it's hard to see honestly
and here he on the sofa he runs over to them and he's holding the mother and baby together and he's
telling the other guys who were working not to separate them because you know I don't know why
but just the image of a dead mother holding her baby something powerful and he's saying the idea
of common later being someone who will as each no more he said it looks like I'm someone who would
appear like the wind fight like a storm it's just so beautiful and like he wanted that he wanted
that kind of hero to be around and so he's creating the show with that kind of hero in
collaborate from all these other people and I think I don't know maybe something about that is why I love
coming in or not sure there's definitely the redemption aspect of it and the idea of like
you know your darkness doesn't have to define you that I find is true in common writer but maybe
it's really like maybe I'm feeling some of your yama's heart and some of the hearts and souls of
these other people imprinting on their work in common writer and that's why I'm so attached to
it and then like there's this thing about how some of the people after Fujioka got injured they
wanted to just write him off the show and like the actor write the actor off the show and say
that he was caught by shocker and they did more surgery on him and they changed look of his face
so they could just replace him and keep it as to kiss you on go but here you almost have no heroes
never die we're not gonna kill our hero like that we're going to do something else and make it work
and they went ahead and did that and that that is why he's hemorrhagic you know became or you know
writer to came into the show and then the double writers reunited in episode 40 something and that
you know that dramatically actually increased counterjust popularity like the ratings went way
up in that part of the show like as a result of taking younger coming back and I don't know how
I would have felt all these decades later watching it if to case young go had just been replaced or
rewritten with another character another actor because there's something about him who's Fujioka
specifically that is like in the show is very appealing very dramatic very I don't know what
there's there's something that he brings to it that definitely makes me love common writer as
well something is performance something in his look it's just he's got a whole package there and
it really works and not like I dislike each emoji it's just he's not Hongo and yeah he's just not
Hongo there's a difference for me and I was so glad to learn that he did come back I found that
out years ago but then reading about how Haruyama you know made that happen in the show is really
amazing and yeah it's just like it's very moving it's very interesting so here you are each memory
let me see who else who did I mention there's Takechi I want to credit everybody as well as I
can Takechi Hirose and Yusaka Uchida and more the people of MBS who ordered it like these are some
of the people who made common writer these are the men who made common writer I really thought
this was a fun read it was very enjoyable it's very cool Maria's art style of course is a joy
to look at and the way it put together the story was really fun and I really enjoyed it and I just
I found like there was something even deeper in this thing that I already love and have all this
affection for and it honestly made me love common writer even more than I already do and that's
quite a feat quite a feat and I think there's more I found chapter one I don't know where the
other chapters are I can't haven't quite found them yet but I see on HLJ I can get the raw
you know Japanese version of this and I might just buy it just to look at the artwork because
that could be pretty cool anyway that's pretty much all I have to say for now check out MJMwindows.com
to follow everything else I'm doing I'm planning on now that I'm over some personal issues getting
back into more aggressively covering tokusatsu and getting back into my writing and if you go
to growbugs.com you will find hopefully very soon some updates on the production of my middle grade
book that has magical bugs battling monsters and protecting kids and one kid in particular
for this first book first set of books and hopefully I'll be releasing updates on that
soon and putting up a pre-order and you can check that out.