How I got into Tokusatsu
My history with tokusatsu is a short one, as in the last few years I only just got into it. Probably my first experience with the medium was when Power Rangers Samurai was premiering on Nickelodeon in 2011. I wasn't going to watch it at first, but my at the time horny, gay teen self saw Najee De-Tiege's character (who was a swimmer) get out of the pool in a promo for the show and thought "maybe i'll check it out!" lol. I paid attention to it while it was on for the first few episodes, then as it went on, it became a show I'd just have playing in the background while doing other things waiting for other shows to come on. Pretty sure I didn't make it to Super Samurai.
Casting a man that looks like this as a swimmer on a TV-Y7 show on Nickelodeon is justing asking for the sexual awakenings of many children.
A few years later, after graduating highschool and in college, I remembered a series that I've seen a few people I followed on tumblr talk about and I knew about in passing from trivia and references made in video games i'd played and even a few anime i've watched. A show called Kamen Rider.
Youtuber blunova's video, "The Most Interesting Kamen Rider References in Media", that goes over different pieces of media that referene the show.
I tried to watch 1 episode of Kamen Rider W, and i never went back to finish the season due being busy and forgetting it. Plus I hadn't learned the method of obtaining episodes that I do nowadays, so manually downloading 48-50 episodes of a show, one by one, was not something I wanted to do.
Fast Forward to half way through 2022, I see a random video recommendation in my Youtube feed where a guy is talking about the color of Kamen Riders and how he wasn't pink, but he was actually MA-GEN-TA. I looked at the comments to see what show this came from and with that I was interested.
I started watching my first full season of tokusatsu ever, Kamen Rider Decade. (I did stop almost half-way through the season and didn't pick it back up till near the end of the year/ beginning of the new year and I did finish it.) And once I finished it, well the rest is history.
