A Showa fan’s guide to Kamen Rider Amazons

Greetings! The name is Salaryman and this is my first article. So, yoroshiku onegai shimasu!

Kamen Rider Amazons is the first ever web-series in the long running history of Masked Riders. Launched by Toei Company in its Super Hero Year project, it premiered Amazon Prime (get the joke?) and had 13 episodes in its first season and yes it is also the first ever Kamen Rider series to get a second season of the same show and name but… To think Amazons is a flimsy remake of the classic Amazon is wrong. Read on true believer and know how the web-series evolved into a whole new league.

Warning spoilers ahead…

“Do you think the recent Kamen Riders are interesting? I don’t think so! I hope with Amazons the toothless Kamen Riders can get their fangs back.”

―Shinichiro Shirakura^[src]

We all know that Kamen Rider is a kid’s show and the Heisei Era is like the WWE PG Era (self-explanatory). Any Showa fans here can remember how dark and brooding BLACK was and how gruesome Ultraman Leo was to his Kaiju enemies but come the year 2000, Kamen Rider was brought back to the small screen and much as I want to say I hate it, it became docile.  This is a big problem for the kids who watch the series year after year after year: they grow up. Now in the case of Showa fans (30 years and up) the new Riders are a bit tamed, granted that the story is well-written but still it cannot be compared from the old ones. This is not the case for Amazons.

Everyone is ripping each other apart! That’s what you get if your city is infested by 4,000 Amazons: creatures created by Nozama Pharmaceuticals made to look like humans until they’re awakened in which they transform into their Daikaiju forms with insatiable appetite for human flesh – that’s the whole premise of the villain’s plight: to put the humans in the said city on the buffet table. How they escaped the facility is the crucial twist in the first season.

Enter the Nozama Peston Service, a squad of battle-hardened mercenaries hired to exterminate any Amazons who are awakened. What’s the catch? They overpowered. We all know that humans are no match for the Daikaiju that’s why fate intertwined their mission with Haruka Misuzawa a.k.a Kamen Rider Amazon Omega. A special kind of Amazon, you have to watch it to know why, he has his own reasons why he joined the Extermination Squad. This is all made complicated by Jin Takayama, the man who worked on the creation of the Amazons Cells and who turned himself into Kamen Rider Amazon Alpha who wants every monster dead at his feet.

What follows is a dark and gloomy world where monsters eat people and a group of people tries to contain the infestation while the 2 antagonists tries to live up their ideals but not without killing each other. Really, the fight scenes in the episode are not for kids, unless you want kids to see a monster get disemboweled, decapitated and butchered. As a solid Kamen Rider BLACK fan since 8 years old, I have to say that Amazons is my new favorite. I give a 10 out of 10 rating.

P.S.

I have to state this; it is one of the Masked Riders that has the least number of merchandise. Aside from the action figures and belt, there are no other gimmicks/forms to sell and that’s saying a lot compare to the others.

Plus the first letter of each episode is alphabetized. Go ahead and take a look…