why is kamen rider changing tones?

[kikaida]

grotesque baby-like TV aliens rolling down hills and all that.

lol. what a visual. won't be forgetting that anytime soon

Spoiler

[Dengar]

-majority of post snipped, go to the previous page-

I am 99% that something there will have a different meaning than i intended.

I mostly think I understand what you're saying, but it's not really the way I see it. I did mention that the themes can be understood by various children of various ages, at differeing levels.

I also do not agree that things like death or suicide constitute "mature". They are, in fact, universal.

[dancercotillion]

The endless hand-wringing over what's appropriate for children is bizarre. Kids have shown time and time again that if they do not understand something, they will either ignore it or ask someone what it means. If they ignore it, they're disinterested and your story has failed to capture their interest. If they ask for clarification, they're at least interested enough to want to know.

When I was a small child, my father allowed me to watch action and horror films. Like, we went and saw Universal Soldier for my seventh birthday. This is a film featuring JCVD as a soldier who died in Vietnam brought back to life as a zombie cyborg, and Dolph Lundgren goes around cutting people's ears off to make a necklace. I wasn't scarred by it, it didn't frighten me into some kind of trauma. I appreciated the things I was capable of appreciating, and ignored what I wasn't.

Kids are far more capable of handling complex subjects that a lot of people give them credit for, and sheltering them from those same topics is necessarily a harmful act. You don't have to show a toddler hardcore pornography in between Faces of Death, but I absolutely applaud any children's show for making complex moral issues an integral part of the storyline.

[butyoumight]

Kids are far more capable of handling complex subjects that a lot of people give them credit for, and sheltering them from those same topics is necessarily a harmful act. You don't have to show a toddler hardcore pornography in between Faces of Death, but I absolutely applaud any children's show for making complex moral issues an integral part of the storyline.

THIS. And something that I think Japan handled with magnificently more grace than America could ever hope to. I always come back to how you never (hardly ever, anyway) see blood in Power Rangers. They don't bleed when you hit them. They don't even really bruise. They don't get damaged. Not the case in Super Sentai or in Kamen Rider. They bleed, they get hurt, light wounds and bandages get carried over from episode to episode, WHEN YOU FIGHT EACH OTHER, YOU COULD GET HURT which is something kids need to know if they're going to be pretending to be these heroes they idolize.

The same thing applies to serious tones and motifs and ethical/moral questions. PEOPLE NEED TO KNOW THIS STUFF, why not teach kids when they're still capable of learning and have less societal bias coloring their experience?

[Go-On Macaroni]

The series i consider Kid's shows are:
*Blade

Nah, Blade's totally not kiddy. I mean, "Onduru ruragittan disukaa!?"; how do we know that's not code for how Kenzaki gets his kicks off?

[locuas]

that's why i included series like BLade and Kiva on "Kid's shows". but while i feel you can show plenty of things to childrens, there are things that you need someone to help them understand not because it is complex, but because it is something kids normally don't think about, it's something extremely morally ambiguous, or it is just something you don't want them to misundertand
Kids are not stupid, but there is something they are(and i am not saying this in a negative sense), they are naive because they learn as they grow. While they can understand a lot of things, they just don't have the knowledge(which is NOT the same thing as intelligence) to understand any thing on the tv. that is why they would neeed an adult to understand some of this concepts, because adults have knowledge and can help them understand. (If i had a kid and he watched a hero shooting and killing other people, i would want to know if he understand why the hero does it and that it is not right to do that)

The series i consider Kid's shows are:
*Blade

Nah, Blade's totally not kiddy. I mean, "Onduru ruragittan disukaa!?"; how do we know that's not code for how Kenzaki gets his kicks off?

Yes, i consider Blade a kid's show because i feel kids woul not need an adult to understand the concepts the show presents.

[dancercotillion]

I dunno, I think Faiz is a lot more straightforward than Blade in terms of morality. And by that same metric, Hibiki is totally a kid's show because when something weird comes up, people explain it to the kid who's in every scene!

"Shounen, it's not okay to spew fire from your mouth. So we'll never do that again, okay? Kids shouldn't play with fire, and neither should Oni."

[Catastrophe]

I thought they retooled that because it was thought to be too scary for children watching?

[AxemYellow]

I think many people don't give kids enough credit - tv producers, and especially some parents.

I remember the first time I saw an R-rated movie as a kid. (Cliffhanger) I just saw it as a normal movie and wondered why it had an R rating.

Kids can understand more than they're given credit for and aren't as sensitive as many believe. Japan actually seems to understand that a lot more than the US with regards to their tv programming. That's why Sentai and KR are so good. American (live action) kids shows of this caliber are few and far between. (The only ones I can think of right now are actually Canadian)

It does seem to me that the more recent KR series are more kiddie in general - at least their is much more of a focus on stupid humor and less permanent bad things happening to people. KR is still better than 90% of American kids shows though.

[Dengar]

To be fair though, silly jokes are an excellent way to grab a kid's attention for the life lesson that comes after the joke. I'd argue that well-placed silliness can get a laid back adult (IE one who isn't obsessed with MASCULINITY) to watch too.

[AxemYellow]

But traditionally it's Sentai that's been silly, with KR being much more serious. I mean they've always had silliness in KR, but it's become somewhat dominant with series like Den-O, W, Wizard and Fourze - to the detriment of the series in my opinion.

[locuas]

It does seem to me that the more recent KR series are more kiddie in general - at least their is much more of a focus on stupid humor and less permanent bad things happening to people. KR is still better than 90% of American kids shows though.

to be fair, Family Guy also focus on stupid humor too, and that is not a kid's show :p

I dunno, I think Faiz is a lot more straightforward than Blade in terms of morality. And by that same metric, Hibiki is totally a kid's show because when something weird comes up, people explain it to the kid who's in every scene!

"Shounen, it's not okay to spew fire from your mouth. So we'll never do that again, okay? Kids shouldn't play with fire, and neither should Oni."

Well...yes, but it is so dark that i do not feel comfortable letting a kid watch it unsupervised.

[dancercotillion]

I thought they retooled that because it was thought to be too scary for children watching?

[Joicerojo]

I do think that the show is changing tones but in the sense that they are kinda complex, is it still a kid's show? I don't know, so far we have seen that in the war movies the "eternal" fight between Kamen riders in one or another way, whereas the Movie for the series feature a kid or a bunch of kids, somehow in the case of Gaim and wizard they seem more focused in the "war" rather than an adventure with a kid as a protagonist....

[narshkajke]

That's true, I started to feel it when watching Den-O, KR used to be filled with moral ambiguity, people getting killed, not to mention creepy,,
I mean in Fourze, almost nobody died, well there's a banishment in black-hole kind of thing, but still it's in lighter tone than Faiz, where the body count is up the roof,, heck in Kuuga or Agito, almost in every episode someone got killed.

I'm not saying that the kid-friendly/lighter tone is bad, The point I'm trying to put in here is that the sense of danger is kinda nullified when the monster of the day is so incompetent that there's almost no victim to it.