April Fools!
In case it wasn’t painfully obvious to begin with, Power Rider Apollo was SentaiRangers.com’s April Fool’s joke this year. We got A LOT of great feedback this weekend. Here’s a bit of a thumbnail sketch.
There’s way too much of a reaction in the Twittersphere to post all of it here. A general idea can be found in the following links:
You could spend hours looking through it. Not an activity I’d recommend.
The Facebook reaction included posts from JEFusion, Henshin Justice Unlimited, and Power Morphicon (cross-posted from their twitter accounts).
JEFusion: Today seems to be full of interesting news. Power Rider Apollo, AKA Kamen Rider Fourze. Another American Attempt.
JEFusion: [Ukiya] A bit of a recap, the Power Rider trademark was registered by Saban Brands 2 years ago.
Henshin Justice Unlimited:There is a whisper on the wind that Kamen Rider Fourze is being developed in to Power Rider Apollo. It’s looking like a prank, but I sent an email in to Saban Brands to confirm. Who would YOU want them to start with?
Power Morphicon: I really hope this is happening ! Cross your fingers everyone.
Tumblr
Tumblr user larzzing produced this wonderful image macro, playing along with our cancerous jokes:
In the same vein, mystrich seems to enjoy commanders of spacefaring vessels as much as we do:
#Power Rider and #Power Rider Apollo are also great reads. It is notable that we created the #Power Rider Apollo tag through this prank.
4chan
The thread has since necroed, but here‘s a link to the original Power Rider Apollo conversation, courtesy of /m/. I am certain this would not have gone viral without them.
My personal favorite is >>8919971, who came up with an actual cast for the show.
r/KamenRider carried our story. Great thanks to the community there for maturely speculating on a show that won’t actually exist, and having fun with the concept in general, though I am still clearly the Emperor of the Dai-Zangyack Empire.
SentaiRangers.com Crew
The brave men who crewed this prank, were myself, Naaim, Colton, and Ethan.
My thoughts can be found on twitter at the #PowerRider tag. Generally, I had fun and am genuinely sorry towards anyone who takes personal offense at our gag.
Ethan had this to say:
Blame Colton. He wouldn’t write the scenes anyways.HE HAD ONE JOB.
I found the prank to just be some harmless fun. We based our casting on tendencies from Saban for the most part, with some…admittedly odd exceptions. Letting it out a bit early was just the build up for the Podcast release on Monday, and it was just fun to do. The discussions were a blast, and I hoped those who rolled with it had some laughs, and those who didn’t weren’t so hurt.
Our original plan was to go boring and just do Sentai Radio again, but I wasn’t happy with that. I actually had an epiphany while texting Colton my new idea: Super Megaforce. No, wait, Power Rider will be an animated series on Vortexx. No, just a regular series. Based on Fourze. As soon as I got home, we started planning. We wanted to release Thursday afternoon so that it could boil over the weekend until the podcast on Monday, but due to a technical mixup, it got out a bit early. Our fake April Fools leak got actually leaked. My other idea was pretty good too, but it would probably take more preparation. What killed us, ironically was Cancer. I think we would’ve been far more believable without the terminal cancer. But damn if it isn’t now the best running joke on our site.
Booooooooooo.
You should of release it on the 31th and said April Fools the next day. You had the wait period too long.
By the by…we didn’t lie about being in touch with a certain somebody…
Jeff is definitely Ethan, though.