Hahaha, those crazy old seventies Japanese kids’ shows! Sure, I’ve heard of them. Seen the clips on YouTube! Maybe even on YTMND when that was a thing. All those silly costumes, obvious miniatures getting blown up and Hitler reincarnated as a starfish. Wait what

Kamen Rider X – Weirdest

Immediately after the easily digestible V3 ended, Rider fans were thrown into the deep end. The deep end of a completely different pool. A pool full of amphibious Riders who rarely go near water, Nazi echinoderms, mysterious killer girlfriend twins and Godzilla veterans playing abusive fathers. My apologies in advance, dear reader, but contrary to my heartfelt analyses of the previous two series’ themes and cultural contexts, this is going to just be a list of freaky nonsense.

Honestly, it would be infinitely quicker to relate what was normal about this series. Unlike his peers, our hero Keisuke is actually *dead* when he becomes a Rider. His dad Keitarou explicitly brings him back to life in his shabby little lab. Then there’s the fact that X is a sombre shade of grey, which is far from a typical Rider colour even now, and that his main USP is his ability to fight underwater.

Spoiler: X hardly ever goes underwater.

In fact, his late father Keitarou leaves a subsea base behind for Keisuke in episode 1… only to blow it up in episode 2 when he worries his son is relying on his resources too much.

No, really, that’s it. Keisuke spends the rest of the series on the road because his crazy dad left him a present and then immediately TOOK IT AWAY FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE. And when they’re alive, the two most notable moments he shares with his father is getting shot by him and a flashback in which Keitarou administers a merciless judo beatdown to his needy son. Now, this is hardly unusual for a Shouwa series, but nothing ever comes of this backstory. In fact, Keisuke’s dad isn’t even mentioned again until the final episode, by this guy:

So. Ok. So. The main villain of X is Keitarou’s best friend, a scientist with a bloated head who’s plugged himself into a giant robot and forged links with several world governments in order to control the growth of human science. In other words, this series has an *actual villain*. Not just that, but an actual villain who conveys his orders to his underlings through a variety of inanimate objects including statuettes and creepy dolls…

Now, I love most Shouwa Riders more than Heisei, but by far one of the “weirdest” things about X is how, unlike those series which came before and after, its bad guys have a more complex MO than “take over Japan on behalf of vaguely-defined semi-spiritual life form *possibly* from another planet let me just check this old issue of Televi Magazine”.

These villains go by the subtle moniker of GOD. Government of Darkness. And unlike every other group of misfits and ne’er-do-wells in Shouwa, they’re not out to conquer the world! No, so far as Dr. Curse is concerned, his “secret agency” as they’re called already has. So what is their goal? To capture and/or destroy any scientific discoveries with the potential to make mankind a threat to their shadowy rule. Yes, long before Agito and Kiva used the same angle to such dramatic effect. But that doesn’t mean GOD don’t know how to have fun. Their kaijin get driven around in little wheelbarrow sidecars…

…and their grunts receive intense training in a variety of disciplines. Not to mention getting to wear sweet capes and goggles in the field (X‘s Sentou Kousakuin are seriously my favourite grunts ever).

(But for all their training, they can still be taken down by your everyday African dance fella)

(THIS is one of the weirdest moments in the whole series; not the first African dance routine in a 70s Japanese show, but the first one to put over one of its dancers as a legit badass who can scare off a highly-trained assassin just by roaring at him)

You could make a case for these examples just being “unusual” rather than weird, but it’s a matter of just *how* unusual some of these elements are. GOD’s kaijin are initially based on figures from Greek mythology, and then – not for any story reason – on a variety of historical and fictional “evildoers”… including Genghis Khan and Geronimo. Controversial much? Most of these guys adhere to sensible aesthetic choices, like Achilles having rocket-powered skates, Prometheus being all fiery, Geronimo being something you don’t mess with in the desert, Fantomas being an elusive reptile and Dracula being a leech.

But then there’s Ulysses having a snake wrapped around him, Nero as a tiger and the infamous Hitode Hitler. Obviously he’s hilarious at first, but more interestingly he’s one of many examples of the almost apologetic stance assumed in post-WWII Japanese media, wherein the Nazi allies of the old regime are treated with just as much contempt in the 70s as they were by the Brits and Americans in the 40s. As for why he’s a starfish – and make no mistake, it’s implied in one episode that GOD’s kaijin are actually these individuals resurrected – my only guess is that Hitler has an almost immortal grossness, which the limb-regenerating starfish comes close to approximating. Maybe it’s just because of alliteration. For my money, though, no X monster comes close to the utter strangeness of Bat Franken:

Because of course, right?? There’s a few other X kaijin who run the gamut from cute…

…to pause-the-video-and-look-away-for-a-moment disgusting.

But hey, let’s reel it back in here. One might wonder where an organisation as expansive and confident as GOD gets all its amazing government-manipulating, dictator-reviving resources. Where’s the realism?! Well, they at least reveal how they come by wood, and guess what? It’s weird. A monster named Alseides (after the nymphs of the groves) turns innocent people into trees, which GOD then harvest over time like some Kafka-esque nightmare.

The kaijins’ abilities are among the most disturbing and creative in the franchise’s early going. But even more than Apollo Geist’s detachable hand bomb he tricks X into shaking as a mark of respect, the real birds equipped with explosives and forced to divebomb our Rider, teenagers being given white cloaks that make them commit suicide by thinking they can fly, or the once-extinct Greek insect whose bite turns its victims into one of the 300 – no, really – it’s really the *atmosphere* which makes X so strange. A lot of its odder strokes are very subtle, from the imagery to the frequent dead-end plots.

One episode opens with a real snake crawling out of the neck stump of a decapitated Buddha statue to some exceptionally funky Sabbath-esque blues rock, and for a moment I thought I was watching a legit 70s horror movie. Not even an American one – a *European* one. Ooh.

But even the pacing of the overall story is strange; the mysterious twins Ryouko and Kiriko, who seem so integral at the start, as well as popular recurring villain Apollo Geist, aren’t even mentioned again after their respective deaths. That’s half the series! And yet, as I mentioned, Dr. Curse bookends the whole show by revealing he was Keitarou’s best friend in the finale. It’s easy to write off as poor plotting – and heck, it is, but at least it’s forgivable for being early days, unlike contemporary poor plotting – but for some reason my first reaction is just to shake my head and think but it must mean something!

It doesn’t.

It’s all just a bit of a strange mess. Say what you will about V3‘s originality, it made sense at its core. But the weirdness is thoroughly enjoyable, to me at least, and has – now that I’ve finally finished the series after several years – made X one of my favourite Riders ever. To call it ahead of its time might be a little previous, but it was definitely out of the norm, and continues to be so even today.

Next episode: Beloved Amazon! Why Doesn’t Anyone Else Care