A few extra words. This was a huge project that took me a few weeks to put together and many sections of hours to research, though it's a lifetime of passion. It started off as me just wanting to compile the few toku shows we did have in the US, and it eventually grew to be pretty large. The hardest part was just trying to determine what actually counted as tokusatsu as many of the films in the "expanded" section I have never heard about let alone seen. I hope this will be satisfactory and a easy go-to for when others ask what is available out there.
For anything I missed or changes I should make, I am open to suggestions.
Little areas of clarification;
-Why the DVD subforum? To be honest this was a idea I played with before and while there is a small number of titles on Blu-ray, most series are only on DVD and may ever only be on DVD. To do Blu-ray only would leave too much out. To include DVD would result in this list to be mostly DVD releases. After consideration, I decided the DVD subforum would be the best fit for now until more titles get released to the Blu-ray format.
-Traditional tokusatsu will always refer to that classic suits and monster stuff, though there are a few things in the expanded section that does fit that category. To be frank, I really wasn't sure where else to put titles like "Sexy Rangers" and "Iron Girl".
-I felt it was necessary to include Power Rangers and those other Saban brands because they are important to the exposure of tokusatsu in the US. Plus Power Rangers is just too huge to share a section.
-I gave Senkosha their own section simply because the little shared universe established in Bravestorm. Toei was also going to be mixed in with the miscellaneous section before I decided there was enough for their own section.
-For the anime section, I tried to stick only to titles that are based on a tokusatsu. There are a few stretches, like Giant Robo, which technically started as a manga first, though the anime really doesn't connect to either. But for me, the tokusatsu version of Giant Robo was the most well-known thing about brand before the anime came out, so I feel like it still influenced the anime. As opposed to something like Tetsujin 28, which the toku is obscure while the anime that succeeded it is more well known and influenced by the manga.
-For now, I don't plain to include anime that feature kaiju or henshin heroes but isn't based on a tokusatsu. That would be difficult to determine.
-International toku section was a tough one, but I felt that the films had to be undeniably influenced by tokusatsu. And that influence has to be a core part of the film, which is why something like Cloverfield Paradox isn't listed. I don't think international live action adaptions of anime should count though, even if some of them do have toku-style influences sprinkled in. My only exception to that was The Guyver because of how undeniably influenced it is.
-The addition of the extra giant monster section simply comes from knowing that people will still count King Kong and Rhedosaurus as kaiju even though they predate the genre. To be honest though, there's enough of those on Blu-ray to hold their own thread. I also tried not to stretch it too far by adding human sized or slightly larger mutated animals. I suppose there's some describable classification of what separates a giant monster movie from any creature feature.
|