GourdI love that I can describe an episode of Android Kikaider 01 as "Mari and Waruder heartwarmingly become pen pals commiserating over their fate as flawed robots, meanwhile, Gill!Hakaider gets into mail fraud." 
Android Kikaider 01: It's kind of wild how much Mari (Bijinder) is just the best character in the show by the mid 30's despite her design when transformed being Like That and all the weird occasional baggage around being the Girl Robot the writers have. She's just got the most character stuff going on, especially compared to Ichiro (01)'s complete lack of it. Her deal with being an ex-deathbot who switched sides and got partial independence from Shadow with Ichiro's incredibly bad copy of a Conscience Circuit and now mostly just has crippling depression about her own self-worth is just really good?
Plus her actress is really good at the untransformed fight scenes. Which thank God she gets better treatment there than, say, Tackle from KR Stronger.
Android Kikaider 01: howling with laughter in disbelief that Bijinder's greatest weakness is that if you get to second base with her, she explodes 
Android Kikaider 01 by the late teens episode count-wise has gone completely buck wild with:
- villains who want to kill everyone for explicitly no reason
- Hakaider, who has Professor Gill's brain inside him controlling him getting an upgrade from Professor Gill's ghost making him three times stronger!
- Hakaider hijacking a US bomber with nukes inside to blow up Tokyo.
- Multiple exploding robot child decoys in an episode.
- Hakaider hypnotizing a kid by making his brain glow and pulse hypnotically.
- A sequence where the main villain, Big Shadow reveals his true identity to Hakaider to be Kikaider 01's ally Reiko, then reveals he's actually a cheap floating skull, then is revealed to be a hologram, and then is revealed to be a guy behind a one-way mirror who looks exactly like his original form.
- After that, a second Hakaider shows up who starts fighting and is then revealed to be Jiro (Kikaider) in disguise wearing a Hakaider cosplay.
seriously, even the characters seem confused by the end of the last one
The thing about the Android Kikaider 01 tokusatsu, is that as an immediate sequel to the original Kikaider they latched onto Hakaider, the rival, being really popular. So they made the initial villains of 01 four Hakaiders. This is both hilarious and a really bad idea in execution because:
- The classic Hakaider design'd one isn't Saburo (the original Hakaider), but Professor Gill, the villain of the original Kikaider, having put his brain in Hakaider's body. So you don't have any of the style or characterization like the original Hakider. He's just a facist vibes dick, which is just... not Hakaider's vibes at all.
- he doesn't act like Professor Gill either or have that voice actor, so we're not drawing in kids like that
- All four Hakaider Force members (operating out of multiple Hakaider Bases that get blown up each episode seriously) fight Kikaider 01 four at a time... and do so badly they come off as incredibly pathetic compared to the original one.
The show has a similar problem in that Ichiro (01)'s backstory is given entirely in twenty seconds of narration and at least in the first few episodes he doesn't have any equivalent of the same about his robotic existence and flawed design the original Kikaider has, and they didn't give him anything else either.
The show is just largely running on vibes of "you wanted more Kikaider" without any depth to it.
#AndroidKikaider #kikaider #kikaider01 #AndroidKikaider01 #tokusatsu
