The popularity of superheroes has fluctuated over the decades, with various projects igniting waves of interest, from the old Max Fleischer Superman serials to Batman ’66, X-Men ’92, and the launch of the MCU. One property that has spawned decades of spin-offs and movies, and even inspired another franchise still celebrated today, is Kamen Rider. While not a household name outside of Japan, Kamen Rider has enjoyed decades of success in its home country, starting with the very first series in 1971.
The hero of Kamen Rider, which translates to “Masked Rider,” is Takeshi Hongo, a college student who loves science and motorcycles. Hongo is experimented on by the evil organization Shocker, which aims to conquer Japan and then the world. Using a special Henshin Belt, Hongo can transform into a masked superhero, modeled to look like a grasshopper, and use Shocker’s technology against them. In practice, this meant engaging in martial arts fights with men in costumes before finishing them off with a special move, typically the dive kick.
The original Kamen Rider should only be watched today by those looking for a goofy, old-school superhero show featuring monsters of the week like Spider-Man (not that one) and Bat-Man (also not that one). The special effects are atrocious, the acting is cheesy, and yet, the series ended up with 34 shows (and counting) over the span of 50 years. Beyond the massive franchise with dozens of different riders, the series is also responsible for launching the second boom of Tokusatsu shows in Japan. This includes Super Sentai, known in the West as Power Rangers.
Following the smash success of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, Haim Saban brought over other similar shows, including Big Bad Beetleborgs, VR Troopers, and Masked Rider, the last of which adapted the Kamen Rider series, Kamen Rider Black RX, from 1988. The Americanized version of the franchise didn’t catch on like Power Rangers, with some partly blaming it on the series’s focus on a solo hero and not a team, which meant fewer merchandising opportunities. The second American adaptation, Kamen Rider Dragon Knight, arrived in 2008 and had more success, even earning an Emmy nomination for the stuntwork.
From the franchise’s beginning, Kamen Rider’s stunt work was on the cutting edge, thanks to the original Masked Rider, Hiroshi Fujioka. The actor was also an accomplished stuntman, able to play the hero and do all of his own stunt work. Unfortunately, Fujioka broke his legs in a motorcycle stunt gone wrong, forcing the producers to bring in a second Masked Rider, the character of Hayato Ichimonji, played by Takeshi Sasaki, to take over for 30 episodes. It was a strange stroke of good luck, as the concept of more super-powered riders helped expand the world and laid the groundwork for future spin-offs.
The original Kamen Rider can be streamed right now for free on Tubi if you’re curious about the start of the Japanese superhero boom. For something a bit more modern, Kamen Rider Geats, which aired last year, brings together all the past riders into one series. While the acting is incredibly corny and the special effects are delightfully low-budget, there’s a charm about the original series’ earnestness that’s missing from most low-budget sci-fi today.
Growing up in the 1970s was an amazing experience that I wouldn’t trade for anything. It was especially amazing in terms of the blatant weirdness of some of the pop culture trends. After all, the disco decade was the era of killer bees, the Bermuda Triangle, and perhaps most memorably, The Bigfoot Craze.
Bigfoot, of course, is a giant ape-like creature believed to inhabit the Pacific-Northwest, known by the name “Sasquatch” in Native-American lore. Today, we are no closer to proving Bigfoot’s existence than we were forty years ago, but the myth of the peaceful, giant creature widely persists.
The Bigfoot Craze spanned the decade of the 1970s and ultimately infiltrated every aspect of popular culture, from film to television, to children’s television, even to toys. The 1970s may have been the heyday of the Bigfoot Craze in part because of the famous — or perhaps notorious — Patterson-Gilmin film of 1967, which purported to capture real raw footage of the hairy beast.
By the early seventies, filmmakers had taken full advantage of speculation about the rarely-spotted “creature” in films such as the popular The Legend of Boggy Creek (1972), which is actually one of the few drive-in movie experiences I remember from my childhood. I vividly recall sitting up in the back-seat of our family’s green, 1969 Plymouth Barracuda when I was supposed to be asleep, and watching the “monster” attack a person who was seated on a toilet.
That film featured not Bigfoot, per se, but the Fouke Monster (or rather “Southern Sasquatch”) of Arkansas. Directed by Charles B. Pierce, The Legend of Boggy Creek was an early pseudo-documentary that “re-staged” the reported monster attacks and became a smash sensation at the box office, grossing over twenty million dollars on a budget of less than two-hundred thousand dollars. It was followed up over the years by several sequels, including Return to Boggy Creek (1977), and Boggy Creek 2 (1985).
After that, the Bigfoot floodgates were open. The years 1976 and 1977 brought to cinemas such similarly-named films such as Sasquatch: The Legend of Bigfoot (1977) directed by Ed Ragozzino, and The Legend of Big Foot (1976) directed by Harry Winer. Both efforts featured a kind of grainy, semi-documentary vibe, much like their Boggy Creek predecessors. I have vivid memories of seeing previews on television for Sasquatch in 1978 and being absolutely scared out of my wits. It’s not in the trailer I’ve posted below, but I remember a sequence where Bigfoot bursts into a log cabin in the woods, swinging open the door…
The year 1976 also brought one of the decade’s most popular iterations of the Bigfoot story. The seventeenth episode of The Six Million Dollar Man (1974 – 1978) was titled “The Secret of Bigfoot” and it featured bionic Steve Austin (Lee Majors) battling a robotic Sasquatch (Ted Cassidy) from outer space. The Bigfoot character proved so popular that he re-appeared on several follow-up episodes of both The Six-Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman. Before long, the Bionic Sasquatch was also a hot toy from Kenner.
In 1976, Sid and Marty Krofft included a segment called Bigfoot and Wildboy in their ABC Saturday morning TV series The Krofft Supershow. It graduated to its own time slot in 1979, and starred Ray Young as Bigfoot and Joseph Butcher as Wildboy. The episodes pitted the shaggy Bigfoot against vampires, aliens, and even a sinister duplicate of himself.
In April of 1977, In Search of (1976 – 1982) devoted its fifth episode to the hunt for Bigfoot, with host Leonard Nimoy recounting astounding and frightening tales of “real life” creature sightings.
Finally, I’ve always wondered if the friendly bear/ape/giant Chewbacca in Star Wars (1977) was, in some small sense, George Lucas’s acknowledgment of the Bigfoot craze that had swept the nation.
So, what was the appeal of Bigfoot, and why did this creature of folklore prove so immensely popular in the 1970s? I suspect the beast’s popularity in the disco decade had something to do with the desire to discover something new and different. Although I love the 1970s, it was a weird and disturbing decade in many ways. The Hippie movement had turned sour, thanks to the Manson “Family,” America was still embroiled in Vietnam, and trust in government fell to an all-time low thanks to President Nixon and the Watergate Scandal.
At the same time, we had an Energy Crisis and looming fears about nuclear meltdowns (like Three Mile Island in 1978). In short, the world just seemed a terrible mess in those days, and so to imagine something new and different roaming the wild forests was, in short, an appealing fantasy. Bigfoot was a creature untouched by man and therefore corruption. If he existed, then, indeed, magic and innocence could still exist too.
Source: Various
