User reviews

This may be the greatest TV show ever made. It is a SCIFI Western Noir detective show with martial arts and a lot of explosions. Did I mention the flying car and a super suit that can crush it's user in minutes? Action, mystery, intrigue and beautiful Japanese women are all in this tokusatsu action show.

Also my kids love Zubat! He is a true selfless hero. One for the ages.

If you like old western movies or TV series you'd enjoy this series which though it takes place in modern Japan features characters who dress and behave as if living in the American west of the 1800s.

This is also a great series for fans of Miyauchi Hiroshi (Kazami Shiro in Kamen Rider V3 and the blue ranger in Goranger) who plays private detective Hayakawa Ken and the whip whielding hero Kaiketsu Zubat.

Kyo Kensuke's wonderful music is reminiscent of the western movies this series is patterned after.

Of mixing two things that, apparently, have nothing to do one with each other, meaning the western storytelling taken from stuff like the Jonah Hex Comics by Michael Fleisher during his tenure on the character in the same era this show was produced (even the constant strapping/maiming/trapping of Hex is reproduced here) and the henshin hero antics typical of the Kamen Rider, Ultraman and Super Sentais, in particular of the latter's abortive second iteration JAKQ Dengekitai from which it is taken not only the scheme of the fights but also the crudest of the stuff like the villains trafficking in drugs and humans, children with suicide bombs, fathers taking a shotgun to kill their sons etc. (the reason why the ratings were awful and the series was cancelled, if you ask me). Flawed because, albeit this time luckily there is no ubermegaipergigacrappy Big One in sight due to Hiroshi Miyauchi already being busy in the pants of the main protagonist, the more time it passes the more it becomes clear the two halves don't mesh particularly well and you have the impression that the henshin hero part was forced by Toei on Ishinomori while he was more interested in making a fully-blown western toku with no henshin hero in sight. It also gets a bit boring the more time it passes, even discounting the fact that this is a showa era show and you must watch it accordingly to the showa standards (particularly concerning the repetition, something that plagued the Jonah Hex comics too from a certain point on). As a side note, it's interesting to note that this so-much-lauded and nonsensically overhyped "masterpiece" by a certain kind of toku aficionados (the ones who hate the Maestro Toshiki Inoue for his 70's shoujo sensibilities) apparently had the same stuff Inoue applies to his output, meaning...you guessed it, a love triangle, an innuendo of the 70's shoujo mixture of love and hate, people talking about dating and marriage. So Inoue haters love the same stuff Inoue does (even if he does it ten times better at least) and all they need to do it is the name of the granfather of the Toei tokus on it! Unbelievable.