Director Junya Okabe
Starring Sarah Zeemá, Roberta Sparta, Grant Gerber, Yvonne Lu & Antuone Torbert
Score 3/6

How many people out there watched Power Rangers episodes in either the 90’s or 00’s? For the record I did during high school. Well at least until I was about 15. I found Power Rangers to be boringly addictive.

A few days ago, I was told about a new series called BLADER and the first four episodes of a planned fourteen episodes as well an episode zero (prequel episode) are currently up on YouTube, each episode is around fourteen minutes long except for the prequel episode which is about twenty-four minutes long. Junya Okabe the man responsible for the short Cat Shit One and the fan film Zatoichi vs Predator wrote and directed BLADER.
I am sure you all remember that with every episode, producers took footage they shoot with English speaking actors and spliced in previously shot action sequences that used Japanese actors. Well girls and boys BLADER is taking this style of television production to the digital age through a process that has been dubbed “Visual Localization”. Currently on YouTube there are two different versions of BLADER Japanese and American. Through “Visual Localization” producers digitally switched out Japanese speaking actors for English Speaking actors while keeping the action sequences. It appears that “Visual Localization” has also been done for a Chinese version of BLADER.

The premise of the show is that a battle suit piloted by a child supported by team assembled by the scientist who developed the battle suit is what stands between an Evil Artificial Intelligence stranded on the moon and its plans for world domination.

Now I have watched the English version and yes this is another example where the services of ‘Rent-a-Kid’ would have come in handy. Would I watch this if I had kids? Perhaps, I’d probably even watch it from time to time if I had any younger nephews or nieces who liked the show, so I would know the right toy to buy. I was completely unfamiliar with any of the actors, but I felt that their performances did come across as being emotionally flat. This flatness is what really bugged me about the introduction of the character Williams. Even though I don’t speak a word of Japanese I watched the first episode of the Japanese version and re-watched the first episode of the English version and paused between the two, it would have been great if the subtitles where not auto-generated by YouTube. To me it seemed that the Japanese actors seemed to be putting more of an effort into their performances. In each version of the first episode, I also noticed some differences in the costume choices for some of the extras.
I loved the concept of the battle suit and how the pilot has 200 seconds to defeat the monster and the transformation of the pilot into the battle suit clearly took a leaf out of the Power Rangers playbook. Come to think of it there where a lot shows that did a similar transformation process. The concept for the lead henchman Socket (he might be the source of one or two nightmares) is remarkably interesting. Visually how BLADER was shot immediately reminded me of the Canadian Science-Fiction Fantasy show Sanctuary.
As for Charlie Parra, the man who wrote BLADER’S theme music. Bravo Sir.

Questions where posed in Episode 0 that probably wont be answered until the fourteenth episode. I might have to keep an eye on this and see how things turn out.