Mighty Morphin’ childhood : constructions of boyhoods through American adaptations of Japanese television franchise Kamen Rider

Despite the name-recognition and profitability enjoyed by Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers (1993-1996), adapted from live-action Japanese television franchise Super Sentai (1975 onwards), the closely related Japanese boys' superhero franchise Kamen Rider is largely unknown in anglophone countries such as America, Australia, or the United Kingdom. Kamen Rider has been adapted into English twice (in 1995 and 2008), both using the same method as the Power Rangers franchise. This adaptation method involves combining sections of pre-existing Japanese footage with newly filmed footage to create a distinct programme. Neither adaptation of Kamen Rider achieved high ratings or commercial success.
The first purpose of this thesis is to interrogate the failure of the anglophone adaptations of Japanese boys’ superhero franchise Kamen Rider to achieve popularity comparable to that of closely related adaptation Power Rangers. Through comparative analysis of the Japanese source texts and their anglophone adaptations, reading the texts within their broader historical and cultural contexts, the second purpose of this study is to identify the profound ways that cultural constructions of childhood and representations of masculinity deviate between these texts. I examine the anglophone Kamen Rider adaptations to perform readings of childhood, boyhood, and other cultural identities and their representation through a transcultural lens.
Why was one franchise so popular (and so controversial) while the other remains obscure? What can this contrasting reception reveal about the relationship between cultural identities such as boyhood, representational practices, and transcultural flows of children’s media? My textual analysis of Kamen Rider’s anglophone adaptations reveals pleasures present in the Japanese texts that are absent from the anglophone: the pleasures of ambiguity and grotesquery; of homosocial intimacy; of a relationship of mutual closeness with mothers; of a carnivalesque mode that valorises the disruption of hierarchies and the nowness of childhood; and of the masochistic pleasures of melodrama. In answer to the question of what it is that adults are demanding of boys through these anglophone texts, I conclude that boys are being asked to close off parts of themselves and to reject the pleasures I have identified in the Japanese source texts. The anglophone adaptations strip away intimacy, emotion, and ambiguity and instead reinforce a constrained and reactive construction of masculinity.
This thesis makes three original contributions to knowledge. The first significant contribution is that it is the first detailed examination of Kamen Rider to be written in English. Kamen Rider has been a ubiquitous presence in Japanese children’s media scapes since 1971. It is a culturally and commercially significant property not only in Japan but elsewhere in Asia, South America, and some European countries. Although the focus of this thesis is on the anglophone adaptations and broader anglophone context, my analysis of the Japanese Kamen Rider texts will introduce the franchise and its significance to a wider readership.
The second significant contribution this thesis makes is its explication of the ways in which societal beliefs about childhood impact television content produced for children, developing a reading methodology that has broad applicability for the transcultural study of children's media. Despite the dominant focus on media effects and violence in contemporaneous criticism of Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers, my research uncovers the centrality of broader debates around masculinity and power to the discomfort the programme provoked in many adults in the 1990s. The backlash against Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers’ representations of gender and power in turn influenced how these themes were addressed in the 1995 adaptation of Kamen Rider. The 2008 adaptation carries these themes into the new millennium, nostalgically attempting to create a story of clear-cut heroic American masculinity from a Japanese text primarily concerned with exploring the porous nature of the boundary between hero and monster.
Finally, the adaptation decisions I identify and contextualise within their respective transcultural contact moments illuminate what adults are asking of boys through what is transposed and what is supressed. Texts created for boys are an important focus of the emerging field of boys studies, and this thesis both contributes to and extends that field with its transcultural focus. Kamen Rider, as a collection of transcultural boys’ texts inherently concerned with violence, monstrosity, homosociality, and heroism, has historical and ongoing salience to fears of, and for, boys. Boys’ entertainment media circulated transculturally does not only act as a mirror to its audience, but also evokes shadows of alternative possibilities through the glimpses it offers of other cultures and ways of thinking and being. Picking up the shards broken in translation thus critically informs how anglophone boyhoods have been constructed in and through entertainment media.