Japanese children's shows about superheroes fighting rubber-suit monsters. (Well, mostly children's shows.)
Tokusatsu and the language barrier.
I was watching Kamen Rider Dragonknight (an English adaption loosely based on and using footage from Kamen Rider Ryuki) and was having a hard time taking it seriously because the way the characters talked felt ridiculous and unrealistic.
Then I started thinking that regular toku probably sounds like that to Japanese adults too.
I find things seem less silly when you're reading them than hearing them said out loud.
What do you people think? Would we be able to take tokusatsu as seriously as we do if it was all in English instead of subtitled?




It's been a while since I saw Dragon Knight, but I'm used to kids' TV having unrealistic silly dialogue. I don't think I noticed it being any different from other shows.
But... yeah. Tokusatsu, and Japanese TV shows in general, tend to have pretty unrealistic dialogue. One major thing is that people use second-person pronouns waaay more often than anyone ever uses them in real life.
I think the second-person pronouns think is due to the way the Japanese language is structured.
In my opinion it's a failure of the translators if they can't/won't translate it into natural sounding English.
But I'm grateful for fansubbers work even if I don't agree with all their decisions. :)
Oh, I don't mean in the subtitles, I mean in the actual dialogue. These characters are throwing kimi and omae around like there's no tomorrow, which would get them at the very least looked at funny IRL.
I never noticed a huge difference between toku and dialogue in anime for example. Granted, I don't speak Japanese, but it doesn't really stick out to me all that much.
Not familiar with Dragon Knight, Power Rangers in particular really seems to try and make things as intentionally corny as possible, from what I can tell. (There's no way they can get such consistently bad actors year after year, it's got to be by design, right?) I almost feel like it's aimed at a younger set of children than Sentai is. I imagine some of those same factors could be at play in an adaptation of Ryuki.