Kamen Rider Wizard Head Writer Was Hesitant to Take the Job?

Tsuyoshi Kida, the writer for the upcoming Kamen Rider Wizard series, will have his chops tested in his first role as head writer of a tokusatsu series. In a recent blog entry he talks about his memories of past tokusatsu shows and reveals some surprising details regarding his decision to join Wizard as its writer.

In a recent post on his blog, Tsuyoshi Kida, head writer for Kamen Rider Wizard, reflects on his experiences with Toei and the future with Wizard. Credited as a writer on Hibiki, Kida’s tokusatsu resume is actually a fairly small one. He’s done a handful of episodes in tokusatsu before working on Kamen Rider Hibiki in 2005 – although it should be noted his work on Hibiki consists of 15 episodes, 10 of which were written alongside Shinji Ooishi, who is given the title of series composition. Since his time on Hibiki, Kida has stuck to his primary field of work, the theater. In recent years he’s done some tokusatsu related works in the form of stage shows and even wrote the Pirate Sentai Gokaiger – Let’s Make it Flashy! 36 Round Gokai Change! Super Video release for Gokaiger. Kida remarks that he’s been busy preparing for Wizard since the start of the year and just finished the first script in June. While things are going along at a smooth pace now, he mentioned that he wasn’t keen on the idea of doing another Kamen Rider show at first. Reflecting on his time on Gingaman and Hibiki, he felt as if the producer’s influence was too strong and that he wasn’t able to impart his own voice onto the various shows (the shows he’s worked on, Gingaman, Kuuga, and Hibiki all featured the same producer). It’s likely that his experience with Kamen Rider Wizard producer, Takaaki Utsunomiya, who also worked on Shinkenger and Gokaiger, on the Gokaiger Super Video special created a solid relationship between the two. Serious work on Wizard was likely to have begun while Gokaiger was reaching its end game in the final months of 2011, and as Kida remarks that he’s been preparing since the start of this year, Utsunomiya seems to have quelled his fears that he won’t have any narrative freedom. Even though he isn’t sure what’s in store for the future, he urges fans to encourage him throughout the year as his first head role with a tokusatsu series begins.

While fans were excited to hear that a writer from Hibiki was coming back to Kamen Rider, it was sort of out of context. The Kida we’ve seen before was a man writing under the heavy influence of a different producer. With Kida and Utsunomiya seeming to have a stronger work relationship than Kida has had with producers in the past, we’ll likely be seeing a Kamen Rider series where the writer has a lot of input and will be able to really forge the world as he sees it.

Source: RisingSunTokusatsu