Five of the Super Riders (found Taiwanese adaptation of "5 Riders vs King Dark" film; 1976)
The Taiwanese theatrical poster.
Status: Found
Date found: 03 Mar 2020
Found by: 文彥
The Five of Super Riders (閃電五騎士 Shǎn Diàn Wǔ Qí Shì, lit. "The Five Lightning Riders") was a Taiwanese adaptation of the Kamen Rider movie Five Riders vs King Dark and the first episodes of Kamen Rider X released on January 23rd, 1976.
Genesis
In 1975, the Japanese TV and film studio Toei Company licensed out 4 of their Kamen Rider featurettes originally released on Toei's manga fair Toei Manga Matsuri and a handful of suits to Taiwanese film studio Tong Hsing Film Co., Ltd. to create 3 movie adaptations for the international market.[1]
The three movies were
- The Super Rider V3 (adaptation of Kamen Rider V3 and the movie Kamen Rider V3 vs Destron Mutants), released on November 11, 1975.
- The Five of Super Riders (adaptation of Kamen Rider X and the movie The Five Riders vs King Dark), released on January 23, 1976.
- The Super Rider (adaptation of Kamen Rider vs. Shocker and Kamen Rider vs. Hell Ambassador), released on July 17, 1976.
These adaptations had new footage shot with Taiwanese actors replacing the Japanese cast, not unlike the Power Rangers franchise, and changed the plots to them to form a film trilogy. Notable changes included Riderman being turned into a female character and the character Garagaranda being a separate monster instead of Ambassador Hell's monster form in this film series.
Premise
The 5 great Super Riders must team up to stop the evil world domination plot of Emperor Chi Wu and his monster army.
Availability
While the first and third movies can be found in their entirety online and on DVD and Blu-Ray releases due to their German and French releases, the second movie, Five of the Super Riders, never saw a wide international release. It was released in South Korea sometime in the late 1980s as part of the direct-to-video three-episode series 번개기사5형제 (English: The 5 Lightning Rider Brothers), where each episode is the Korean dub of each Super Riders movie with Five of the Super Riders being the first episode, and in and Latin America under the titles Karatekas del Espacio (English: Space Karatekas) and Los Supermanes De La Galaxia (English:The Supermen Of The Galaxy). The Latin Spanish dub is now lost while the South Korean version has recently been uploaded in its entirety, with user 흑연마왕 uploading all three episodes of the Super Riders movies' Korean dubs on YouTube throughout May and April 2022[2][3][4].
The movie's Taiwanese cut was re-released on April 16th, 1987, and has allegedly been released several times on VHS.
On March 8th, 2020, the original Taiwanese cut was finally made available on YouTube by user 文彥.[5]
While The Five of Super Riders was the last movie of the trilogy to be found, it is the only one in which the original Mandarin version is fully available, as the Mandarin versions of The Super Rider V3 and The Super Rider are still "lost", outside of their considerably shorter and much more known German and French dubs, where only a few clips from the original cut of The Super Rider are available through ChanWeiMan1828's upload from June 17, 2012.[6]
Gallery
Five of Super Riders Lobby Card.
Hong Kong Five of Super Riders poster.
Latin American Five of the Super Riders poster.
South Korean VHS of the first episode of 번개기사5형제 (The Five Super Riders).
