Kikaida returns Even in Waikiki, you don't often see two red-and-blue mechanical men, much less an adoring circle of media types and fans of, let's say, a certain age, crowding the lobby of a hotel. Tourists craned their necks to see who was in the camera spotlight.
to Hawaii
The wildly popular Japanese
superhero is back after 26 years
to visit with fans at a collectors showBy Burl Burlingame
bburlingame@starbulletin.comKikaida was back in Hawaii after 26 years.
Even so, tourists scratched their heads and wondered.
"Some sort of Japanese superhero, I guess," one visitor explained to his kids, who also looked somewhat doubtful.
Only in Hawaii was Kikaida way, way huge. The name means, literally, "mechanical man," and it was a for-kids Japanese television show of the early '70s. It combined the heroic storytelling-with-a-moral of Western culture, the color and martial arts of Eastern ways, and the noise and flash of some consumer-savvy marketing.
Kikaida -- sometimes spelled "Kikaider" -- was a half-machine, half-man creation that spent most of its time as Jiro, a wandering teenage dude with a red guitar. One strum, and "Change. Switch ON! One, two, three ... Jiro, change-ee, to Ki-kaiii-idaaa!"Personal appearances by the show's stars in Hawaii regularly drew more than 10,000 fans in the early '70s. Yesterday, at the Outrigger Reef on the Beach Hotel, were Daisuke Ban, the Japanese actor who played Jiro, Kikaida's human form, and Shunsuke Ikeda, who played Kikaida 01, a kind of sequel superhero.
Two anonymous Hawaii Kikaida fans recreated the show's costumes and modeled them alongside Ban and Ikeda. They'll all appear this weekend at the 11th Annual Hawaii All-Collectors Show.
Through a translator, Ban and Ikeda indicated how pleased they were to be back in Hawaii.
"We always mention our fans in Hawaii whenever we do press conferences and interviews in Japan," said Ban. "The Hawaii fan club brought us here, and there are so many Kikaida collectors in Hawaii."
Ikeda remarked that the original Kikaida costumes were long gone, and that the reproductions were first-rate.
"A lot of the action we did ourselves, but if the stunts were too dangerous, of course we used stuntmen," he said, explaining why the original costumes wore out.
"Steven Spielberg's 'A.I.' uses many of the same issues we explored in 'Kikaida,'" said Ban. "That is, the human aspects of being a mechanical man."
And then they performed the little change-ee dance and chant, and some of the older folks in the crowd applauded in delight, while others wondered what all the fuss was about.