Kamen Rider Super-1

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
Super 1 and his rather pimped out ride

Kamen Rider Super-1 was the seventh Kamen Rider series lasting from 1980-1981. The titular Rider is Kazuya Oki, an astronaut who is rebuilt by NASA into "Super-1", as a space exploration and development cyborg without the need for bulky external gear. But the Dogma terrorist group sends a spy to infiltrate NASA. After seeing Super-1 put though the tests. Dogma resolves to steal the technology for themselves. When they're unable to do this they decide to kill everyone involved with Super-1 instead. Unbeknownst to them there is one survivor. Unable to transform of his own volition, Kazuya escapes to Japan, where he trains in martial arts, eventually using it to replace the external henshin command - and getting some fighting skill in the process.

Now not so much a dude with a built-in spacesuit as a force of two-fisted[1] justice, he goes after Dogma.

He fights Jin Dogma, a second group, later on.

Tropes used in Kamen Rider Super-1 include:


  • Arm Cannon: Green Hand is a pair of Flame Thrower and Ice Thrower. Blue Hand is Thunder shooter.
  • Artistic License Martial Arts: Avoided when possible - the Sekishin-Shourinken[2], while invented for the show, is as efficient as they can make it.
  • Bare-Fisted Monk: Yes, Super-1 has the Five Hand System, and yes, he's a cyborg on a bike. But he doesn't actually need them. This guy learned how to transform by beating his way through a hundred martial artists...
  • Battle Amongst the Flames: The first fight in the series amid the exploding NASA base.
  • Cool Bike: Super-1 actually has two bikes - a Suzuki and a Harley Davidson, the "Blue Version" and the "V-Machine" respectively. The Blue Version is better at rough roads and general agility, while the V-Machine is better at flat-out speed and can transform into the even faster "V-Jet".
  • Dangerously Genre Savvy: Dogma destroys Kazuya's Transformation Trinket in the first episode.
  • Don't Think, Feel: Kazuya learns much of his fighting skills in such a way.
  • Do-It-Yourself Theme Tune: Shunsuke Takasugi sings the opening and first ending, as well as a few image songs - apparently, he wanted to be a singer growing up.
  • Dropped a Bridge on Him: Master Genkai Roshi, unlike Benkei (see below), dies a very anticlimatic death moments later, he trips over an explosion caused by Kaiser Crow (Terror Macro) and dies. You don't even think he's dead until you see Kazuya's reaction to this.
  • Dying Moment of Awesome: Benkei, the other Badass Normal in Kazuya's martial arts school, saves him from some Dogma archers, however, this causes him to take a lot of arrows, which kill him.
  • Fire, Ice, Lightning: If the Five Hand System doesn't utilize Power Fist, it utilizes this.
  • Name's the Same: Astronaut who learns martial arts whose given name is Kazuya? He doesn't exactly run on The Power Of Love, though just as much of a Badass. Oh, both of them likes to get chop-sockey too.
  • Power Fist/Swiss Army Appendage: The Five Hand System Super 1 uses is an example.
  • Shooting Superman: Akuma Teitoku's[3] final plan to kill Super-1? He locks him in a sealed room and sucks out all the air, therefore suffocating him to death. This lasts for all of 3 minutes, since Super-1 was originally built to do stuff in the vacuum of space, ya dope!
  • Shown Their Work: Informed that the show was going to have a heavy martial arts theme, the face actor[4] and the suit actor[5] trained in kung fu to get the Sekishin-Shourinken to come across properly.
  • Transformation Trinket: Not a trinket per se, but NASA's computers served the same function, until they were destroyed.
  • What Do You Mean It Wasn't Made on Drugs?: Granted, the past shows had some really odd looking monsters here and there, but this show had their villains head in to some really, really, really weird directions.
  • What Kind of Lame Power Is Heart, Anyway?: Gold Hand. It serves as a radar, which won't be useful in fights. Subverted that the only thing to make it useful is combat is to use it as a rocket launcher.
  • You No Take Candle: Americans speaking Japanese and not much English?
  1. and legged!
  2. "Red Heart-style Shaolin Kung Fu
  3. literally 'Demon Admiral'
  4. who was chosen for the role partly due to being a former Land SDF Ranger
  5. who was basically every Rider except Riderman