Masato Shimon -- Let's Go! Rider Kick! (Theme from Kamen Rider)



As kids, my brother and I were huge into the Japanese kaiju movies such as Godzilla, Rodan and Mothra (discovered The Peanuts that way), and then when we actually traveled to Japan and spent several days on my grandfather's farm in Wakayama Prefecture, we also took a liking to some of the live-action superhero shows. Of course, there was the "Ultraman"series, but a close second was "Kamen Rider"(仮面ライダー...The Masked Rider). If the English translation sounds familiar to you, there was an adaptation of some of the adventures of recent incarnations of the insectoid motorcycle-riding hero in the United States and Canada several years ago done "Power Rangers"style.

To continue to show my aging process, I will let you know that we watched the very first Kamen Rider during our first Japanese summer in 1972 as we saw reruns in the afternoon (the show had premiered the year before). I got a handbook of sorts of the super bug, and my brother got a costume of the Rider (Halloween trick or treating that year earned my brother quite a few weird looks....I guess parents had never seen a cycle-riding bug with a ventilation fan for a belt before....go fig). And the both of us got a 45 rpm compilation record of superhero theme songs. The first track was the legendary theme for the first Kamen Rider.

For me, "Let's Go! Rider Kick!"still stands as the coolest theme song for a live-action Japanese superhero (although the theme for Ultra Seven is pretty good, too). Sung by Masato Shimon (子門真人） who also sang the theme for "Gatchaman"（ガッチャマン） and one of the biggest hits in Japanese pop music history, "Oyoge Taiyaki-kun!"（およげ！たいやきくん）, he, for some reason, sang it under the pseudonym of  Koichi Fuji（藤浩一）. I remember dancing, jumping and kicking to the theme song with its staccato horn intro and the defiant tones of Shimon-san....also remember getting yelled at by Mom when I started wrecking some of the breakables in the apartment. Still, a great song since the arrangement sounds perfect for a rumbling motorcycle racing on the roads in the early 70s.