This… is likely a really bad idea, to respond to these sort of things. I know what sort of place these forums are. I know you'll later on come after me in other ways, make me out to look even worse. You'll say my responding makes me look worse. I'm agreeing, it might. I'm admitting to taking great risk by replying and knowing it.
But every so often there are large misunderstandings from people who weren’t there during the creation of “Farewell, FamiKamen Rider”, didn’t watch the movie, didn’t watch our commentaries, etc. I’m seeing new discussion pop up this week in light of about 28,000 new people seeing Justin’s story and learning what the FamiKamen Rider is and what our movie made for him was after I just made a video thanking Toei for making Kamen Rider Ex-Aid, because it’s something Justin would have loved.
It seems that the post from UglyOldJafar is someone who perhaps didn’t see Justin’s original videos, or didn’t hear anything we said about the production of the project. Most of these things I’m writing are things we’ve stated elsewhere, such as in our commentary track. We had access to photos, music, concept art, and other early drafts and episode synopses of many of Justin’s proposed episodes for his mini-series. It’s true that this movie is not 100% what he wanted, but that was literally impossible to accomplish when Justin was not alive to do these things. Justin was going to have to be between three to four different characters at once, being JewWario, Yanki J, NegaDub, and possibly the re-animated version of his first version of the FamiKamen Rider suit which he was naming GAW (Game & Watch). There was literally no way to bring back NegaDub without it actually being Justin. So when the last thing you see of NegaDub in Justin’s original cannon is him being defeated, for our purposes, it was better to just leave it as is.
We attempted to utilize as many ideas otherwise as we possibly could have without having Justin here. For example, Yanki J was always intended to become the SuFami Rider. This was teased in videos that Justin already had online, and was confirmed in early scripts and episode synopses. Our only difference was that we’d already made a suit for SuFami before someone had sent us pictures of what Justin originally intended him to look like. Really, we weren’t that far off. The similarities include a long coat/tails similar to Kamen Rider Wizard, and some sort of big stick to swing. But while our version used Super Famicom color schemes, it turned out Justin’s original costume was to be all white and closely resembling Sadamitsu the Destroyer. That was the largest difference, and really more of an accident since we didn’t have images to go on until the production of our movie was almost over. For that reason, we included those very same production photos of Justin himself in his white costume during the creation of that costume in the ending credits of our movie. We didn’t want that to go unseen.
In Justin’s original series, Mark and Samantha Fujita were intended to both play villain characters. Samantha’s character was meant to be something of an evil lolita character (Samantha already has those kind of outfits). But they were also meant to actually physically be in Colorado to film. Justin ran out of money and couldn’t get anyone out to film (that included me, the week we were supposed to film my parts). However, I managed to include the both of them still. In Justin’s original WaRiOn series and the introduction of the FamiKamen Rider, Shigeru Miyamoto gives JewWario the equipment to be able to fight, eventually turning him into the FamiKamen Rider. For that reason, we cast Mark as Shigeru Miyamoto. Samantha’s part remained relatively similar. While we, too, could not afford to fly anyone out to us, we had a local friend Caley Richardson play as the suit actress for Tsunemi, the lead female villain for the movie, and had Samantha voice act over her so that she could continue to fulfill a similarly intended role Justin had in mind for her.
There’s a large and important reason why the characters of MarzGurl and Chris go through a restaurant to talk to Shigeru Miyamoto. Justin largely insisted that his character go into a restaurant and eat all the time (even against the suggestions of some people who were trying to help him write his scripts at the time, as some felt there was never a solidified reason why the character kept doing that). The restaurant was supposed to be where he would meet my character, who would somehow manage to give overly wise advice to JewWario time and again. For that reason, it was really important that we got a restaurant into the movie where we would go and find a secret, remote location to get advice from someone wiser than us. Thus, we go through a restaurant to get to Shigeru Miyamoto who sent us on a much longer mission.
I’d received confirmation from others who were working with Justin on his original project that there had largely been talk of having the villains work for SEGA. That seemed like the logical direction to take the project to begin with. So, there you have it. Justin at some point wanted SEGA involvement, and that’s what we gave it.
The original trick team that Justin was working with reached out to me and wanted to help. But there was no way to fly them out to San Antonio and get the choreography down. If I could have afforded them, I would have. But that was impossible.
There are parts we wanted to use and tried to get, but couldn’t. You can see photos of props and costume pieces during the closing credits of the movie as created by Featherweight. I’d asked people close to the project if they were able to locate or acquire these pieces so that we could use them, but they never fell into our hands. The best we could do without these creations and with no money is create cheap black-and-white knock-offs that kinda-sorta looked bug-like in nature. And past that, the only thing we could do was show these photos and the concept art for the armor during the credits.
The song playing during the ending credits, Ready To Brave, was not a song we composed. It was composed specifically for Justin’s original miniseries. There was originally supposed to be another vocalist, but my understanding was that it would have been difficult, to say the least, to get her to want to return to do the vocals. So I filled in with them, only because I was running out of options. I’d considered composing a Miku Hatsune version of the lyrics, but ran out of time to do that, too. It was just faster and easier for me to do the vocals, even with my own dissatisfaction with it. But that composition was absolutely intended to be used for Justin’s original project (the opening theme, I believe).
In regards to Doctor Holocaust, that clip at the beginning of the movie most certainly was not invented just for the movie. That’s an actual clip of Justin inside that FamiKamen Rider suit. It’s from a video that Conal MacBeth (Doctor Holocaust), Justin, and myself made in 2012 while we were in Guelph, Ontario, Canada as guests at Con-G. Make no mistake, Conal and Justin were friends. The naming scheme of Doctor Holocaust up against a guy who named himself JewWario was absolutely unfortunate, sure. But perhaps you should have seen some of the videos we made leading up to our appearances at Con-G. Conal had no idea who we were, but Justin reached out to me and asked me to make a fun video with him where the two of us called out Doctor Holocaust because he’d made a video promoting all the other guests of Con-G, except for us. Justin was fake-mad, not because of a guy named Doctor Holocaust, but because we weren’t mentioned in his silly video promoting the convention, and Conal wasn’t even actually a representative of the con. The whole thing was a joke. Conal’s response was to make a Doctor Holocaust video responding to us and saying there’d be a battle, but he also said something to the effect of, “Look, I know what my namesake sounds like, but I wasn’t trying to fight a guy with the name JewWario.” Again, the whole thing was a big joke.
We filmed this fight video, as I said, in February 2012. But the video didn’t come out for quite some time. In fact, Conal didn’t end up releasing the fight video until after Justin passed away in early 2014. This meant that the very last footage of the FamiKamen Rider to come out, that would have actually been cannon, was this fight footage against Doctor Holocaust. In that video, a news reporter says that the bodies are never found. This is what gave us our only possible opportunity to create something that would actually feasibly exist within Justin’s cannon. After all, how else do we explain that Justin is not here to be the FamiKamen Rider? From all of the meetings we had with as many people as humanly possible, there’s simply no way to recast the FamiKamen Rider, and we had no intention of passing the suit on to some other person. That was NOT Justin’s wishes. He was absolutely not here to designate someone to pass the torch on to. FamiKamen Rider is JewWario. JewWario is Justin. We did what we had to do in having Matt Burkett do the suit acting for the FamiKamen Rider (and Yanki J inside of the SuFami suit, too), but we were absolutely not willing to give it to anybody else after that. It’s why we wrote Chris as turning down an offer to be a new hero in the name of Nintendo. This movie was not intended to glorify anybody else but Justin in the process.
If you want to get mad at Conal for having the name Doctor Holocaust to begin with, I guess you can. You wouldn’t be the only one to do it. For many years, he defended the name as being “A” holocaust, not “THE” holocaust. However, about a week or so ago, he actually finally “killed” Doctor Holocaust off in the first of a two-part video, telling his audience that he has heard and understood the many complaints he’s had on the name for years. My understanding is that the second part of this two-parter coming out next month or so will be the character coming back to life with a new name. I don’t know that that changes anything. All the same, be real, friends. Again, Conal and Justin were friends. You don’t have any room at all to be angry at the two of them fighting each other when this is something Justin actually wanted to do with Conal. You didn’t see how happy he was, or how much fun he had making that fight video. He was all smiles, and the set up to it was all jokes. This entertained the living hell out of Justin. If you’re going to be mad that the FamiKamen Rider’s body was missing, well, I guess you’d better be mad at Justin, too, for agreeing to the writing of the fight.
I suppose you can say he “died” if you want. We were really careful to not say anybody died. Certainly, his body was missing. But in watching the movie, his essence absolutely is not dead. It’s been inside the FamiKamen Rider cartridge for three years. If you want to say, “STFU, that just means he’s dead,” fine, go ahead. That wasn’t what we said, but okay. Now, it was our every intention to keep what actually happened to Justin separate from the events of the movie, aside from deciding that we were saying goodbye to the character. For that reason, we never used the name “Justin” out loud in the movie, in order to separate Justin the real person from “JewWario” the fictional character. But because of that, one critique that Linkara gave us was that we should have used Justin’s name because Justin was JewWario, and JewWario was Justin. And that’s fair criticism, because despite the fact that JewWario had funny scripted and absurd things happen to him, he still had other characters occasionally call him Justin (Yanki J often called JewWario “Justin”). While fiction happened to JewWario, real life often seeped in, because Justin was just a real, down-to-earth sort of guy. So, ultimately, this is a decision that was never going to please everybody. Do you acknowledge what actually happened to the real life human being, or don’t you? In our opinion, we believe that we did the least angering thing by saying goodbye to the character but not directly addressing the real world suicide. But, again, you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t, I suppose.
To suggest we “looted his corpse” is also something of a misnomer. We haven’t made a dime off this movie. We specifically did NOT want to earn any money either on the production or the distribution of the movie. Some people donated a little money. MAYBE $200. The rest of the donations were in props and costume pieces. And past that, we dug ourselves into great debt trying to finish what we could, buying costume pieces and props, because we didn’t want to make people feel like they had to contribute more money to a project that so many people already gave $10,000 to. I don’t know what happened to that money. We did not have access to that IndieGoGo, nor did we have access to those funds when the decision was made to make the movie. We did the whole thing by the seat of our pants, when several, several, several people came to me and asked me if I would do something with Justin’s work. I don’t know why they asked me. I don’t know what made me qualified. I certainly didn’t feel qualified. But I DID feel like people deserved to get something after they gave $10k and we all knew they weren’t going to get anything for it. And furthermore, there was a strong desire on my part to allow something of Justin’s original ideas to make it out into the world, even if he wasn’t there to finish it. No one else was going to do it. We did. And we did it on mostly our own cash, cash we really weren’t in a position to be able to afford to spend. We turned off ad revenue on everything involving FamiKamen Rider, including vlogs about how people could help on the production, trailers, and the movie itself. I’ll repeat, WE DON’T MAKE MONEY ON FAMIKAMEN RIDER. It’s part of the reason why we haven’t sold DVDs of the movie yet, despite people asking for it, because we haven’t rightly figured out how to print them and come precisely to cost (or keep from going into debt in the process). We do NOT want to earn money on DVD sales. Our next decision has been that, if we were to ever print DVDs, any extra money we’d ever make on them would just go directly to charity, likely for suicide awareness. But we’ve just never figured the whole thing out.
Now, not liking the movie, that’s something you’re absolutely allowed to do. There are PLENTY of parts of our own movie that I don’t like. I wish that it wasn’t made under the circumstances it was. In fact, I wish we weren’t even put in a position where there was any thought that a movie needed to be made at all. I wish Justin was here. I wish he had made his original series. I wish we’d had more money. I wish we’d had more time. We made the movie with no money and with all of our cameos done from a distance in under six months. This was NOT a Channel Awesome movie. This movie did NOT have large scale crowdfunding. We were in a race against time to make a deadline for MAGFest 2015, like we’d been asked by members of MAGFest staff. I wish I wasn’t acting in it. You can complain about my acting, and you know what, you’re right to do so. I’m not good at it. I hardly even like it. I simply did what I had to do, especially since “MarzGurl” was right there in that fight alongside the FamiKamen Rider against Doctor Holocaust. We did what we felt we could with the cannon that already existed. It wasn’t the way we wanted it. But we did the best we could. You don’t know how many hours we poured over his old material to make sure we didn’t contradict what Justin had already established, or how long we judged what we wrote against what Justin’s plan for his series was.
Will “Farewell, FamiKamen Rider” ever be Justin’s original miniseries? No. That will never exist. And it breaks my heart that it won’t. But to say we didn’t do absolutely everything we reasonably could within our human power to make sure we utilized everything of his we had until there was nothing left, then… well, you just weren’t there to know.
And Marvin, those are not JewWario's games being sold. The FamiKamen Rider cartridge rocketed off into the sky from Canada and is supposed to have landed here in San Antonio, where we made the movie, admittedly for the ease of our filming the movie. Justin did not live in San Antonio. Both he and his characters were located in Colorado Springs, Colorado. It is never to be insinuated that all of the games in that box are Justin's, only the FamiKamen Rider cartridge. In fact, all of those games are mine.
Thank you. I'll accept any and all berating and punishment from this point forward. Aside from that, I make no assumption that our movie is good. It isn't, and neither am I. But the details of the creation of the movie should absolutely be clarified.
