Kamen Rider: Dragon Knight is an American science fiction superhero television series that originally aired on The CW, as part of the CW4Kids programming block, from December 13, 2008 to December 26, 2009. It is an adaptation of the Japanese tokusatsu show Kamen Rider Ryuki and is the second installment in the Kamen Rider franchise to be adapted for American audiences after Saban's Masked Rider in 1995. The series was developed for television by Steve and Michael Wang and produced by Jimmy Sprague through Adness Entertainment.
Differences between the Japanese series and the American series.[]
As the idea is to imitate the Power Rangers franchise, so the Japanese series that has a dark plot was changed to something more child-friendly. The Japanese plot went like this: A mysterious character created Kamen Riders just so they would get into a fight to the death with each other and with the monsters. Each of them was aided by a thematic monster which they took control of, but the first few episodes showed that if the transformation device was destroyed and not the rider. The monster would kill the rider, and at the end of the episode the Kamen Rider Knight who was Ryuki's ally for a long time wanted to kill him just because now he's the last one left. In the film that serves as the final alternate episode, they didn't become enemies, but a dark copy of Ryuki emerged that they had to face. In the American version, the Kamen riders were not made to fight, they had their powers stolen and given to other characters by a villain who commanded the monsters. The objects of transformation were either given to criminal characters or to deceived characters to help them, who when they discovered the truth, joined the heroes. The heroes were Wing Knight (the equivalent of Knight) who was the one who kept the powers, and by Dragon Knight (the equivalent of Ryuki) who accidentally got involved in the story. In the American version the monsters that helped the Kamen Riders were robots, and although they only helped the character who had the transformation object, they didn't turn against him when he lost the object. In this version the attacks that defeated the Kamen Rider did not kill him but left him trapped in the Advent Void, something like an alternate dimension, they were released when the story was ending. The true owners of the powers regained them in this ending, and the characters were shown helping each other to convey the idea that they shouldn't be enemies. The scenes in which the dark version of Dragon Knight faced the characters appeared as nightmares in which the Dragon Knight was bad, and the dragon knight himself had these dreams. When the black armor appeared and gained an owner it was established that it was just a coincidence that it looked like the armor the hero saw in his dreams.