Nathan Long

Novelist and screenwriter Nathan Long served as lead writer on Kamen Rider Dragon Knight, the 2009 American adaptation of Kamen Rider Ryuki produced by Steve Wang and Mike Wang. He discussed the job twice on the record: once during the show’s original run, walking through how he landed the project, and again after the series wrapped, answering fan-submitted questions about the constraints and backstory the aired episodes never had room to explain.

Long’s path to television ran through prose fiction first. He had written several Warhammer novels for Black Library’s Blackhearts and Gotrek and Felix lines, plus assorted tie-in fiction and one game module, alongside a small number of screen credits including Guyver: Dark Hero, co-written with longtime collaborator Steve Wang. That earlier partnership is the direct reason he ended up on Dragon Knight: Wang called him and asked if he wanted to head-write the show. Long came onto the project after the pilot had already been shot, inheriting Wang’s concept of a group of Riders from a world called Ventara, defeated before the series begins, set against a second group of Earth-based Riders recruited by the villain Xaviax.

His job from there was making that premise hold together across forty episodes, reconciling existing Ryuki action footage with an entirely different plot. Episodes where two Riders fought side by side one week and tried to kill each other the next had to be explained after the fact through in-story loyalties and rivalries invented to fit footage already shot for a different story. Long was blunt about why the show leaned on reused footage rather than filming original action: budget, plus name recognition an all-new American series wouldn’t have had. Within that constraint, the writing team deliberately avoided a straight translation of Ryuki’s plot, partly because American children’s television couldn’t carry over the original’s more violent Rider-War concept, and partly because they wanted the show to come from their own ideas rather than read as a diluted copy. He and the Wangs pushed back against network requests to lighten the tone or add more comedy, arguing Kamen Rider had never been built as a bouncy team show in the Power Rangers mold, and that the Ryuki footage itself didn’t support that kind of story.

Asked about the cast, Long singled out two performers by name: Matt Mullins, who played Len, and William O’Leary, who played Xaviax. He praised Mullins for growing into the role as the show progressed, and O’Leary for both his performance and for mentoring the newer actors on set; he separately credited O’Leary with helping bring Carrie Reichenbach into the series as Kase. He also noted that Mike Moh, cast primarily for his acting rather than any fight background, turned out to have real martial-arts ability the production put to use. On his own process, Long described writing daily with tea and a Conan soundtrack running in the background, and offered a short set of rules he said he’d written down for a nephew: write every day, finish what you start, listen to real feedback, read widely, expect and push through rejection, and build relationships with the people who actually buy scripts, something he admitted he’d neglected early in his own career.

By the time the series had finished airing, Long’s answers turned mostly on the same constraint he’d flagged from the start: money and time. Dragon Knight ran on roughly half the per-episode budget of a typical Power Rangers episode, shot in three days rather than the usual six, and he said that gap shaped nearly every creative choice the writing team made. He filled in backstory the aired episodes never had time for, including the Onyx Deck’s origin as a prototype Eubulon had been developing before his exile from Ventara, and the full account of Adam’s betrayal: a sixty-three-year gap since Ventara’s original war, the Riders’ rotating suspended-animation shifts, and how Xaviax exploited Adam’s grief over a lost love to turn him into an unwitting collaborator.

Long was direct about the show’s most criticized structural choice, its three clip-show episodes, including the finale: a deliberate trade-off, concentrating a fixed, underfunded budget into thirty-seven stronger episodes and absorbing the difference with compilations, treating episode 39 as the true finale and episode 40 as an epilogue. Several ambitious storylines, among them a full-episode return to a devastated Ventara and an original action-heavy epilogue, were written and then dropped once it was clear there was no money to shoot them. Standards-and-practices edits, by contrast, were minor: a line about “tearing someone to pieces” was cut for violence, and an episode-19 death scene was softened with added dialogue implying the character might still be saved. He closed by thanking the fans who had watched and commented throughout the run, noting he had no other television work lined up at the time and was focused on the Warhammer novels he continued to write for Black Library.