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The story
Following the release of special footage for the film ‘Bayside Shakedown N.E.W.,’ reactions from cast members poured in on 5ch’s Geinou/Sports News+ board. While some lamented that Eri Fukatsu and Toshio Kakei weren’t among the names mentioned, the discussion also reignited debate over whether Muroi Shinji and Sumire actually died in the previous installments.
The gang reunites
[Video] ‘Bayside Shakedown N.E.W.’ — Yusuke, Miki Maya, Miki Mizuno and other familiar faces gather for special footage capturing the “present day”
‘Bayside Shakedown N.E.W.’ — Yusuke, Miki Maya, Miki Mizuno and other familiar faces gather for special footage capturing the “present day”
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Still, it'll probably rake in decent box office
Plenty of seniors and middle-aged people will go see it
He was in the Muroi movie
Waku never made it up the ranks before retirement?
Aren't cops supposed to get promoted by seniority?
Well, he's the guy who puts in the effort and only ever fails
Retired to Atami
Even as chief, he got shipped off to Akita
This show ran on Yanaba, Fukatsu, and Ikariya
And none of them are in it
Generally, shows and movies that are dying just keep piling on more characters
Kakei and Miki Maya, fine, keep them
But don't invent new characters for the on-the-ground cop roles
Like Yuki Uchida or Chibi Norida
The precinct's the setting, Waku's gone, Mashita got promoted, Yukino got married and retired — how do you do this without new characters?
Uchida was actually there from the early TV specials though
She'll probably be in the Aoshima slot from the Muroi movies
My guess: just a brief cameo right at the very end
The fact that everyone's saying she's not in it up to this point is suspicious
Oda showed up at the very end even in the Muroi Shinji movie
Toshiro Yanagiba said he'd only come back if they let his character die
Feels like finding out a character died in some long-running Western drama you stopped watching ages ago
Had a rough time explaining the plot contradictions to someone who watched the first movie for the first time recently
Sumire didn't die
She just quit the police and went back to the countryside
Doing that whole ghostly send-off scene and then never bringing her back for the rest of the movie, only to reveal she was alive the whole time — that's a bit cringe, no?
And apparently they told Eri Fukatsu to act that scene believing her character had died
Maybe they changed it once a sequel got greenlit and they had no choice
They never actually said she died in the main story
I think all the ghost stuff was just a cover for a visual effect that didn't come out right
(Also, don't put ghosts in what's supposed to be a normal cop drama)
All just old shows
Is Naomi next?
Did she become a Diet member or something?
Even going by the actress's real age, she's still got a few years left
Died for absolutely nothing, literally
Living out a quiet retirement in the countryside
Whoa, I had no idea
He got on the brass's bad side and was ordered transferred to Akita, refused, and retired instead (Shinjo got sent off in his place)
Holed up in the countryside living with a foster kid, then got dragged into trouble with the kid's parents
Long story short, he had a heart attack in the snowy mountains and died
For a movie billed as 'the final chapter,' staging it to look like he died when he's actually alive seems pointless — who does that even benefit?
That scene itself didn't mean anything anyway
Makes you wonder why they went with such a weird bit of staging
Nobody wants to see the Macaroni or Jeans character go soft with age
You don't see that pattern much these days — swapping out the 'young lead detective' role like that
Back then, the whole 'hit TV show becomes a movie' business model didn't really exist yet
Though it did exist for anime
Actors at the time drew a sharp line between movies and TV dramas as separate worlds
Fuji TV was the one that erased that distinction through the '90s
Background and Key Points
Bayside Shakedown (“Odoru Daisosasen” in Japanese) began as a 1997 Fuji TV drama and became one of the most commercially significant franchises in Japanese film history: its 2003 sequel grossed roughly 17.3 billion yen, a live-action box-office record that stood for years. The films built their identity on a specific ensemble — Yuji Oda’s detective Aoshima, Eri Fukatsu’s Sumire, and Toshiro Yanagiba’s Muroi Shinji — plus supporting officers like Kakei. A 2019 spinoff centered Muroi and appeared to close out his and Sumire’s arcs, marketed at the time as a “final chapter.” That history explains why longtime fans reacted to a cast list for a new “present day” special as though checking attendance at a reunion: this franchise’s commercial power was built on exactly these faces returning.
The thread’s actual disagreement isn’t about the new film’s prospects — nobody doubts it will sell tickets to an aging fan base — but about continuity: did Muroi and Sumire die in the earlier films, or not? Posters split between “Muroi clearly died of a heart attack after being forced into retirement” and “Sumire never died on screen, she just quit and went home,” with some arguing the show staged a death-like send-off purely for a visual effect that didn’t land, rather than as a narrative fact.
What outside readers likely miss is the production reason behind that confusion: actors were reportedly directed to play the farewell scene as if their characters had died, only for the story to later walk it back once a sequel was greenlit — meaning the ambiguity isn’t sloppy writing so much as a franchise rewriting its own ending after the fact.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Geinou/Sports News+) thread “[Movie] ‘Bayside Shakedown N.E.W.’ — Yusuke, Miki Maya, Miki Mizuno, Soichiro Kitamura and other familiar faces gather! Special footage capturing the present day released.”
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