Follow TV Tropes

Following

Awesome / Kaiketsu Zorro

Go To

  • General:
    • This version of Diego stands out in the franchise as a whole as one of the few versions of the character to begin his crusade for justice completely alone. Whereas most other incarnations of the character have someone to confide in from the beginning, this Diego spends the first few episodes of the series with no moral support. Despite this, he never let his Upper-Class Twit charade slip, even when it disappoints, embarrasses, or outright angers the people closest to him.
    • In an oft-reused sequence, four soldiers are smart enough to avert Mook Chivalry and gang up on Zorro, only for him to block all their swords and physically push them all back at the same time. Then he disarms them all, again at the same time.

  • "Return of the Hero:"
    • Bernard's Establishing Character Moment is definitely this. Lolita is smuggling a falsely accused man and his family to the port under cover of picking up Diego, with soldiers in hot pursuit. Bernard, who's riding with her, buys her time by lassoing a rock, then leaping from the moving carriage in order to trip the soldiers' horses with the rope. It proves from the very beginning that Bernard is quite clever, not to mention strong for his age, making him well suited for the role of Zorro's sidekick.
    • When Lolita shows up with Chichita and his wife in tow and begs Diego to help hide them, he only hesitates for a moment before enlisting the captain's help. He might not know what Lolita's doing, but he recognizes her urgency and leaps into action instead of wasting time with questions.
      • One for the captain, too, for agreeing to hide Chichita's family.
    • Lolita faces down a group of armed soldiers with nothing but her own fierce resolve. Even when they draw swords and start to act threatening, she refuses to back down.
    • It's subtle, but when Gonzales rounds up the guests from Diego's homecoming party, he admits to Alejandro that Chichita and his wife are being executed as an example to anyone else who might think of fighting the army. He quickly reverts to a brusque demeanor, but his downcast expression when he makes the admission shows that he's just as unhappy about the orders he's giving as the townsfolk are about following them—not to mention a great deal more intelligent than his superiors think he is.
    • Zorro's first appearance, everything about it. First, he shoots the soldiers' rifles out of their hands from the top of a cliff. Then, he makes an impressive Badass Boast before single-handedly disarming (and, in some cases, unhorsing) every soldier present without breaking a sweat. Then he frees Chichita and his wife and duels Gabriel to keep everyone distracted while they made their escape, finally capping it off with another Badass Boast as he makes his own getaway. The assembled crowd is left completely speechless.
    • The gathered crowd breaking out into laughter and cheers when it becomes clear that Zorro has the soldiers completely outmatched. Zorro successfully turned what was supposed to be a massive power move for Raymond into a public demonstration that the army can be beaten and that someone is actively fighting for the people's rights.
    • A double-decker of a villainous one for Gabriel: first, he remembers that Chichita would have his baby with him and orders the captain to ring the ship's bell in order to make the baby cry and give away his location. Second, when that doesn't work, he realizes that Chichita must be making his getaway in a smaller fishing boat, works out where he'd set sail from, and gets there in time to catch up with him, despite the delay from first searching the large ship.
    • In his second face-off with Gabriel, Zorro is holding his own until he trips over a rock. Gabriel lunges forward to deliver the killing blow—and Zorro dodges, disarms him, and gets to his feet to hold Gabriel at swordpoint. It happens so fast that not even the viewers can clearly see how Zorro turned the tables.
  • "The Barrels of Wine:"
    • The flashback sequence to when Diego and Lolita first met, which doubles as a heartwarming moment. A group of bullies are frightening young Lolita with a snake on a stick. Diego, despite not knowing her, comes to her aid and starts a fight with the bullies even though they have him outnumbered four to one. And he wins.
    • When a group of bandits attack the wagons transporting the Vegas' and Pritos' wine barrels, Lolita takes advantage of Diego fleeing the scene to whip her horses into a gallop and try to escape while the bandits are distracted. While it doesn't work (the mounted bandits easily catch up to her heavy wagon), the effort is admirable.
    • The sheer audacity of Brown's plan merits mention. Not only is he paying bandits to steal wine from the townspeople and selling it back to them at exorbitant prices, he also tries to bribe Commander Raymond to give him a monopoly over wine sales in San Tasco, which would allow him to raise his prices even further.
    • The Reveal that Zorro completely Out-Gambitted Brown by marking the Vegas' wine casks with his trademark Z in anticipation of their being stolen. And to take it one step further, the casks in the Vega wagon were never filled with wine at all. Zorro swapped them out for barrels of plain water.
  • "Proposal of Marriage:"
    • Zorro catches the "escaped" firebug in the act of setting a fire. The firebug pulls out a club and charges him, and Zorro...calmly draws his sword and slices the club into pieces before he can take a swing.
    • During the climactic battle, Zorro makes use of the epic blocking sequence described above for the first time. The soldiers on the receiving end clearly have Oh, Crap! expressions, just to drive home how epic this move was even to the in-universe witnesses. Gonzales watches this happen and still squares up to fight, because "orders are orders".
    • Raymond, of all people, proves that Even Evil Has Standards once he learns what Gabriel has been up to. He outright says that the only reason Gabriel isn't being court-martialed for his actions is because if word got out, it would bring shame on the entire army, and makes it very clear that Gabriel is to leave Lolita alone in the future. While the last part doesn't completely stick, Gabriel never pulls a stunt of this magnitude involving Lolita again.
  • Zorro's Single-Stroke Battle against two hyped-up assassins in "My Fair Lady Zorro."
  • Lolita proving herself to be a crack-shot with a rifle in "Lolita Get Your Gun." From the top of a church spire, at that. And bear in mind that, at the time the series is set, rifles and other firearms were notoriously inaccurate even in the hands of a skilled marksman.

Top