I finished 秘密戦隊ゴレンジャー!
It’s the first in the long line of super sentai tokusatsu shows, from 1975-77.
I was a bit wary going in because it’s 84 episodes long, and I would consider myself more of a “giant monsters” tokusatsu person rather than a “let’s go fight in a quarry” tokusatsu person, so I was worried how interesting it would be especially over so many episodes, but I ended up loving the show!
My parents kind of shielded me I think from Power Rangers as a kid (not wanting me to play fight so much), so I don’t really have any basis for it at all, which made it particularly fun to discover how the show works. The format is very similar episode to episode - the rangers gotta stop a colorful themed villain in a mask hailing from the villainous 黒十字軍, and they’ll probably do it with a big fight at the end, a special move, and a vehicle or two. But the team dynamic is strong and offers a lot of possibility for one or two characters to get the biggest spotlight each episode, providing some variety. Especially coming off of the Ultraman shows - which all feature a uniformed team of characters who are ultimately mainly just there to shoot at the monster until Ultraman shows up - the team and their different costumes and techniques seem hugely flavorful.
The optics of like - one leader guy, two young handsome guys, one heavyset guy, and one woman, and it’s the last two who ride in the sidecars when they’re all in their little motorcycles - initially made me very worried for dated and unpleasant handling of some things. But honestly, it ended up not too bad on that front! The heavyset character’s proclivitly for eating comes across more like a Lister-from-Red-Dwarf-esque intense love of specifically curry than necessarily fat jokes, and everybody definitely gets lots of moments to be cool (even if they’re never hugely developed characters or anything). They all feel like equal team members.
The biggest strength of the show though I think by far is that the costume design is fantastic! All of the villain and hero designs are extremely fun, and they manage to achieve a sort of… elegance? that I remember was lacking when I watched Kikaider, where the villain costumes are all fun, but in a goofy, papier-mâché sort of way. I dunno if it’ll come through, but I’ll post a bunch below and maybe you’ll see what I mean. Like, they’re goofy - but still very well-executed.
They’re just endlessly creative and strange, and it’s always fun to see what the 仮面 theme for the next episode is.
Along similar creative and strange lines, the sort-of… child logic? that the series operates on is extremely fun too. There isn’t much explanation for why things work the way that they do (at least not that I made out), and costumes in particular seem to have the power to transform at will, like the way the rangers summon their characteristic weapons (a different one for each character) by like, pulling the visor of their mask, which comes off but in a camera splice is replaced with a different visor and now the visor that they pulled off is the weapon… it’s hard to explain, but it totally works on that “now I have THIS weapon” play fighting logic. Even more surreal are the special moves, where the rangers perform a volley move with a ball/bomb/thing, and then in the later episodes, once this ball reaches the enemy, it like… transforms completely into whatever the rangers would like, in order to catch the villain of the episode off guard, before exploding.
The villain always explodes at the end of the episode. (and there’s always a shot of them… spiraling into hell? afterwards).
They also seem to have clued in on the toy market as well because there’s no shortage of extremely colorful and odd vehicles (that often get their own dedicated theme song).
The show is just brimming with fun things, I guess is what I mean.
I exercised while watching the show, and for quite a while achieved the ideal state of looking forward to that exercise time because of getting to watch the next two episodes, rather than that time being begrudgingly participated in. I tended to especially like the episodes involving horror-ish elements, or when they go to a theme park.
That said - I confess that that enthusiasm did wear off quite a bit by the very end of the 84 episodes. It’s really a lot of episodes! I had trouble paying attention to the last few unfortunately…
The show has a definite shift around the midpoint, switching around some settings and characters, but otherwise barring a slight sense that they’re creeping a little bit closer to a confrontation with the main bad guy… it really is just episode after episode of fighting masked villains.
One odd plot development that does happen - The yellow ranger, the one who loves curry, abruptly leaves the show and is replaced by a different heavyset guy (who does not show particular love for curry). Then after a handful of episodes, this new yellow ranger is killed off and the original one returns. I gotta imagine there’s some kind of interesting production reason for why that happened.
I watched the show without subtitles of any kind, and one element that made for an especially fun time that way, is the show’s writers enjoy throwing in riddles - for a lot of the show, there’s a なぞなぞ every episode, even to the point of being teased as a reason to see the next episode for a while there.
I almost never fully heard and understood the entire なぞなぞ, but it was still fun to hear just enough to say, know “ah someone asked a riddle I didn’t catch and the answer was something about fish” or whatever. I got really used to spotting the format “blahblahblahは なあ～んだ！” at the very least.
There’s certainly… a lot of super sentai to potentially watch in the future now that I know I liked this show so much! But the tokusatsu/exercise bike power hour continues for now with Ultraman Taro… I gotta admit it has been good to see giant monsters again.
I also watched a couple movies:
- 修羅雪姫
To give the Obayashi movies some space from each other, I decided to watch the Lady Snowblood movies between them (mostly because… there’s two of them). I turned off subtitles, and my listening comprehension was helped greatly by reading the manga that covers this one first. It follows it surprisingly closely in the big story beats, and there’s a lot of historical detail I definitely wouldn’t have picked up otherwise.
I enjoyed the movie! It’s less outright shlock than the manga in some ways (much less nude swordplay, except - very weirdly - during a training sequence when she’s a young girl), and makes more of a straightforward movie revenge story out of some of the beats in the manga that go in other directions, I think largely for the better. But it’s still a revenge story that (thankfully!) is more interested in dwelling on the cool-action-character-doing-revenge parts than the cool-action-character-suffering-grievously-to-motivate-the-revenge parts (the latter of which is frequently an issue I have with revenge movies…).
There’s a lot of arterial spray, and a memorable corpse bisection. And I think the climax at 鹿鳴館 is pretty great (and much less weird and fraught than that section in the manga…)
And anyway, as with Female Prisoner Scorpion the main strength is simply that Meiko Kaji is very cool and good at theme songs. - ゴジラ2000 ミレニアム
Picking up with Godzilla where I left off at some point a while back… now without subtitles!
I watched the Roland Emmerich Godzilla before this, and while this one is clearly much, much better… honestly, I think it has similar problems (just to a smaller degree).
Namely, the characters all feel like “Blockbuster Movie Character A”, "Blockbuster Movie Character B’ etc. moreso than they do people to me (particularly the precociously plucky child, and the undercurrents of ‘protagonist used to be together with love interest but they just couldn’t make it work even… if only they could bond through some kind of calamitous adventure!’), and the increased use of digital effects struggle to make it even remotely seem like the characters and Godzilla are on the same plane of existence. It’s funny that the latter dates the movies’ look a lot more intensely than the prior movies (if the multiple weirdly prominent shots of original iMacs didn’t already)
Again – not as bad to me as the Emmerich one and its whole platoon of plucky comic relief characters (and this one uses a suit for a lot of shots). But it just felt kind of empty to me still… I would in general personally much prefer the goofy campy fun of the showa movies than one like this that conveys seriousness and drama but doesn’t often manage to be interesting.
I think comprehension was OK, although there are a lot of technical elements to Godzilla movie dialogue (people discussing genes and radiation and whatnot) that likely went mostly over my head.
Curious what the later Godzilla movies will bring! And increasingly tempted to go back to the older ones with my improved listening skills…