I have an… interesting relationship with Super Sentai.
I, like most people of my age, grew up when Power Rangers was at its Zenith. I still remember watching the ads for the show on TV and then staying up late to catch it because I was a kid and I had no idea how TV schedules worked. I followed the original show religiously, like any true fanboy I sang the main theme dozens, hundreds of times and to this day I still don’t know the lyrics. I had a crush on Amy Jo Johnson and I have never wanted a tiny plastic gun that turned into an even tinier knife so badly ever since.
I stuck around with the franchise as I grew up, but I eventually fell out of it. No harsh feelings, I still have very fond memories of Lightspeed Rescue and Ninja Storm, but after SPD I had no real interest in following it anymore. Maybe I was getting too big for a kids show (Editor’s Note: HA HA HA HA HA HA HA), maybe Mystic Force just wasn’t that good, or maybe I realized that nothing was ever going to top Doggie Krueger.
Whatever the case, I left Power Rangers behind and to this day I never looked back.
As you can probably tell from my erratic musings, I got into the internet at a very early age. I am talking about the days before social media and Google, when the Internet was this mystical, unknowable place full of so, so much porn. As any unsupervised teen on the internet during the 90’s would, my first order of business was to look up as much info about Pokémon as possible, but I eventually branched out and the Internet became a window into things about the world I never even knew existed.
It was during those early years of “surfing” through the “cyberspace” that I learned of Tokusatsu, or rather, I learned that Tokusatsu was a thing; I had long lost my Toku Virginity to Ultraman and Godzilla (I refuse to change the phrasing of that sentence), but I had never realized fighting monsters in rubber suits was like, an actual genre that people worked on.
With my eyes open for the next Faiz, it was only a matter of time before I discovered what was the longest running and most emblematic franchise in Tokusatsu: The Super Sentai Series.
Even back then and with all the power a 56kbps connection could muster, people didn’t really know about Super Sentai as much as they knew of Super Sentai. Age of the internet or not, the language barrier was still very much a thing, which is why for many years the myth of the Super Sentai series being darker and more serious than Power Rangers persisted.
This, of course, couldn’t be farther from the truth; while they do handle certain themes differently, Super Sentai and Power Rangers are still essentially the same thing, only filtered through different cultural lenses. As to why people got that wrong idea in the first place, well, that is one of those things that we can pretty much blame squarely on Choujin Sentai Jetman.
By the time I discovered the series it had only been a few years since I stopped watching Power Rangers, and in hindsight, that is probably one of the reasons why I never went back to it; once I knew of the relationship between both franchises, Power Rangers simply lost a lot of its magic to me. Either way, I wasn’t all that interested in Super Sentai at first, that Kamen Rider dude seemed cooler and edgier, but I decided to check it out due to morbid curiosity and because that ‘Gekiranger’ show seemed like it was kind of my thing.
If you’re thinking that this is the story of how I became the world’s greatest Super Sentai fan, you’re going to be sorely disapointed; if you follow me online, you poor soul, you’d know I watch any and all Tokusatsu I can get my hands on, even the porny stuff, and while that does mean I watch plenty of Sentai and Sentai adjacent content, I have never really thought of myself as a huge fan of the franchise.
It’s not that I don’t enjoy it, my feelings on SunVulcan are well documented, but as far as Toku goes, franchises like Godzilla, Ultraman and Precure certainly take priority for me. I like it well enough to keep watching every year, but I am not invested in Super Sentai so much as to get upset about it.
The reason why I took you down this path through memory lane is because I am old and telling people stories makes me feel important. And also, because very recently I achieved one of those life time achievements that you only hear about in legends, like paying your mortgage or fulfilling your new year’s resolutions: I watched Super Sentai.
All of it.
For those keeping track at home, that is just over 2300 episodes, more than 80 movies and specials and a handful of mini-series, all across 45 seasons and counting. And it only took me… *checks calendar* …13 years. Sure, there’s a handful of side stuff I haven’t watched that I will get to eventually, but as far as main content goes, I have watched every single series and movie in the franchise. And the Yodonna special.
Did I write this just to flex my nerd credentials?
Well, yeah. Why do you think people write stuff in the first place?
But a part of me also wanted to share an epiphany I had while looking back at all the individual series of this multi-colored franchise, and all the time I spent watching them:
Man, Super Sentai has been airing for a very long time.
Not my keenest observation I admit, but when you truly internalize for how long this franchise has been airing, how many seasons it has, and how many people have grown up with it, it really is shocking how Super Sentai is not, well, bigger.
To be clear, Super Sentai is certainly not small. As one of the “Big Three” of Tokusatsu, it has a level of exposure 90% of the anime industry wishes it had. But as impressive as that is, this is still thought of squarely as a kids show. Compare that to Ultraman, the quintessential Japanese super hero whose influence and legacy, both in Japan and around the world, can never be overstated. And yet, this silly little franchise for silly little kids still dwarfs it in length.
For the nerd-folk out there, a long running franchise is nothing new. In some circles you can’t call yourself a fan unless you understand a running joke that is 20 years old. But unlike most decade-old franchises, Super Sentai has managed to maintain a near constant presence on TV every week for over 40 years. And yet, in terms of cultural impact, people don’t talk about it in the same way they speak of other Toku franchises.
Just looking at the biggest names in manga and anime for example, a lot of creators and artists do credit Kamen Rider or Ultraman as an important influence during their formative years, sometimes even quoting specific episodes, but very few of them ever mention Super Sentai as a direct source of inspiration.
That doesn’t mean Super Sentai hasn’t left its mark, but its place in Japanese culture is rather peculiar. While other Toku franchises have had a larger impact and were far more influential, Super Sentai has persisted for so long that its very concept and tropes became part of the cultural language. From the roll calls to the giant robots to the colorful suits, you don’t need to know Super Sentai to speak Super Sentai.
One of the biggest hurdles for Tokusatsu, especially outside of Japan, is how people tend to write it off simply because it is primarily aimed at kids. While Toku aimed at older audiences is certainly a thing, it is undeniable who the primary audience is. But this has never been a hindrance on a creative level, for a lot of the charm of Tokusatsu comes precisely from the optimistic outlook born out of aiming for a young demographic. Just because something is aimed at kids it doesn’t means it can’t be good, and Tokusatsu is the greatest example of this.
But that is only half the story, for lot of what has made Toku a pillar of Japanese entertainment lies in the unique way it tells stories. This is why Tokusatsu is often thought of not just as a medium, but as a genre; being live action, the constrains productions were often held to, such as limited budgets, location availability and even safety concerns, forced them to create a narrative identity of their own.
As such, most of the plots you find in Toku only really work within the context of Toku, as they would be absolutely ridiculous anywhere else. Characters rappelling down buildings, episodes that take place entirely within one location, extended boat chases, or that time in Dai Sentai GoggleV where they had Jyunichi Haruta dodge explosions for 15 minutes straight; these all are things that you only really see in Tokusatsu.
The 1970’s was a VERY experimental time for the medium; while you can trace the origins of Toku back to the 50’s, it wasn’t until the Henshin Boom of the 70’s that a lot of what we think of as part of the genre came to be. Narrative boundaries had yet to be defined, so everyone was pushing the limits of the format to see what they could get away with, and it was in this environment that what would eventually be known as the first Super Sentai series, Himitsu Sentai Goranger, came to be.
It is no exaggeration to say that Goranger was a genre defining show. It wasn’t revolutionary per se, but it was the culmination of Toei’s Toku productions up until that point. A near perfect cast, fantastic miniature work, elaborate action set pieces, not to mention the iconic soundtrack by the late (and great) Chumei Watanabe, by and large Goranger set the standard for Toku super heroes going forward.
Suffice to say that the show was a massive success, but one that would prove hard to replicate; its direct follow up, JAKQ Dengekitai, failed to live up to expectations, leading to its early cancellation. After that, the would-be franchise lacked a clear direction going forward; the concept of a team of super heroes was certainly appealing to audiences, Gatchaman and Cyborg 009 had already made waves in the world of manga and anime, but things hadn’t worked quite as well in the realm of live action.
There were many attempts to make this formula work throughout the 70’s, but none of them would find the same success as Goranger until Battle Fever J and later Denziman came along.
If you ask around on the street, people will tell you that the King of Manga himself, Shotaro Ishinomori, was the creator of both Kamen Rider and Super Sentai, and that isn’t wrong; he did come up with the concept for Goranger, pitched the show and drew a manga for it. But talking strictly about the TV series, most people who I talk to on discord would agree that a lot of what defined Goranger’s identity AND success was actually the work of one of the most prolific Tokusatsu writers of all time: Shozo Uehara.
Working as head writer for the series from 1975 to 1981, his work was instrumental in establishing the tenets of what would become the Super Sentai series. And even after he left in order to create the Metal Hero franchise, because this man could not be stopped, his writing became the template that other writers would follow for years to come, and not just within Super Sentai.
You can’t talk about 80’s pop culture without mentioning the impact sci-fi had on, well, everything. Sentai was certainly no exception, partly because of how well Toku lend itself to fantastic concepts, and partly because of Star Wars. But mostly Star Wars. And this is a trend Uehara and the writers who took over after him very much took advantage of, as the franchise transitioned from a team of super spies with a license to use increasingly large explosives, to Dengeki Sentai Changeman, the show that all but perfected the Toei Space Opera formula on a time when Spielban was still just a little Sharivan.
As weird as this may sound, the 80’s really was the period when Super Sentai became Super Sentai. The point when it went from being a just a TV show, to a property with a cultural identity. Fans who only consume modern Toku, the heathens, might not realize just how much of what they think of as Japanese Super Heroes was popularized during this era, and Super Sentai was very much at the center of it.
From hot-blooded rivalries to young people fighting for justice with the power of youth and justice, all the things you often see referenced, honored and even parodied in other mediums became a staple of Sentai during the late 80’s. Shows like Flashman, Maskman and writer Soda Hirohisa’s Magnum Opus, Turboranger, really came to define the image of the “modern” Japanese Super Hero.
At this point, Super Sentai was very much one of the most successful Super Hero brands on TV, especially with both Ultraman and Kamen Rider both going through a rough patch, and believe it or not the history of one of the most iconic franchises in Japanese media was just getting started…
But that is a tale for another day.
If you want to know more, and why wouldn’t you? Then join us next time for Part 2 of Growing up with Spandex!
Fanboyism Extraordinaire 
I do hope to get more context on the Sharivan and Spielban joke though. And shame for me to admit it I havent catch up on Super Sentai as much as Ultraman and Kamen Riders per say despite it being the first among the holy trinity of Toku I watched hahah.
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