foxinthestars

In today's pointless viewing report: more Sentai. I've actually gotten myself distracted with other things and have been neglecting Magiranger and Shinkenger, but I did get the last of TV-Nihon's snippets of older Sentai series: the first 8 episodes of Dengeki Sentai Changeman, which is from the mid-80's (!). Although I was assuming that "distance back in time" and "WTF" would directly correlate, in some ways this seems less off-the-wall than Zyuranger, although a lot of it is probably that all I got of Zyuranger was a whirlwind multi-parter that started it off, something Changeman didn't do, plus no one in Changeman had to say the words "Dino Chronicle" with a straight face. In other ways this one does show its age; the special effects and editing look very low-tech now, some of the monsters look oddly Muppet-ish, and our big bad villain Star King Bazoo looks like something laughed off the set of Classic Trek, but this in itself is entertaining, and alongside that it's interesting to see just how much of the formula was already firmly in place, even if the giant robots weren't as elaborate looking as they've gotten lately (seriously, next to ChangeRobo, something like MagiLegend is downright decorative). The weirdest thing for me was a certain, I guess, "Values Dissonance" that came into play more with Changeman than the others---the "you could do that on a kids show in '80s Japan?" type of thing. There's a bit of a military theme, and I found seeing Sentai in camo a bit jarring, although I probably shouldn't; after all, this would be roughly contemporary with the G.I.Joe cartoons of my own childhood. More surprising bits are that the symbolic mermaid that appears behind Change Mermaid during her henshin sequence is very obviously topless, one of the villain lackeys wets himself on camera, and the weird bath scene at the end of episode two, which I tell myself is a cultural thing, but still, the narrator did have to say the post title with a straight face. (Or maybe not, you can't see the narrator's face...) I had fun with it, but my verdict is still "recommended for those with an interest in the history of Super Sentai."