seems like a good time to start this thread, since today is, without exaggerating, probably the biggest day in the history of western tokusatsu fandom so far.
about an hour ago, toei launched their new youtube channel toei tokusatsu world, with the first two episodes of 70 tv shows, dating from the 60s to the 90s, with english subtitles. there’s shows that have never been fansubbed, shows that have been on my wishlist for years, shows that i’ve never even heard of before!
but of course, let’s talk about tokusatsu in general in this thread, too~
I’m tempted to watch the original Zyuranger because it seems like it’s everything that I like about Power Rangers without everything that I don’t like about Power Rangers, but maybe another Super Sentai is best? What’s SB opinions on what Ranger series is best to introduce someone to?
I used to watch some tokusatsu as a veeery young kid thanks to a channel here in Brazil that licensed a lot of great toku (I definitely watched some Ultraman, Kamen Rider and Jaspion) but it was so long ago that I barely remember, the channel died in like 1999 and nobody else had the spine to license toku
zyuranger is pretty good, it’s got lots of very silly stuff and quite a bit of grim stuff, too. the series after it, dairanger is also very good. i think any sentai from the late 80s or early 90s is gonna be a safe bet tbh.
hikari sentai maskman (tv) - this was actually shown in sb anime club a couple of years ago. a group of lovable young heroes use a giant robot and the power of meditation to fight against an evil empire of underground monsters who want to conquer the surface world. more than any other super sentai season i’ve watched, i really felt a bond towards the characters growing over the course of the series
dengeki!! strada 5 (tv) - a show from the 70s that actually has very few fantasy elements. it’s about a bunch of secret agents, one of whom has psychic powers. they fight against the terrorist organisation big nova in 13 episodes that are full to the brim with violence and insanity.
sekai ninja sen jiraiya (tv) - kind of like a live action version of g-gundam, but with ninja instead of mecha? also, their interpretation of what constitutes a ninja is incredibly loose. for example, there’s an english ninja who’s literally just a knight on horseback.
lady battlecop (movie) - we also watched this in anime club once. it’s a low budget straight to video robocop knock off, but this time robocop is a woman
godzilla vs biollante (movie) - the 80s and 90s godzilla movies have some of the best special effects of all time, and biollante specifically is probably the best monster effect to ever appear in a movie
zeiram (movie) - tough lady bounty hunter comes to earth in pursuit of a malicious humanoid bioweapon. meets two earthmen who become her temporary sidekicks with no lame tacked-on romantic elements. generally just a great movie all round.
Watched two of the pilot episodes at random last night:
Go! Robottie - this is like a sitcom-esque one about a clumsy helper robot that moves into a family’s house, Robottie is unfortunately kind of annoying but i enjoyed its hard plastic shell and the secondary character robot designs are very cool. I liked the frog one and there’s a cop robot that looks like the girl version of the terrifying policeman from Chulip. My favourite parts were the brief shots of Robottie smashing through walls which were just a little more elaborate than you’d usually expect from this type of show, I’m glad the production team was still able to draw on their long experience making destructible environments. Second favourite was the city pop song that plays at the end over footage of the robots hanging out on a fancy yacht.
Captain Ultra - Flash Gordon esque space adventure, very good, very pulpy. The aliens are mushroom people that look sorta like the chaos eaters from dark souls, there are some good shots of them sort of flapping their long creepy arms at wailing extras. It’s surprisingly action packed for a 22 minute tv show!! The big episode twist is that the mushroom base is hidden inside the torso of a gigantic, rampaging, seemingly unrelated monster, and so the heroes have to blow its limbs off with a rocket launcher before climbing inside it to set a bomb inside its chest. In addition to this they all kill like two dozen dudes. Captain Ultra’s sidekicks are a robot and a twig man(?) who for some reason are named Huck and Joe.
watching these old shows, i feel like i’m learning about special effects with everything i watch. for example, the kagestar has a hero with shadow-based powers, and to show these powers in use, they use a mixture of animation, a guy in a suit, composite shots, and trowing a big black blanket over someone.
it’s so much more interesting that everything just being a big blob of cgi, and it makes me want to make movies, especially since most of the stuff they did in shows up to like, the early 80s is totally within reach of an independent production with a modest budget in the 2020s
