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What are you watching (Sentai edition)
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10-21-2021, 08:18 PM
#
8940
Fish Sandwich
The Immortal King Tasty
Join Date: Jan 2012
Location: Every diner you've ever been to.
Posts: 3,833
~Fish's Zenkai Tour!~
GP-32 – Engine Sentai Go-Onger
(There are kinda some people missing again, and kinda not. It's a little complicated, unlike most things in this show.)
Dude, Go-Onger is just like,
my happy place.
This show and me go way back. Although that connection, as always, started mostly as a result of random chance. I think my very first experience watching the show was actually seeing the premiere on YouTube just for kicks, back in that window of time where it was pretty easy to just stumble upon full episodes of subbed toku shows on that site. I don't remember exactly when this would've been, or how much of an impact it really left on me, but I definitely must've liked it, because later, when I originally went to watch the Kamen Rider show that aired the same year, Kiva, I totally chickened out and abruptly decided "You know what? Yeah, I'm feeling it;
Let's Go-On!
" (This would've been around when Gaim was airing, for reference.)
...I'm really not kidding when I say I make these decisions on a whim, if you can't tell. For basically no reason at all, Go-Onger became one of the first Sentai I ever watched, and the very first that wasn't the newest show at the time. For those reasons alone, it would probably hold a special place in my heart, but it goes so far beyond that. This show played a huge part in making me truly love Super Sentai as a whole, and to this day, I think it defines a ton of what I associate with it as a franchise. That might seem strange to people familiar with the series, given what an oddball it is, but personally, I see Go-Onger as almost this sort of
pure essence
of hero tokusatsu. There's not an ounce of pretension to Go-Onger. If you asked me what the central message of the show is, I'd probably tell you it's simply that you're supposed to watch it with a smile. It's a show about cool and colorful allies of justice endlessly triumphing over evil with their sheer heroic determination and friendship, and it's about you as a viewer having your day brightened by seeing that.
The raw upbeat energy of Go-Onger is truly something to behold. Here's just one example – the Super Sentai Series logo at the start of the opening. It's a small thing, but naturally you'll be seeing it a lot if you watch the show. Plenty of series put their own spin on it, and Go-Onger's idea was to have the characters suddenly climb up over the logo from behind, and leap off to enter their Engines so they can hurry up and press forward on the road of justice, all as that legendary theme tune starts kicking in.
Oh man, and the theme song! This one is definitely getting its own paragraph! Apparently the single for this thing sold extraordinarily well, and seriously, it's not hard to see why. It's a total masterpiece, any way you slice it. The perfect mission statement for the show, and a darn catchy song in its own right. The infectiously cheerful tone of the instruments is matched only by the lyrics of one Mike Sugiyama, a man whose talent for wordplay can only rightly be described as
divine.
It takes but the first couple of lines to tell you exactly what you're in for with Go-Onger, as it blows through just about every possible "Go"-related pun
back-to-back
, even counting up to five in Japanese ("
ichi ni san shi Go
-Onger!") before immediately counting
down
in English ("three two one Let's Go! Onger~!"). It's silly, it's fun, it's direct, and, most importantly, it's way more precise in its construction than it has any right to be.
No wait, it's definitely most important that it's
fun
, isn't it? That's certainly the point I want to stress with this one – the immense joy I feel whenever I'm watching Go-Onger, or even when I'm just listening to those sick tracks, or really
anything
that reminds me of all the stuff I utterly adore about this show. Like, even the commercial bumpers in this show are so delightful! You've got those ~adorable~ little SD animated versions of all the Engines racing, and a different one wins each episode and— Wait! I should probably explain what an Engine is already!
Basically, Go-Onger's whole central conceit is the partnership between the human members of the team and their respective Engines, my absolute gold standard for sentient mecha in Sentai. This is definitely the show that solidified for me why I love this concept so much. What I think makes the Engines unique is the sheer emphasis the show puts on making them
endearing
above all else. They aren't cool sacred guardians or anything; they're pretty much cartoon characters, with quirky vocal tics and intentionally goofy designs that emphasize their extremely prominent faces, complete with big googly eyes. Plus, as I mentioned, they're also
literally cartoons
sometimes. The Engines were precisely calculated to be as
cute
as humanly possible, so the audience would get attached to them, and I'm telling you right now – it works! These guys are the best. I adore those strange designs; I adore how lively they all are; I adore how they truly feel like equals and friends to the Go-Ongers proper; and I adore what a perfect fantasy concept this whole thing is. Be honest, who
wouldn't
want to become best friends with a giant robot car/animal thing from a parallel world and then go fight supervillains trying to pollute the planet together? There's a reason the merch sold well this year!
Oh yeah, and the Engines are also from a parallel world, by the way. Machine World, to be exact, which is where the premiere opens things up, as the Engines chase down those aforementioned polluting supervillains in an action-packed first minute, only for the bad guys to escape, and wind up in Human World. ...We just call it Earth, but I adore how Go-Onger's tone stays so consistent even with these super direct names.
Go-Onger places value on keeping the pace as active as possible (the team does have a racing motif, after all), so a smart thing the first episode does to that end is skip over a lot of exposition. Not only does it start with action right out of the gate, it cuts to half a year later right after that initial scene, placing the focus not on how the Go-Ongers came to be, but simply who they are on a day-to-day basis. They're basically idiots! There's only so much space between all the action to give you an idea of the personalities for the team, but with guys this deliberately simple, there's only so much time you need to get a handle on them. All five of them are great here. There's always been something weirdly wholesome to me about this group. They just travel around in their motorhome all day, and they bicker a ton like any family, but you always know their hearts are in the right place. Sousuke's always being equal parts passionate and stupid, because as a Red, it's his job to represent the overall themes. Ren's cooking everyone's meals. Saki's staying positive. Hanto and Gunpei aren't even part of the team yet, but that doesn't stop the former from being adorable, and the latter from being so aggressively self-serious that it's
also
adorable.
In Gunpei's case, I think it maybe runs the risk of a viewer who doesn't totally clue in to the vibe of the show not understanding that his gruff criticism of the team isn't meant to be taken any more seriously than anything else (Gunpei is also basically an idiot), but I am very fond of how the show uses Gunpei and Hanto becoming involved with the Go-Ongers to drive the story in the initial episodes. It's something different than the norm, and like with everyone else, I found myself really endeared to this unlikely duo and all the antics they get up to.
Although, for how much the show actively plays up the silliness of the team, it places just as much emphasis on how legitimately
cool
the Go-Ongers are. This is the trick that I think makes me love this show as much as I do. (Or well, one of them, anyway.) The exaggerated tone of Go-Onger gives it this excuse to simultaneously portray its heroes with this downright old-school sense of grandeur, and that's the thing the show undercuts with comedy the least. For how quirky Sousuke, Ren, and Saki can all be, at the end of the day, they really are allies of justice, and that means they're also
awesome.
There are few shows out there that wholeheartedly embrace all the stereotypical trappings of toku heroes the way Go-Onger does, and you can see so much of that in the premiere alone. From the constant verbal announcements accompanying their actions, to the stock footage shot against a nondescript void, to the quasi-expository narration that accompanies the transformation during the climax, or even just to the excessive amount of explosions happening. Or heck, how about when the villains express confusion about the existence of the giant robot, making it clear that Engine-Oh is, exactly like
its
accompanying narration says, a power the Engines only gained by uniting their hearts with their human partners, which happens to be in the form of a giant robot, because in a show like this, that's the only form the ultimate symbol of teamwork
could
be.
There's also this one little moment, at the end of the first fight scene in the episode, where after blasting the monster, everyone stylishly twirls their guns around before slamming them back in their holsters while extremely uplifting music plays to celebrate their victory. There's literally nothing comedic about it, and I feel that maybe makes it the best example of what I'm trying to get about Go-Onger's tone. I wouldn't call it a parody or anything, even though it has elements of that. It's much more like a tokusatsu show made directly from the perspective of the target audience. It's funny primarily because kids like to have fun. That's also the same reason the conflicts are so straightforward, and the reason why despite filling those conflicts with so many jokes, the storytelling still delivers on loads of genuinely exciting struggles and daring turnarounds while it's at it.
I don't know. I feel like this post ended up being a huge mess for some reason (I should maybe mention explicitly that I think the premiere is of above average quality!), but that can happen when I try to talk about shows I like this much. Because it really is every little thing, you know? I can go on for a surprisingly long time just about how cool I think it is how this show handles
the helmets.
How the whole "'Met On!" callout during the transformation sequence is the perfect Go-Onger blend of stupid and cool; how it fits the racing theme nicely; how it puts me in this sort of Power Rangers comfort zone seeing the characters hanging around in-suit with their helmets off, which doesn't happen in Sentai nearly as often.
Or, hey, on that note! Between that, the animal/vehicle hybrid mecha, the guy singing the theme song, and the composer of the background music, I could talk about how I almost see Go-Onger as this sort of sister series to a certain other "Go" I'm extremely fond of, even though they're polar opposites in so many ways. Although weirdly enough, their eventual PR counterparts ended up being tied together quite thoroughly, but that's yet another anecdote entirely, and I'd rather prioritize the BGM! Megumi Oohashi's score for Go-Onger helps immensely in setting the tone for the series, mixing lots of bouncy and fun tracks with many that are these sweeping, epic pieces (and frequently still bouncy), beautifully capturing the duality going on here. Utterly fantastic stuff.
I guess this is about where I wrap things up for talking about Go-Onger, but man, I'm seriously not sure I'm even remotely getting across how formative this series ended up being for me. This is a show that really reminded me on the most fundamental level why I watch these kinds of shows to begin with, and that feeling has stuck with me ever since. I find Go-Onger to be endlessly charming, and revisiting it for the tour put the same smile on my face that it always does.
__________________
誰かの笑顔のためだろ?
Last edited by Fish Sandwich; 03-05-2022 at
07:01 PM
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