First Sentai Series
 

Saw this in the KR thread, so I thought I would ask here.

What was your first Super Sentai season? What was your reaction to it? Did it make you want to watch more sentai?

My first was Shinkenger and I watched it while I watched Power Rangers Samurai. Completely by accident. Needless to say, I was surprised at how much overlap there was. I instantly wanted to watch more sentai and compare it to older PR seasons. I also found myself more invested in the story than I was in Samurai and the most recent PR seasons at that time. I enjoyed it immensely and went back and watched Go-Onger (since I just re-watched RPM before Samurai) and got a huge kick out of how different the shows were.

Zyuranger for me, just cuz of the PR association.

Well the first I ever saw any episodes of was Megaranger. But the first series I ever watched beginning to end was Hurricanger. And yes, oh boy yes did it get me hooked.

Gaoranger in 2002 on VHS. I had no idea it was Super Sentai, just Power Rangers in Japanese. It was not until I discover Super Sentai on the Wikipedia in 2004. I didn't really watch Sentai until 2012 with Gokaiger.

My first was Shinkenger. And boy was it a bore. I really did not want to watch more of it after I hit episode 20-ish.
Then it was Magiranger. Didn't feel it. Stopped after 5 or so episodes.
Then I tried Boukenger. I dropped it around 10.

I heard rumors of the upcoming Gokaiger, which was gonna be the ultra reunion equivalent of Decade. To prepare myself, I decided to get a little knowledge in this time.
And that's when the lights shined down from the heavens, and into my hands Celestia bestowed upon to me
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hR7ftRGYsOg
The first Sentai I watched beginning to end, my absolute favorite, and the only series I'll call excellent~

Gaoranger.

My first sentai series was gekiranger and I found it while looking up episodes of powers jungle fury on YouTube.

My second was the excellent and perfect example of an anniversary series gokaiger. This is my favorite sentai to this day and I hope that if more space themed sentai come out that they meet the gokaigers

Kagaku Sentai Dynaman was my first. Went back from there as best as I could in the days before the internet and followed what I could after that up till Gekisou Sentai Carranger which is when I stopped watching sentai shows for quite a bit.

I have watched other shows post Carranger in the last couple of years.

Gokaiger

It was Gokaiger for me.

First Episode I was shown: Go-Busters
First Series I watched through: Oh hell I think it was Battle Fever J.

First series i started was Gokaiger but I actually stopped and watched all of Goseiger after the vs movie

Mine was Goseiger. I think most people who've been on the site for awhile don't need and/or want me to say what I thought about it.

I saw Flashman and Bioman during some of the earliest years of my childhood back when I was staying with extended family overseas in South Korea, and it left a lifelong impression on me. :)

Mine was go-onger. i did stumble the odd clips on you tube of gao ranger and stuff like that but not enough for me to dive in. then collection dx very own eva unit 4a where doing the reveiw coverage of go-onger toys so i thought i just watching it. so i found some one uploading it in on veoh and since then i been watching sentai ever since.

What makes you say that? :p

I may have already discussed my issues with Goseiger before at some...

*Switchblade couldn't finish writing this post because it was more important to go bake a little boy a birthday cake*

The first Sentai series I watched was Hurricanger. I enjoyed it but never finished the series because I already watched Ninja Storm and thought it wasn't worth it to watch pretty much the same show again. This mindset continued on so I intentionally ignored Super Sentai. After awhile, my mind changed and checked out my second series which was Toqger. I hated it so I stopped and checked out past series instead in Kyoryuger and Shinkenger which I liked.

Zyuranger. I was into Godzilla, but started getting burnt out on it. However, I still needed a man in rubber suit/giant monster fix. Ultraman was entertaining me well, but I was curious to find what was out there. I had heard about Super Sentai before, but never actually watched it. Oh man, it was so much better than Power Rangers.

Shinkenger. From there all of Tokusatus opened up to me, and I haven't regretted a moment (maybe Fourze, but that's mostly due to his over-happy personality than anything. Really most of that season was okay).

Magiranger, if I recall correctly.

Hurricanger. Hurricanger's cool, even with nonsense subtitles.

My first Sentai series was Jetman. I had just read on Wikipedia that power Rangers was really this other series but with spliced footage and I was like really?I can't believe I was so stupid that I couldn't figure it out!. It had been well over a decade since I watched power Rangers so I was browsing through the series list and I saw Jetman was before Zyuranger and I was like ,well lets see how the one before Zyuranger is Ive already seen the majority of the battle footage thanks to MMPR lets check something new out and then i got hooked.

Being half Japanese, I was exposed to things like Godzilla dubs at a very young age. So when I first watched Power Rangers at age 8, I immediately knew from the dubbing of Rita/Bandora that something weird was going on with that show.

I ran to my mom to ask her what the hell this show was, and she immediately recognized it. "I remember watching these kinds of shows when I visited family in Hawaii as a kid, they're all over TV in Japan," she told me. And she was able to determine that the producers shot new, American footage and spliced it into those shows she used to watch. Not knowing any more specifics than that, I continued to blissfully watch Power Rangers, feeling more connected to it based on my ancestral ties to Japan.

As I got older and the low quality levels of Power Rangers became more and more apparent, I fantasized about the Japanese version of the show and how it was probably way better than what Power Rangers had to offer.

When my family finally got an internet connection, one of the first things I searched for was "Japanese Power Rangers." Through various Geocities and Angelfire fan pages, I learned all about Super Sentai. I read about the stories. Characters betrayed each other and had dark secrets. There was a lot more action. Heroes even died sometimes! I was desperate to learn anything I could. In fact, I think that learning about Super Sentai kept me watching Power Rangers. Even though I'd aged out of that show, I'd still watch and obsessively try to reconstruct what was really going on in the original Japanese versions.

Eventually, when I was about 15 or 16, I went to a pop-up Japanese flea market in the parking lot of some church in Ohio and stumbled upon a VHS tape full of GoGo V episodes recorded from a Japanese TV broadcast. I lost my mind when I watched it. This was my first real taste of Sentai, and I was hooked. From there, I scoured Limewire for anything that was available. I found a few ultra low-res episodes of Megaranger and Gingaman. I had no idea what anyone was saying, but my teenage mind was like, "oh my god, this is badass! The stakes are so much higher! The characters bleed! They fight battles at night! All this overwrought, melodramatic acting is hysterical!"

Not too long after that, I was able to score some pirated VCDs of Jetman on eBay. Unfortunately, I had no way to play those at the time, and the discs gathered dust for years and years.

Time passed, and while I still checked out Power Rangers from time to time, other interests (and school) kept me from seeking out more Super Sentai. Then, about 4 or 5 years ago, I found TV-Nihon's Shinkenger subs and watched that whole show. That was my first complete Super Sentai viewing. It rekindled my childhood obsession, and I haven't turned my back since.

TLDR: the first actual sentai episodes I watched were from GoGo V, and the first full series I watched was Shinkenger.

My first Sentai was Gokaiger, after my youngest son showed interest in Super Megaforce. I was curious why they began in that one form, and then changed into another form and they seemed totally un-related. Also the difference in symbols threw me and I started researching. Pretty soon, I was completely hooked on the genre.

Dairanger, watched it back in the 90s. I'm a big shaw brothers fan and this really appealed to me.

Zyuranger.

A fit of Power Rangers nostalgia triggered by Pacific Rim made me curious about Super Sentai, and I discovered Fansubs were a thing, and thus downloaded GUIS' subs of Zyuranger (Bear in mind there was no DVD release on the horizon), and fell in love from there.

I learned about Super Sentai when Shinkenger was airing and I watched clips of Shinkenger through Go-Busters and when Kyoryuger started, I started watching that. Kyoryuger was my first Sentai, but I learned about Sentai from Shinkenger.

My first exposure to Super Sentai outside of Power Rangers was Kakuranger, my first episode was Abaranger, and my first series was Jetman.

I had known from the beginning that Power Rangers was just a pseudo dub of Super Sentai, but had never had a chance to actually watch it until my friend brought a couple episodes of Abaranger from a Japanese video store. Prior to that though, I had seen picture books of Kakuranger and Ohranger in that same store, which I currently still own. I believe this was back in 1996 when I was 4 years old.

After I found out there were Sentai subs online, I decided to watch Jetman because of the Gatchaman-influenced theme and the fact that there is no Power Rangers equivalent of that series, and I've been a big fan of Super Sentai ever since.

Gaoranger. I got the Hong Kong bootleg DVDs from a store called Animeniacs and was a fan from that point forward. The next series I saw included Hurricanger, Dairanger, Zyu, and what was currently available from Abaranger (as it was airing at that time).

Shinkenger then Gokaiger then Kyoryuger

First Super Sentai series I watched was ToQger. I'd read plenty about Sentai and the differences and all that but hadn't ever had much interest in watching them until it was decided that Go-Busters wouldn't be adapted.

At that point I decided I'd watch stuff that hadn't or wouldn't be adapted. I caught wind of the likelihood that ToQger wouldn't be adapted while it was still airing, and I actually thought it looked cool, so I checked it out and got hooked on that.

I actually really enjoyed ToQger. Since then, the only other Super Sentai series I've watched is Go-Busters, which took me a long time to get into, and I never really got too into it.

Figured that'd be all I watch, but a couple folks highly recommended Magiranger, because I really like PRMF, so I actually just started that (a couple episodes in).

I think a lot of Sentai are worth watching.
This isn't a "SENTAI IS BETTER!" situation, but rather, a lot of PR series tend to stick somewhat close to the source material (Some are vastly different, like In Space and RPM, but generally speaking...), so if you enjoyed a PR like Jungle Fury, Dino Thunder, or SPD, you should check out their Sentai counterparts.

BOUUUUUUKENJA!

As a young child I enjoyed the series for its comedy and giant robots like sentai is supposed to be enjoyed

That was enough for me to watch both Tomica Heroes, Go-Onger, Goseiger, Gokaiger, a bit of Go-Busters, Kyoryuger, ToQger, and Ninninger, and enjoy all of them, so it was a success.

Techincally, I'm pretty sure it was Bioman. My parents are missionaries to the Philippines, and as a 4-5 year old I was hooked on this Sentai show. So much so that when I did something really bad (can't remember what) the harshest punishment my dad could give me was to ban me from watching it for a couple of weeks and it is still the punishment I remember the most to this day.

Years later as an adult I really wanted to find out what series it was and started researching Sentai. What I could remember of it and what shows had been released in the Philippines seem to best match Bioman. Around this time I foundn Linkara's History of the Power Rangers. Having seen a bit of that as a teenager, I become curious in both and decided to try again to find the original source series. This in turn led me to find the subs by TV-Nihon, and when those ran out, I discovered GUIS. I pretty dropped everything else I was watching for about a year and a half, with occassional breaks, and caught of on everything that was fully subbed.

Thing kinda came full circle when I ended up watching the Available Bioman episodes, found out GUIS needed help with them and ended up pre-timing the rest of the series. The next episodes they release will, I believe, be ones I have worked on. I am rather proud of that.

It was Bioman, when I was 8 in 1985. Before the PR era, tokusatsu shows have been a thing for a few years in France.
It wasn't the very first toku show I saw by the way, it was Uchū kara no Messēji (Message from space) , but the one I was really crazy about was Uchū Keiji Gavan when I was 4~5 years old.

Then the show that le me rediscover super sentai was Kogaiger. At the time I didn't know Toei has continuously been making a super sentai serie each year.

During RPM I discovered shinkenger and loved it. However the first show I watched to its end was Go-Busters.

After all this time, Go-Busters is till my favorite sentai. Such great CGI, amzing stunts, great dark stories and wonderfull complex villans.
Super fun ride if a bit shaky in the middle.

Started with DekaRanger.

The badassary that is Dekamaster is what drew me into watching it.