[Fish Sandwich]

~Fish's Zenkai Tour!~

Episode 15 – Choujin Sentai Jetman



(Is something a little different than usual here? Eh, I'm sure it's fine.)

Jetman was a revolution for Super Sentai that catapulted it back into the spotlight with its unparalleled quality. Jetman doesn't hold up all that well, and its successors have greatly improved on its innovations. Jetman is the legendary Toshiki Inoue's first amazing outing as main writer. Jetman is the highly overrated Toshiki Inoue's only amazing outing as main writer. Jetman is the show with Black Condor, who is so cool! Jetman is the show with Black Condor, who is so repugnant. And perhaps most of all, Jetman is a show with a title I only ever want to say as Jetto, Jetto, Jettoman!

Whatever Jetman means to you personally, there's no denying this much – Jetman is significant. It made huge waves, and I'm not just talking about the Birdonic kind!

The events surrounding Jetman's creation and success were quite probably the biggest thing to happen to the franchise since the franchise itself. Super Sentai was a reliable staple for Toei by 1991, but as I discussed talking about Fiveman, the "reliable" part of that statement had come into question by the end of that series. It either needed to do something big enough to make a splash all over again right away, or else end up sharing the same fate as Kamen Rider at the time, and become another big property Toei was happy to keep largely on a shelf as they waited for that "something big enough" to come along. I don't think it's redundant to stress here that Super Sentai has continued to go on uninterrupted for several decades since Jetman. It's something obvious that we all know, but it's one of those facts that's easy to take for granted.

Chief producer Takeyuki Suzuki certainly didn't have that luxury at the time. Having been in that position for every Sentai series back to Goggle-V, he had been working right alongside Hirohisa Soda to take the series to new heights, and with cancellation now a legitimate possibility, if not outright likely, he set about bringing in some fresh blood to give the next show the spice it needed to survive. Whether it was faith or desperation that led him to make the choice, Keita Amemiya and Toshiki Inoue would be the inexperienced rookies tasked with bringing the innovative flavor that was needed to put Super Sentai back on top. Considering how high the chances are of any toku fan having heard both of those names, I probably don't need to tell you how well this went over.

I mean, it's Jetman. I knew the gist of that story, and if you have even a decent amount of interest in Sentai, you probably did too. It was a very, very big deal. Inoue had a distaste for making toy commercials and a flair for the dramatic that appealed to the sensibilities of an adult audience of the era, who were eating up "trendy dramas" left and right. Combined with Amemiya's raw talent and unique vision as a director, Jetman would prove itself a massive hit, breaking with conventions left and right in favor of its emphasis on character and storytelling above all else. That picture up top is only there because there's no great group shot of everyone anywhere in the first episode, but that in of itself says so much. Look at those three. They're incomplete, and more than that, they're vulnerable. The humanity of this team was way more of a concern than making them look unfailingly cool, and I have to appreciate that risk.

It's a good premiere, if that needs saying. Something that legitimately does feel like a massive change from what had come before, and yet deeply familiar to me as a modern viewer of so many toku shows made in its wake. It certainly feels like an Inoue show, what with a tragic romance baked right into the origin story. There's a central premise to Jetman I've always adored the sound of, with Red Hawk being the only guy there who was supposed to be there; the lone traditional hero putting together a misfit team of amateurs to form what was intended to be an elite military unit, all while dealing with the shocking loss of his girlfriend when the bad guys attack in the middle of the procedure that was meant to imbue the both of them with the aforementioned "Birdonic Waves" that would give them their powers. As you'd expect from a master of melodrama like Inoue, nothing about Jetman comes off very stable, and this is all before mentioning the convoluted romantic arc that starts defining the show beyond this initial episode. (Parents wrote letters complaining!)

Despite all this, Jetman, at least here in the premiere anyway, still feels plenty aware of its true target audience, and the emphasis on drama isn't too far removed from what Soda was already doing to begin with. There's still a thrilling heroic action climax with explosions and a bird-themed plane, of course, and the ineptitude of the new recruits is as much a source of comedy as anything. Like, I don't wanna make this first episode sound like some huge artsy turn for the franchise – it's still Super Sentai at the end of the day, and that's not a complaint!

Definitely an intriguing start for a series I probably ought to mention I haven't seen at all prior to this? I'm only now realizing it might sound like I have a good amount of existing familiarity with Jetman, but that's all osmosis right there. It just lets you know how ubiquitous this show is. Jetman is something I'm sure I'm going to be happy to sit down and watch some day, but it's also something I've heard so much about I almost feel like I already have at times. It certainly seems like a show that earned its success, and it was fun finally giving it the slightest peek.