[Fish Sandwich]

~Fish's Zenkai Tour!~

Chapter Twenty-Two – Seijuu Sentai Gingaman



Gingaman! It is a title of honorable galactic warriors, bestowed only upon those with courage!

Gingaman is also a show I'm continually growing more fond of. I'm not sure how best to condense my whole experience with it in a way that will make sense to people who aren't me, but I initially watched it right after Megaranger, in the middle of that huge group of shows I went through following my rewatch of Ninninger that I mentioned way back at the start of the tour. And like, you guys saw last week how hyped I get about Megaranger. I utterly adore so much about Gingaman conceptually, and naturally I enjoyed the show itself just fine, but it rarely got me as fired up as some of the shows I surrounded it with, and for a while I kinda mistook that to mean I *must* like it less than I want to or something. I don't know. It's wasn't a very logical thing. I explicitly said Gingaman was a victim of poor timing for me when I got done with it, though, and I was at least right about that much.

As for those concepts, this is the last of Shigenori Takatera's trilogy of Sentai he was the chief producer on, and he picked what was, for him, a radical new direction – to not take things in a radical new direction. This really needs stressing. Takatera was in charge of five shows for Toei, and this is the singular one where he decided to try his hand at a more traditional approach to heroic fantasy. Which might make it sound like he was phoning it in that year, but I definitely think it's much more earnest than that. This was a traditional show that would be made to his standards, and you can tell Gingaman received every bit as much care and detail as usual.

Here's an easy example of that usual care and detail: the episode titles. Like always, there's a consistent format to them, and in this case, the episode numbers themselves have their own format as well, beginning a Sentai tradition I have always been extremely fond of. So much so that this trend Gingaman started is the entire reason I've formatted the numbers of these posts the way I have, even knowing I had to wait until almost the halfway mark for it to pay off. That's just how serious I am about this.

I maintain seemingly minor bits of nomenclature like this can play a huge role in conveying themes, tone, atmosphere, or whatever other facet of a story. Gingaman completely nailed that with its simple but effective choice to refer to its installments as "chapters". This is a heroic fantasy, so what you're seeing isn't merely a show: it's a legend, being written down page-by-page every week on your TV screen. And that's awesome as heck!

Straight up and down, I think the motifs in Gingaman are brilliant, and it goes way beyond even that one cool idea. The heroes are also heavily themed around nature, so they push the animal motif with living mecha, some of my favorite suits in the franchise, and insanely cool body language. Their posture when running is iconic, and whoever came up with the idea for them to smack the ground with their hands during the roll call is a genius. It's all so delightfully active, and exactly why I love seeing toku heroes based on animals so much. The villains are pirates from space, but also broken down into several factions with wildly different themes decidedly unrelated to pirating, who spice up the series by turning each quarter into its own arc with a totally unique set of monsters – a bit of conscious inconsistency in the name of good fun. Gingaman manages to tie all this together into something almost inexplicably cohesive feeling, and what really helps on that front is how the story is still grounded in a proper sense of humanity.

This is the part where I finally get around to mentioning something that's a pretty big deal to me personally. Gingaman was the first ever main writer credit for Yasuko Kobayashi, a woman who has been my favorite toku writer basically the entire time I have been into tokusatsu. There's a heart to her characters and stories I don't think I could ever summarize in a sentence, but it was already evident even back in the episodes of Megaranger she wrote, and it's evident in Gingaman too, right there from the first episode.

Gingaman's premiere is rock solid. You get a great feel for show's fantasy atmosphere, with five young warriors in a hidden forest village being chosen to become the new Gingamen, a position so deeply rooted in ancient tradition that there have been triple-digit generations of them over the past three thousand years. You get a great feel for the villains, who of course show back up with dramatic timing after being sealed away all that time, with all the main generals going around messing up the city, demonstrating their signature styles and selling the threat the group poses if left unchecked. Which naturally means our fresh-faced heroes are suddenly in a rush to claim their powers and put a stop to this, leading to an exciting confrontation...

...And this is where I wind back a bit to say that, on top of this flawless structure, you also get a great feel for a compelling series-length character arc, which is where, in my bias, I'm going to say Kobayashi's talents come in. See, Ginga Red ends up being a guy named Ryouma, when the guy who was actually appointed to the role was his older brother Hyuuga. And you have to understand, Hyuuga is cool. He's a way better warrior, and the very image of a hero, right down to being played by Sasuke from Kakuranger, and literally wearing Geki's shirt from Zyuranger. Hyuuga is so cool, that even when he's about to fall into a crevice to almost certain doom, instead of showing fear, he simply entrusts his sword to his brother and leaves him with words of encouragement before dropping. Ryouma doesn't believe for a second that he has it in him to be that cool, and that inferiority complex creates an interesting dynamic. It wouldn't fit Gingaman's mission statement as a show to have heroes who are flawed in the usual ways, so they cleverly got around that by having Ryouma be an idealized hero whose sole issue is that he's blind to his obvious innate talents and quality of character. His flaw is that he thinks he's flawed.

Because Ryouma is totally cool too! He even proves it right after the tragic loss of Hyuuga, displaying an immense amount of power in his rage, and transforming with the rest of the team for an awesome fight scene that involves a ton of elaborate wire-work and other such stunts and effects to further sell the bestial style of the team. And amidst all this action, Ryouma is there, charging in with his sword and managing to land a hit on every single one of the main bad guys. In the first episode! He can't defeat any of them yet, of course, but dude, you don't get cooler than that. It's an absolutely wonderful finish to a great episode, and the whole thing also benefits immensely from an amazingly theatrical soundtrack once again by Toshihiko Sahashi, and from the slick direction of Ryuuta Tasaki, who handled his first premiere with Gingaman, and who would be entrusted with a great many Kamen Rider debuts following this.

It's become apparent to me at this point that I might have more to say about Gingaman than I did about Megaranger. I did also sort of expect this, though. See, the whole point I was going to get around to, tying back to the start, was how Gingaman's epic fantasy trappings are contrasted by an equal level of dedication to being a very chill show about pleasant people, and how that's why it didn't get me as actively excited as the energetic show it followed after, but like, I ain't got time to elaborate on that anymore!

I've gotta stop myself at some point in these things, and evidently, this is where the line ended up this time. Suffice it to say, I've since realized with the benefit of hindsight that Gingaman's unique vibe is its strength, and it's one of many. I feel like this huge rambling post has barely scratched the surface, and that's yet another thought that makes me like Gingaman more than I already did.