[Fish Sandwich]

~Fish's Zenkai Tour!~

Episode 23 – Kyuukyuu Sentai GoGoFive



...Why the heck have I not watched this whole show yet? Or, no, wait, before I ask that, I need to ask something else first. Can I tell you a story real quick?

A meteorite strikes the ground in the middle of a bustling city. It carries with it a towering demonic creature of stone and magma who begins destroying everything in sight. Citizens flee in terror as buildings come crumbling down. In response to this chaos come five courageous heroes. To the awe of nearby onlookers, their aquatic base rises from the water, and from it deploy a series of highly advanced train cars which begin speeding to the scene of the disaster. The gargantuan size of these vehicles almost seems to highlight how larger-than-life the operators themselves are, with everyday vehicles and roadways becoming dwarfed by the fantastic machines. Arriving to find several people trapped within an elevator inside a burning building, the heroes utilize yet more vehicles to mount a rescue. The unbelievable nature of these incredible tools is somehow given credibility by the surprisingly ordinary mechanisms they employ to perform such amazing feats. Hydraulic pistons and wire ropes raise enormous metal frames into position to combine with one another for the purpose of extinguishing the flames. Stabilizers extend to brace ladders that reach massive distances to provide the heroes their entrance into the devastated structure. Braving many obstacles in the process, the heroes succeed in their daring mission to get the imperiled civilians to safety, and turn their attention to the creature responsible for the destruction. Powerful guns keep it at bay as they unite their machines into a titan of their own, allowing them to triumph over the monster in a thrilling battle that, at last, results in the hard-earned salvation of the city.

As you can tell, I don't really have skilled enough prose to do it justice, but I still felt the need to describe the plot of GoGoFive's premiere in that pompous manner, as though you've never seen a hero tokusatsu show before, since it ought to help set the tone for what I'm talking about next. See, that's the plot of the first episode of Kyuukyuu Sentai GoGoFive... but it's also the plot of the second episode of its American adaptation, Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue. I like to start these posts off by talking about what each show means to me personally, and for GoGoFive, it's going to have to start there. Because as I watched that first episode again (I'll explain the "again" in a bit), I came to the conclusion there's something I can't dance around and still get across my feelings here, so... mind if I tell you another story?

Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue is the first tokusatsu show I remember being a fan of. More than that, it might be one of the first things I remember period. I consciously avoid being even that specific about my age on this forum, but you're all getting a rare glimpse into the very foundations of my toku backstory right now, all so you know how sincere I am when I say the following – 20 years ago, that whole sequence I described was the coolest thing I had ever seen in my entire life, and 20 years later, it's still the coolest thing I have ever seen in my entire life.

Granted, there are lots of coolest things I've seen now (I became really bad at picking favorites!), but this is something I want to stress. I'm not telling you that I hypothetically think the action in GoGoFive's premiere would impress children of the time; I am literally one of those kids who was impressed by it. And it totally holds up! Do you know how lucky I feel, seeing all these amazing special effects, then reading how they spent an unusually large amount of time and money putting the first episode together? It's almost certainly the most impressive raw tokusatsu work I've seen in this tour yet, with a high level of intricate detail that really sells the perfect mix between "realism" and fantasy the show is going for. This is an episode that can make a walking pair of giant robot trousers with no torso seem legitimately impressive and cool.

If you've ever wondered where I get all this passion for the genre, you needn't look much further than this show's American counterpart. It is indescribably formative to me as a person, and while it might sound like I'm talking about the wrong series an awful lot in this post, what I'm attempting to get at here, in this mess of excitement, is that most of the things that made Lightspeed Rescue so formative, it owes directly to GoGoFive. Which means I owe a lot to GoGoFive, and always have, even well before I knew it.

It isn't just about giant robots, either. What I'm grateful about these shows doing for me, above all else, is defining the notion of heroism the way they did. Note that GoGoFive's premiere doesn't involve the heroes fighting anything until they bust out the giant robot at the very end. Quite literally, rescuing people comes first, and everything else comes after. A hero is not someone who merely defeats foes; a hero is someone who *saves lives*. After all, as the team's catchphrase so succinctly puts it, people's lives are the Earth's future. It's maybe precisely because of how impactful this was on me (even without the catchphrase) that I don't have the words to describe how laudable a concept I find this. To this day, I place an enormous value on superhero stories being about more than just violence, and if you're familiar with a lot of the opinions I've expressed on a lot of different shows over the years, then this whole origin story likely puts a lot of that into perspective.

So... why the heck have I not watched this whole show yet? I did try to, really early after getting into Kamen Rider and Sentai in 2011. It might've even become the first Sentai I saw in full, but, as I remember it, either the entire show wasn't subbed yet, or at least I was unable to find those subs. So I gave it a few episodes, all of which I adored, and then decided to put the rest off until the day came where I could actually watch the rest. And uh, heh... I'm just still putting it off for some reason? I could use the abundance of other great toku shows I've discovered in the intervening time as an excuse, but man, just seeing the first fifteen seconds of the theme song is enough to make me feel a little guilty about leaving this Mission Incomplete for so long. Like, even now, I still fondly recall "ken yo, hikari wo yobe!" as being maybe the single coolest thing ever said before a finishing move, but getting to hear those sweet words again apparently isn't enough of a push. Someday, GoGoFive, someday.

Speaking of things I feel guilty about, my apologies if this one was a little hard to parse for anyone? To sum it up, GoGoFive has amazing concepts and themes I know I'm going to love one day, the first episode is great, and did I seriously not find any room to mention that it's also the second Sentai focused on a group of siblings as the protagonists? (Alongside "five" being right in the title, avoiding disrupting this tight character dynamic was apparently the thinking behind not adding the now usual extra member to the team partway in, which famously created the opportunity for Lightspeed Rescue to add one totally unique to that show.) Okay, so now I can say I was at least a little informative about the show itself, but yeah, this one was 100% self-indulgence on my part. If you're still wondering what GoGoFive even is after all this, by all means, do what I haven't and go watch it for yourself. I barely scratched the surface of what I know makes it awesome, and you could discover so many awesome things I don't know.