[Banba Soukichi]

In 2003 I attended Anime Reactor in Rosemont Il.
While wandering the Dealers room I noticed a table set up with the Full Faize Driver ( Not the toy, the actual Prop) in the Briefcase and a small TV looping a bunch of fight scenes from early in the series, keep in mind this is 2003, Toku had yet to become a big thing in the US. A japanese man who spoke some english sat at the table to doing commissions, after talking to him I found his name was Diasuke Kobiyashi, he wasn't on the guest list but had never been to America so he had tagged along with one of the Cons guests. His duties involved character designs for Toei on Kamen Rider and Super Sentai, most recently he was the character designer for Abaremax. Now this was super cool and I commissioned 2 pictures from him, one being the Big one Picture you see in my sig.

Well on Saturday word got around that he was holding an impromptu Sentai Panel, myself and about 12 other people showed up, so it was very personal and we had a translator so it flowed well. amongst some of the stuff that done was he drew a wholly original sentai team based on Audience suggestions. This team was a military team with Element based powers.

Catching the date and theme?

The Ranger were, Red-Fire, Blue-Water, Yellow-Lightning, Green-Woods, Black-Metal & a 6th Ranger Silver-Astro.

Now, this was October 2003, Abaranger was winding down and Dekaranger would have been deep into Production, but the very next year Magiranger came out, featuring a magic Theme, BUT containing 4 of the 6 color/element themes we had designed in that panel room 14 months earlier. I've always thought that was pretty cool. We also designed an Irish themed Beer Ranger but no images of that exist because as Dasuke said "If my boss ever finds out I drew this I'm so getting fired"

To show, I've attached the scan of Red-Fire and Blue-Water.

Enjoy!