[Kamen Rider Lucha]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Red5

I still enjoy newer sentai, but in a different way from older sentai. One is not better than the other, they are just different. With the time slot change, the show's approach changed. When families watched together, we got Liveman, Jetman, and stuff like that. With the Sunday morning time slot, we have the brighter shows with more toys.

I've been binge watching a lot of older sentai these days (Kakuranger, Maskman, Jetman, and soon Liveman), and I'm more surprised by these shows' similarities to modern sentai than I am by their differences.

Like, the story structures are almost identical-- a random character story begins, is soon interrupted by a monster attack, the heroes transform and fight, the monster retreats, the character story resumes and becomes tied to the monster story, the monster attacks again, the team defeats it at human size, it reincarnates as a giant, the team calls their mechs, the mechs combine and use their finisher to defeat the giant monster for good, then the heroes return to the character story for a denouement and thematic wrap-up. The structure of an episode of sentai has not changed in at least 30 years, even as the show's commercial demands and technological abilities dramatically shifted. I think that's pretty damn impressive.

As I see it, the major differences between old and new sentai are the increased number of collectibles, an increased reliance on CGI, an increase in episode runtime, and a decrease in stock footage. But I think these differences improve upon the format. I'll go through point-by-point.

COLLECTIBLES: The increased collectibles solve a major problem I have with older sentai-- that is, how repetitive it gets. The introduction of new mechs, power ups, and weapons allows the newer shows to avoid the stagnation so common in the older series.

CGI: If you look closely at the pre-CGI shows, there are still a lot of stylistic special effects that greatly resemble modern CGI-sequences, so even this is not that major a departure. At worst, the CGI helps to make more dynamic the repetitive stock footage used in each episode.

RUNTIME: This should be obvious, but an increased runtime gives us more room to explore character and theme. Now, this isn't always the case because some sentai writers are simply better storytellers than other, but in theory the increased runtime is a good thing as it allows for more nuance and detail.

STOCK FOOTAGE: While the runtimes have increased, somehow the reliance on stock footage has decreased. Where as in older sentai about 25% of an average episode is reused footage, in modern sentai its use is much more sparse (and when it is used, it's much more visually compelling). Instead of a series using the same mech kick/punch/sword-slice footage over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, we have dynamic mech battles where at least one unique thing happens every battle. Sure, there are still reused transformation, attack, and gattai sequences, but in modern shows, because there are so many more mech configurations, attack possibilities, and power ups, there are more stock footage options available, so the repetition is less noticeable.

It could be argued that there's been a shift in tone from the earlier series, but I find that every modern series has a somewhat different tone, so I'm not fully comfortable identifying that as a consistent divergence. Like, even in the most kid-oriented shows (ToQger, for example), we have drama and philosophy that's AT LEAST as intense and sophisticated as what is found in something like Maskman. Zed and his crew are way more compelling villains than Zeba and his crew because I understand The Shadow Line's motivations and relationships way more clearly than I do the Underground Empire Tube's. There may be less (brightly colored, obviously fake) blood and out-of-henshin violence in older shows, but the emotional intensity is still just as extreme and complex-- if not more so.

Now, don't mistake this epic-length post as some "newer series are better than older series" argument. I don't believe that at all. I think Maskman, Kakuranger, and Jetman are FANTASTIC series. I'm just trying to point out that the differences between old and new are largely superficial, and the core of Super Sentai remains the same today as it was when Hiroshisa Soda ran the show in the 80s.