[Kamen Rider Lucha]

I finished Kakuranger weeks ago, but my journey through the past of Super Sentai is only just beginning. Instead of tackling Megaranger like I said I would (I'll get to it eventually), I decided to finish up some of the series I've started and haven't finished.

First on the list was MASKMAN, which I have now completed.

And I've gotta say -- I wish I hadn't bothered picking it back up. There are a few cool episodes (episodes of note are: the Galaxy Robo intro two-parter, the Momoko/Underground Flower episode, all of Haruka's ninja history episodes, the one with Barabas's incest-y mother, just about every Kiros-centric episode, the Unas-Akira two-parter, and the one where Haruka and Momoko become outlaws, the one where the kids are forced to dance to death) and a few characters I really dug (Igam, Haruka, Kiros), but overall Maskman was utterly, painfully generic. The male heroes were cookie-cutter, the female heroes were interesting but got short-changed on focus episodes, and all of the villains except one (Igam) had very superficial motivations (and several were downright idiotic).

My enjoyment would have improved if the action was good, but I got really sick of the stock footage for the mech fights, and the human-sized fights were pretty "meh" throughout the series. And -- in what is perhaps the most damning indictment of a Super Sentai series for me -- I never once went, "this is so ridiculous, I can't believe what I'm watching." I'm almost always bowled over by the absurdity of at least ONE element in a sentai show, and that never happened here (although no one realizing that Igam was a woman was absurd in an infuriating way).

My major criticism (what, the above wasn't enough?) is that while I got a feel for who all of the hero characters on their own, I never understood their relationships. I have little to no idea of what the heroes thought about each other, and I feel like at any moment one of them could have been replaced without any of the others noticing. The villain characters were slightly better in this respect -- at least I understood that Igam and Ial had a contentious sibling rivalry and that Barabas hated everyone -- but their often baffling stupidity (seriously, you had NO CLUE that Igam was a woman? She's wearing high heels, a bustier, and heavy make up in every scene she's in, for heaven's sake) mitigated my appreciation of even that.

I'm not one to poke holes in the story logic of a sentai show, but the second I start thinking critically about Maskman, my mind explodes with questions. Like... Why was Kenta part of the team? What was the point of Momoko? I'm told Takeru is a thrill-seeking badass, but aside from the two episodes where he demonstrates a modicum of badassery, isn't he mostly just a lovesick puppy dog? How can I be expected to care about a climax focused entirely on Ial and Igam's relationship, when I only ever saw them interact for like, 5 minutes before they used their here-to-fore unmentioned magic sibling powers to save the world? Was there any nuance to Zeba's plans, or was he just trying to take over the world using late-in-the-game introduction of "Evil Particles?" Why didn't Zeba just kill Igam and/or Ial so they could never be reunited? In 51 episodes, they couldn't give Kenta another character trait beyond "this guy likes girls, I guess?" They couldn't have spent one more episode on Momoko? They couldn't have wrapped up the car racing stuff at all? What in the world is going to happen with the Underground Empire now that everyone on the surface is aware of their existence? Ugh, it's maddening!

The above may make it seem like I hated Maskman, but I didn't. I just found it completely unexceptional. So many people laud this show as the best series 80s Sentai has to offer that it makes me wonder if I should just stick to the 90's and beyond for my Sentai fix.