[GoldenXtreme]

You know, I think sometimes we tokusatsu fans forget just how GOOD we have it. Then you watch something like Giant Saver, which really puts things into perspective.

Since this series is super obscure I think a little bit of background is required. Giant Saver is a tokusatsu TV show from mainland China, which shared one of it's production companies with the maker of China's Armor Hero series. Giant Saver takes it's inspiration from Sentai, with a team of transforming heroes and their assortment of combiner mechs for when the monsters get big, to the point it might be more accurate to call the series a knockoff of Sentai rather than inspired by it. Notably, it has action done by Takanori Shibahara's Wild Stunts company!

One of the first things that immediately struck me about the show was the veneer of jank on pretty much every aspect of it. The stunts, while occasionally busting out cool moves, were generally a bit slow and clumsy. The camera work was truly awful, many shaky handheld shots and often they ended up with this vaguely nauseating distortion of the background in scenes. Episodes regularly end extremely abruptly. Heck, even the final episode pretty much did a smash cut from finishing off the final enemy to a 45 second epilogue. The show has a real bad case of adult actors badly pretending to be teenagers (especially Windy). The subtitles were just TERRIBLE. And yet... there was an earnest effort to add in overarching characterization and plot points, which actually shocked me. Sometimes a character would get injured and it would persist over several episodes or incidents from the past would get brought up. Really jarring that they actually tried on that front, as imperfect as it was.

Occasionally really unhinged episodes would come up, like the one where the team kidnaps a magical fishman doctor to force him to heal someone, getting said doctor killed in the process. Or... the episode with the monster that gives people intellectual disabilities, which is handled with even less tact than you are imagining. The plot overall was two-parter monster of the week fare. Fight the Super Elf (or occasional other monster), get the item, repeat. I think the story was at it's best when it came to episodes focused on winning new members over to fight on the team, which were usually quite fun. As far as the characters go, the cast was generally charming but lacking in substance. I felt like Zoe in particular got the short end of the stick when it came to focus.

There were a few interesting cultural things that got my attention during the show. Being filmed in China it was interesting to take in the scenery. Much of what I saw seemed nothing like Japan, and actually reminded me more of what you might see in the US, which really surprised me! Another thing, and one I personally found very funny, is how the actors were all very touchy with each other, which makes a very amusing contrast to the slightly aloof impression a lot of Japanese actors give off. Finally... I learned something really unusual about a lot of Chinese TV shows from this. Most shows aired in mainland China are required to have the dialogue be in Putonghua, the "standard" form of Chinese. However, most actors have strong regional accents in one form or another, so it's standard practice to redub live action shows with voice actors with a more "normal" accent, and Giant Saver is no exception. As someone who isn't used to watching Chinese TV, this creates a slightly uncanny effect where the voices feel slightly off all the time. In my mind, this is sort of like if the US redubbed anyone with an accent to sound like a New Yorker.

So... it was just kind of a disaster! We eat so good most of the time that sometimes we forget that tokusatsu can be really janky. I did find the show had a certain charm to it though, I'd legitimately be curious to try the other two entries in the series if they had subs, see if they were more polished and all that.