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What are you watching (Sentai edition)
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05-18-2021, 07:36 PM
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8571
Fish Sandwich
The Immortal King Tasty
Join Date: Jan 2012
Location: Every diner you've ever been to.
Posts: 3,833
~Fish's Zenkai Tour!~
Episode 11 – Hikari Sentai Maskman
The logo for the team is a pentagon with the number five in it, and it's also the series that introduced the glorious ideal of the five-piece combining robot to the franchise, appropriately called Great Five. It drives me
insane
that I'm NOT talking about the show literally called Fiveman right now.
That's what Maskman means to me personally as someone who hasn't seen it – just a sense of confusion about why it took them a couple years to come up with a title that fits this show's designs so well. And you know, I'm really glad I'm doing this project, because if I wasn't, I might've taken so much longer to get the closure I did looking the show up and finding out it
didn't
take them a couple years at all, because the working title for this show was "The Fiveman" the whole time! Turns out it's the people working for Toei that are truly insane, because they apparently spent most of the 80's constantly discarding all these Sentai ideas during the planning phase, only to then refuse to change other elements of the shows that directly reflected them!
So, putting that long-held frustration aside, how was the premiere? Well, first of all, I continue to be impressed by how Hirohisa Soda keeps finding different approaches for these scripts. You'd think it'd be hard to avoid writing all these first episodes in basically the same way, but I think he was probably conscious of that trap, and actively working to avoid falling into it. There are some notable shakeups in the structure for Maskman. For example, not only is there no giant robot action, there's no
transformation sequence
either, which feels sort of weird, even though it doesn't affect the plot or anything.
What absolutely affects the plot, however, is the clear focus on a particular character, Red Mask, also known as Takeru. And I mean,
just
Takeru, apparently, because my old frustration with the "five" thing has now been replaced by the mystery of why this show does the "only given names" thing again when these characters are just regular Japanese people as far as I can tell? Like, I could tell you Takeru's family name is Shiba
or
Tenkuuji, and even though I can't prove myself right, nobody could prove me wrong either.
But then, now I'm getting off track, much the way Takeru has to get off the race track he drives his cool car around when his girlfriend of mysterious origins rushes onto it in order to warn of the oncoming invasion of the underground empire. The interesting angle Maskman picks, that I can imagine being really unique and interesting over the course of a series, is putting a romance pretty front and center. The fact that it's a romance between a hero of the surface world and a woman originally sent from underground to act as a spy makes their situation dramatically complicated, of course. This is all communicated fairly smoothly just in the one episode, with some quick flashbacks establishing that these two have a history together, and a tragic separation that's shown to spur Red Mask on once he joins the climactic fight scene after the other four have already arrived.
It didn't totally wow me in the moment, but now that I'm sitting here writing about it, I'm realizing I actually really appreciate a lot of how this one was put together. It doesn't try to cram anything unnecessary in that would mess up the pacing, to the point that the whole martial arts/spirituality Aura Power shtick that's a central motif of the series is only brought up as a
cliffhanger
, enticing the viewer with yet more layers to the story that haven't even been touched on yet... outside of Hironobu Kageyama screaming about it during the opening's chorus, at least. (I kid, I kid; it's another good song!)
Not my absolute favorite premiere so far or anything, but another very promising start to another show I'll probably quite enjoy eventually.
__________________
誰かの笑顔のためだろ?
Last edited by Fish Sandwich; 03-05-2022 at
05:32 PM
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