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What are you watching (Sentai edition)
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08-05-2021, 07:49 PM
#
8777
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 21 – Denji Sentai Megaranger
You'll have to forgive me if this post gets all high tension times a million, but I love Megaranger so much it's a struggle to try and stay all nice and structured when all I want to do is sit here yelling about how awesome this show is. Actually! In that case, how about I don't bother trying at all! Normally I'd start with broad context or whatever, but who needs any of that setup when I can come out of the gate swinging with a particularly bold statement considering what this entire project is dedicated to:
I firmly believe Megaranger's premiere to be in the running for the best first episode in Super Sentai history.
That last sentence is total hyperbole on my part! I'm contradicting myself right here and now so it won't be a surprise if I do later. If I seriously thought the entire back half of this tour was going to be downhill from this peak, that'd mostly just be depressing. But what I
do
seriously think, and why I'm wording it that strongly anyway, is that Megaranger is completely amazing, and its initial outing is about as tight as they come.
See, Megaranger is in a bit of an interesting spot when it comes to the whole personal connection angle I like to cover, because it's both a show I've already seen in full, AND one I watched the premiere of but nothing else for what I believe was at least a couple years. Which means I'm basically doubly hyped here, hence why this whole post is such a jumbled mess of excitement. Although I don't remember exactly what my initial interest in the show was, or why I didn't jump on the whole thing right away.
I know that even before watching the show, I adored the theme song so much I could spend an entire paragraph on it, and, hey, guess what you're reading right now! Replace "premiere" and "first episode" in that above hyperbolic statement with "opening" and "theme song" and you've got the gist of it. What an absolute masterpiece of a jam. That energetic rhythm! That triumphant sound! Those fitting lyrics! There are only a scant few Sentai openings that can even come close to getting me as pumped as Megaranger's does. So that probably played a huge role in drawing me towards the series.
And once I did watch that first episode, it immediately left a strong impression on me. Apparently not strong enough to start watching the rest of the show right then and there, but it became something I knew I wanted to get around to sooner rather than later.
It's a premiere that's downright impeccable in how thoroughly and clearly it lays out what the show is about, and all in an extremely entertaining fashion. Conceptually, Megaranger revolves around two ideas (digital technology and youth) which are arguably a single broader idea (things that make the future), and the catch in both of those cases is that this is another show produced by Shigenori Takatera, so those ideas are employed in large part to ground the fantasy in a degree of reality.
So what's our Red for the series, ordinary high school student Kenta Date, doing in the very first scene of the premiere? Hitting up the local arcade and using his skills playing the Megaranger fighting game to crush some bully picking on little kids, of course! It's a really fun introduction, from the futuristic holographic visuals of the game, to the way the setup instantly endears you to Kenta, showing a caring side to him right away, but in a distinctly down-to-earth manner. A big part of the appeal of this show is that none of the heroes start as hypercompetent warriors, or even people "merely" predestined to eventually become hypercompetent warriors, and nothing could make that much clearer than Kenta's complete indifference to getting recruited to become a real-life Megaranger, being much more preoccupied with the free meal they had to give him so he'd sit down and hear them out. He was technically brought there because he had latent potential, yes, but even the guy running the whole operation has trouble believing it after getting a load of his personality. Kenta's hardly the ideal human, and that's what makes him the ideal symbol of this show's goals.
The rest of the character introductions are similarly strong, even though they aren't the ones given the most spotlight. The aforementioned guy in charge of the Megaranger project, Kubota, is easily my favorite mentor character in any Sentai I've seen, and you get a feel for why right away. He's just another very
normal
dude, often very visibly stressed out the way someone with his job probably would be, while still clearly being qualified for it. Again, far from an ideal human. But while the heroes may not follow the usual heightened standards of the genre, the villains of the show, the Nezirejia, most certainly do, and that's what the makes the conflict so compelling. Right from their name, playing off of a Japanese word for twisting or distorting something, they're clearly bad news, and they start living up to that very quickly, tearing through a facility in use by INET as part of the organization's efforts to stop the oncoming invasion of the world... a facility where all our main characters happen to be at, naturally.
So there's some real thrills to this episode's structure too, as within a minute of Kenta, Kubota, and the other four future members of the team all getting in a room together for the first time, everything starts exploding, and suddenly there's this HUGE pressure going on. Kubota sees the surprising ingenuity and determination of these five random high school kids when put in a pinch, and these five friends can see the weight of the violence happening around them, so they end up becoming the Megarangers, and from there it only gets even cooler. You've got the obligatory fight with mooks, the first hint of a bit of a cool rivalry between Mega Red and the main muscle of the villains, and it all ends with the team narrowly escaping the complete destruction of the facility by heading up to space, with that little bit of text in the corner assuring the viewer that this is merely the beginning.
And sure enough, the show really does get cooler and cooler from there, as though that's possible. So many wonderful moments, exciting new characters, and just generally stellar episodes all over the place. I could talk about so many of them! The awesomeness of Galaxy Mega as early as the second epiosde! The suspense of the debut of its successor, the Mega Voyager! Wonderful additions to either side of the cast, like Yuusaku and Guirail! The Nezirangers!
The Nezirangers!!!
It's
too
much! This is already way longer than I wanted these posts to be, and there's still a part of me that wants to keep going. Where's the whole paragraph dedicated to how great the ending theme song is too, you know? Needless to say, Megaranger is a show that is very much to my tastes. Grounded and realistic in ways that make it more human and relatable, but without ever losing sight of the big engaging drama or goofy fun that makes hero tokusatsu what it is. I mean, INET tried to find candidates for the Megarangers using
a video game
; the show's not actually that obsessed with logic! But if a bit of "realism" here or there can add a cool factor to all the technology, or a hint of subtle depth to the characters and their bonds, or a greater sense of menace to the antagonists, then Megaranger never hesitates to take advantage of that. The tone hits a great sweet spot in my opinion, and the individual stories it tells within that world are often as compelling as can be.
I speak so highly of Megaranger because it did an unusually fantastic job drawing me into its universe and endearing me to the people living in it. There was a stretch where my signature on this forum was an out-of-context screenshot of a random goofy line from the show I loved, and that lasted for WAY longer than it really needed to. Even now, it's a series I feel a ton of attachment to. At the end of the day, I don't think I can sum it up any better than that.
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Last edited by Fish Sandwich; 03-05-2022 at
06:09 PM
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