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What are you watching (Sentai edition)
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11-17-2021, 06:49 PM
#
8987
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 35 – Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger
Okay, I've teased the whole story of my proper introduction to Super Sentai quite a few times leading up to this moment, and here we finally are – 2011, the year tokusatsu peaked, apparently. I mean, it's a decade later, and with an almost alarming level of consistency, I still regularly see people talking about how Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger and Kamen Rider OOO stand head and shoulders above most of the other entries in their respective franchises. Both of these shows are getting V-Cinemas to celebrate their 10th anniversaries, both of them sold loads of merchandise, both of them *still* reliably move merchandise... both of them are downright
beloved
series, any way you slice it.
And you know what else OOO and Gokaiger have in common? They were the first shows I watched from either franchise, and in both cases, I
really
don't appreciate them anywhere near as much as I ought to. In OOO's case, a huge part of that is how I watched so many Rider shows right away that I consider more than one of them my "first", which gives me some excuse, but with Gokaiger? You're going to see over the next couple weeks that it took me a bit to start engaging with Sentai with the same level of enthusiasm I immediately approached Kamen Rider with. I watched OOO because
I
was excited about it; I watched Gokaiger more because
everyone
was excited about it.
Gokaiger was certainly a series that immediately commanded everyone's attention back when it started airing. Toei basically set out to make the definitive anniversary celebration for all of Sentai, and when the premiere comes out swinging with an epic battle featuring
close to two hundred suit actors
portraying all the teams up to this point on the screen at once, fighting in a legendary battle against the forces of evil, it's easy to see how serious they were about this. That cold open alone is iconic enough that I'm pretty sure back in the day, it even managed to go a tiny bit viral among people who knew nothing about the context beyond "look at all them Power Rangers!" It was a big moment.
But you can't have the entire show be made on that scale, of course, so what was the actual meat of the series like, for people to praise it the way they do?
Well,
they got Naruhisa Arakawa to write it, for one thing. You couldn't have found a better pair of hands to put this show into, really. Not only is he a veteran Sentai writer and long-time fan who knows how to respectfully and effectively leverage past material, but, as I mentioned earlier in the tour, when I was talking about the first two Sentai he was in charge of, the dude's writing has
swagger
, and as further proof of that, it was his idea to make the actual premise of this tribute to a longstanding tradition of allies of justice be about a bunch of roguish space pirates who only came to Earth to look for treasure. Heck of a curveball there! And the result is maybe the only group of protagonists that could hope to match the swagger of the man himself.
Actually, this is maybe throwing the format out of whack with so much general stuff left to go over, but since I'm already kinda talking about the premiere anyway, let me cut to the chase –
Arakawa was the best choice for this job.
It's almost kind of aggravating how tight Gokaiger's first episode is, when I think about how little I would've noticed that at the time.
So obviously the cold open is brilliant just for the sheer scale of it, right? Crazy cool action to kick things off with a bang, and it quickly establishes the backstory heading into the show that all 34 of those awesome teams of heroes unfortunately lost their powers valiantly defending the Earth from an evil space empire that day... which brings us to
these guys
, later on. Why I'm specifically singling out Arakawa's talents for praise is because I'm deeply impressed how fully formed the dynamic of the Gokaigers is from the word go. Arakawa already knows exactly what he wants this team to be like, as though he's already been writing them for a while, and that means he knows how to make all that personality come across
constantly.
There's a great trick the episode pulls in how so much of it is informing you about the world and characters by way of
demonstration
, rather than dry exposition. Combined with the way the individual personalities of the team members get moments to shine throughout each scene, I think you come out of this one learning a ton about the series without it actively feeling like you're being
taught
, the way a lot of opening chapters to stories often (understandably) can't get around. A really great example of this is in how the Gokaigers are shown selling off jewelry for some Earth cash to pay for lunch. Seems innocuous enough, but that's exactly the point: you explicitly know from seeing this that despite being anti-hero pirates in search of the greatest treasure in the universe, the team aren't looking to pillage and plunder for every random thing they want. Plus, the conversation that leads to this itself ends with a nice comedic beat when the deeply materialistic Luka reacts with shock and horror upon realizing why Captain Marvelous is asking for one of her rings, which is demonstrating a key aspect of
her
particular personality on top of everything. I know when I break it down like this, it probably doesn't sound all that impressive, but— wait, hang on a second!
Did I mention Gokai Red's name is "Captain Marvelous"? I'm sorry if I dropped that in so casually, but when you've had Gokaiger in your life for a decade, it becomes easy to take for granted that it has one of the best names for a main protagonist ever. So let's all take a moment to stop and appreciate that for a second. Just say it out loud:
Captain Marvelous.
Sounds pretty great, doesn't it? Dude lives up to that moniker, too. First thing he does in the series is fearlessly charge past an enemy fleet in his crew's spaceship/giant robot, and when the restaurant he's having curry at gets exploded by yet more enemy ships with him in it, his immediate concern is just whether or not he can get a plate to replace the one he lost in the blast. And again, it's like this with everyone, in every scene, all throughout the episode.
The crew of the Gokai Galleon are such an eclectic bunch of strong personalities, and it's no trouble at all getting a handle on them even with all the room that needs to be made for everything else here. I already mentioned two of them, but Don's wimpy demeanor is also on full display as he makes loads of pessimistic comments about basically everything, Ahim is constantly acting like the noblewoman she is and indirectly pushes the group to act heroically by being the first to stop and take notice of the frightened commoners in need of saving once everything starts blowing up (this is why Ahim is my favorite, by the way), and even Joe, the enigmatic cool blue whose personality can't be fully displayed so easily, still has the layers behind his stoicism hinted at in some fashion when Luka teases him early in the episode about how he's totally forcing himself to pretend he isn't excited about exploring a whole new planet the same way all of them are. I guess it's easy for me to say this having seen the whole show, but I truly think the premiere gives everyone great material to work with. As an overall unit, too, you get a nice feel for the whole unique selling point of the Gokaigers being space pirates, which is how this is the exceptionally rare team to have no initial connection to Earth whatsoever, making the way their resolve to protect the planet grows with time a big anchor for the drama. They're initially presented as these weird outsiders yelling through a megaphone to ask where the treasure is so they can be on their way, and even at the end of this episode, it's much more their beef with the villains that motivates them than it is any specific value in this particular planet and its people. Marvelous even insists this was entirely about the curry, if you believe him. To be fair, he does seem like the kind of guy who would believably go to war over someone ruining his lunch.
Indeed, Gokai Red in general comes off like a dude you don't want to mess with, and a big part of that is Hirofumi Fukuzawa's suit acting. This is the final Red he would play before becoming the action director for Sentai as a whole starting with the next series (and continuing at least all the way up to Zenkaiger!), and I think he made it count. It's another instantly distinctive role, with this fantastic balance of nonchalance and aggression befitting a captain who is at once supremely charismatic and more than a little dangerous. But the thing is, Gokaiger is a Sentai where I can instantly tell you how distinct
everyone
is in-suit, something I find often takes a bit more reading into the subtle touches to figure out. Here though? Blue conveys Joe's master swordsmanship and confident stoicism through his habit (that you admittedly don't see in the premiere) of taking opponents on with one hand literally behind his back; Green gets across how weird Don is by doing
whatever
throughout battles; Yellow reflects Luka's self-assured spunkiness with a lot of snappy, high-energy gestures; and then you've got Pink going in the exact opposite direction with graceful and composed mannerisms appropriate for Ahim, the most classy person in the group.
Oh man, and I'm only now realizing I've gotten this far without even mentioning the biggest gimmick of the Gokaigers! ...And I'm still not going to for a little bit, because I want to touch on all the great action leading up to that in the premiere! The Gokaigers storming past an enemy blockade to make it to Earth was a great way to set a swashbuckling tone for the group right away, and it's certainly displaying some more Arakawa swagger to put the giant robot fight at the
start
of the episode, like a total rebel. And while the frantic pace and large scale of the action requires Gokai-Oh to be portrayed using CG for most of the sequence, they made sure to get in a nice shot or two of the proper suit standing there looking cool, which I appreciate. I mean, it probably goes without saying how tight this thing is on a production level when it has the cold opening it does. Honestly, I sort of found the debut battle for the Gokaigers themselves more impressive in a way. They made an unusually large amount of mook suits this year, and all throughout the climax, there's this striking sense of what an overwhelming force these five heroes are somehow effortlessly taking on by themselves, backed by exciting choreography and elevated by the aforementioned distinctive performances of the suit actors. It's impressive stuff; a great way to cap off the episode's action.
Except that isn't what caps it off, now is it? I'd like to note that I wasn't even intentionally trying to avoid getting to this point, because I think that in of itself speaks volumes about how much Gokaiger stands solely on its own merits. And it's because you can get invested in them as their own team that it becomes that much more interesting when they start turning into all the other ones on top of that. Yes, a huge part of the show's appeal is that all those powers that got lost at the start have wound up in the hands of this unusual new Sentai, which, among other things, gives the fights an unprecedented ability to pull in a massive variety of different motifs, styles, and abilities, all owing to how varied the franchise itself has been over the years. It's deeply nostalgic for fans, but also exciting for those less familiar with what other teams are even out there, simply because that makes it so much more random and fun, a balance between audiences that Gokaiger is always striving for.
Naturally, there's a lot of narrative significance to all this, as well. Being anti-heroes who have also monopolized the entirety of Super Sentai, another running theme throughout the show is how the Gokaigers have to prove themselves as true heroes in their own right, rather than mere pirated copies of previous legends, which involves many,
many
returning faces from older shows in guest-starring roles interacting with the crew over the course of the series. A topic that would be fun to talk about in its own right, but I believe the point I was actually trying to get back around to was my personal experience with this show.
Gokaiger is undeniably great. I would not argue otherwise for a second, even back then. And as you can plainly see, I'm certainly getting pumped enough writing about it right now. But when I was watching the show at the time, it never quite became something I was eagerly awaiting each new episode of. It'll be hard to believe, I'm sure, but I guess I wasn't always this passionate about tokusatsu, and I
certainly
didn't start out overthinking things the way I do nowadays. I enjoyed Gokaiger just fine, but I was incapable of stopping to really appreciate how much of a quality series it really is, and it's one of those shows I think deserves another look from me one of these days. Something that's striking me thinking back on it to write this is that, despite how I haven't seen most of these episodes since they aired, I actually still remember loads of amazing moments, even if a lot of the full context is vague at this point. I don't consider Gokaiger one of my absolute favorite Sentai at all, despite the nostalgic status you'd imagine it would have as my first series, and when I say that, there's always this sort of voice in the back of my head, again much like with OOO, that goes "but why not though?" Because on an almost objective level, it just *should* be, the same way it is for so many other people. This is a Sentai that pulls off the impossible feat of being an epic fanservice celebration that's still totally accessible to newcomers (I would know!), full of memorable original characters and tons of strong storytelling of its own, that captures the overall spirit of the franchise, and all with that irresistibly cool pirate motif carrying it along. And then there are the simple pleasures, like how Ranger Keys were basically the best idea Bandai has ever had, and I mean, I adore those things too!
Make no mistake though, I definitely love Gokaiger. It's a show I only grow more fond of with retrospect, as I've gradually come to understand how good I had it getting into Rider and Sentai when I did, and just like most fans probably will, I'd recommend it to anyone in a heartbeat, for so many more reasons than I've even covered here.
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Last edited by Fish Sandwich; 11-17-2021 at
06:54 PM
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