2/27/88 -- It's alive! It's a Liveman!

Today marks the 25th anniversary of the debut of Choujuu Sentai Liveman. The first episode is called "My Friends, Why Did You?" -- and I don't care what you say -- it's a classic. It's personally my favorite Sentai premiere. It just keeps coming at you, and yet, it takes its time to establish everything.

A lot of the Sentai premieres -- most of them -- up until that point had a similar formula. The bad guys are established, invade, the team is assembled. Liveman uses time jumps and flashbacks and fills you in on details -- where the villains are coming from, how the heroes react, the time it takes them to build their arsenal.

One of my favorite scenes in all of Sentai is from the first episode, when Yuusuke, Jou and Megumi collect themselves after Volt's first attack on Academia Island and it turns into a nightmarish reunion with their former classmates. The Bofura battleship lands, the silhouettes of the three traitors as Tatsumi Yano's excellent BGM plays. Look at the smug faces of the three -- they're so damn proud of themselves for annihilating their old school, it's disgusting. They boast of their transformations, the things they learned from Bias. The three protagonists are cornered, Kemp becoming the freakishly bizarre Beauty Beast, Mazenda firing upon them with her surgically-attached arsenal. Our heroes stand -- "We've changed a lot in the last two years, too." They transform, and our smug villains are in SHOCK. I love that they were just two minutes ago so self satisfied, but are just so surprised by Yuusuke, Jou and Megumi's becoming Liveman. And I love that the show wasn't afraid to show that the Liveman just weren't quite there yet, that they take more hits in their first battle. They don't just instantly cream the Volt's troops. Yellow Lion gets so fed up with being beat that he goes and gets his mecha!

How different Liveman must have seemed at the time, huh? This different premiere episode, the first Sentai with completely human villains, only the second team to have just three heroes. I grew up with the Bioman through Liveman run, and had only the vaguest idea of teams that came before Bioman from retrospective books, so a male Yellow and female Blue was an interesting change. I thought just having three heroes was so cool...

It didn't dawn on me until I was older that the two murdered friends, Takuji and Mari, would have filled out the five members of Liveman. The power suits of their project, the plans of which ended up being turned into the Liveman suits, featured the logo of a swallow and beagle. So, last year I had a friend draw me what Takuji and Mari's Liveman suits might have looked like, had they survived and become Liveman. The swallow on Takuji's suit is orange, while Mari's beagle mark is brown, so I wanted to switch up the colors Sentai usually uses and have them be...

ORANGE SWALLOW and BROWN BEAGLE!

My friend came up with the weapon designs -- all I knew was that I wanted one of them to have a sai, because I think it's moronic that Green Sai had friggin' boomerangs and not the sai! I also kind of think that Takuji would probably have been leader of the team since he seemed to have his act more together than Yuusuke did at that point.