Birdonic Soldier: Chojin Sentai Jetman (intro)

Jetman. We all know its reputation. For Toei, for a lot of Japanese fans, it's the Golden Child. For a long, long period in the English-speaking fandom, it was the Golden Child, as well. But opinions among that last group have changed over time; a lot of people have turned on it, and a lot of the new eyeballs the show attracts finds that it doesn't live up to the hype. There's still a devoted fan base, but Jetman's taken some beatings. (It's only right for it to be taken down a couple of pegs; but I hate when it's trashed because of it being an Inoue show, and the popularity of trashing him. The guy used to be good! Just 'cause Faiz and Kiva are weaker works doesn't erase his good shows! And, at this point, Faiz and Kiva look more Kamen Rider-like than anything in the post-W world.)

Jetman used to be really close to my heart. My introduction to it was a Hero Club video that edited together the first three episodes -- I was blown away by it. After sampling around some of the '90s Sentai shows I thought were weird, to see Jetman was a treat, because it felt so close to the Sentais I had grown up with. But it also had some stuff you didn't see in those shows -- especially, of course, Gai, who was kind of like...if Denis Leary was a member of the Justice League. And I was drawn into just how unprepared the heroes were, how much they screwed up initially, how they were shown figuring everything out.

I finished Jetman all scattershot -- it was expensive to buy lousy quality VHS tapes from sellers, so I'd hop around -- and really liked the show, it was in my top five at one point. I liked its seriousness, the drama. It so influenced me, that when I tried doing my own Sentai fan-fic in the late '90s, it turned into such a whiny emo-fest that it made Jetman look like Goggle V.

But the more I'd go back to the show, and the older I got, and the more I saw of all of the older Sentai shows -- once I watched all of them in their entirety -- I became more and more...disillusioned with the show, I'll say. Like, I've written why I think Ryu's such an interesting character on page, but he never was at the top of my favorite Reds. Once I was older, I recognized that Koutarou Tanaka's limits as an actor is the reason Ryu never made my list of favorite Reds. Similarly, I liked the idea of Raita, but actor Tomihisa Naruse would start to bug me the more I watched the show and picked up on little things he'd do that made the character not the good-natured guy he was meant to be.

I liked how cruel the Vyram were, but came to notice how weak Daisuke Tachi was as Radeige -- often making what's (supposed to be) a vicious character laughable. Yeah, even when I loved the show, I always had a problem with Vyram. More on that story as it develops...

The last time I felt a ton of love for the show was when it hit DVD for the first time, in '05, and my family bought it for me as a gift. (I got volume 1 as a birthday gift that year, along with a Cross Changer. It was awesome.) It was the first Sentai show that I loved and cared about to hit DVD, and I was REALLY excited about it. My tapes were mostly awful quality, so it was also great to watch the show with a crisp picture.

After that, though, Jetman kind of slipped for me. Whenever I'd try to rewatch it after that, I'd get bored just several episodes in, or think of how much better I'd find the show with some recasting, or I'd just keep thinking of the ludicrous and infuriating finale. I never fully turned on it, the way a lot of fans did, but it kinda made me sad that I found my love for it so diminished. I'd really like to like Jetman as much as I used to. Even so, I've still taken some lumps defending the show.

There's still so much that Jetman does that I like, and it -- along with a lot of Inoue's other shows -- falls in line with a lot of my sensibilities. And Jetman always felt like the end of an era to me -- going from the militaristic, villain-heavy shows to the nuttiness Sugimura brings to the franchise with his run, and then the Power Rangers influence. (Little did I know that Jetman WAS close to being the end of an era -- the end of Sentai, period.)

And even though Jetman owes a lot to some of its predecessors -- especially Denjiman, Changeman, Maskman, Liveman -- it still brings a lot of new things to the table. Namely, it was the first Sentai to focus on such an unprofessional, rag-tag group of heroes. The generic summary of a Sentai team will usually mention "five strangers from all walks of life." And while that's usually true, pretty much every hero prior to Jetman was either a professional soldier, a scientist, a martial-arts master, or someone disciplined in some sport. (Sometimes, you got a Gary Stu who was practically all of the above!) Jetman gave us a high-society type who wasn't used to doing things on her own; a bratty high-schooler (who hated phys-ed); a stocky, pacifist farmer; and a street-brawlin', pessimist thug. The only professional soldier, the only one meant to be there was Ryu/Red, and even he had issues.

There's just been so many Sentai shows, so many toku shows since, that I think it's been kind of lost on younger fans just how innovative and fresh Jetman was at the time. A lot of subsequent shows enviously want to be it, a lot of people have tried to duplicate it -- including Inoue -- and never quite reached what it did. With my rewatches of Liveman and Black, I wanted to try to work through some mere frustrations. Jetman's fallen more out of favor with me than either of those shows, so I started a rewatch in hopes of truly rediscovering my love for the show, but also hoping to point out where it soared and where I think it legitimately went wrong. Let's go (tobidase)!

But before I start, a complaint -- already. Since I just quoted it, I have to talk about the OP theme. I've said before why I don't like it. But I wrote that post before I found out that producer Takeyuki Suzuki, Toei and the show's staff was pushing for "Toki o Kakete" to be the OP, while Hironobu Kageyama and Columbia pushed for the OP we got. I'm surprised they won over Toei, but it's unfortunate they did. Not only do I find "Toki o Kakete" to be the best song from Jetman, but it would have made for an AWESOME opening theme. It would have been one of those curveball choices like Metalder's OP or Blue Swat's OP, in that it's atypical for an OP, but unlike those songs, it's actually fast-paced, but has a sound which suits the show far greater than the fluffy OP we ended up with. (I've watched the Jetman credits set to "Toki o Kakete" and it's awesome. BTW, Toei's wanting it for the OP is supposedly the reason it plays during the show's first promo instead of an instrumental of the OP.)

TO BE CONTINUED...