Another Fujii episode and...I think Toei owes him some MAJOR royalties. They go on to duplicate this episode for years -- cripes, they still do this episode! It's a shichihenge-styled episode, and it involves a monster that absorbs love and is taken down by the heroes staging a sham wedding. While the shichihenge's been with the franchise from the start, I think this is the first episode of Super Sentai with this particular depiction of it. (Dynaman has a KINDA similar episode, but it only results in Rei posing as a bride. This one involves the whole team, right down to Shiron Fashion Lala-ing dress clothes for the heroes to wear on their undercover mission.) Inoue and Arakawa, especially, love copying this episode. I'm just going to go right out and say that it seems to me like Fujii was the first who came up with this, something that's gone on to be such a well-worn trope.
What I like about this episode is that the Turboranger piece together some vague clues about what's going on, and then they kind of keep failing in terms of plans. They make a connection with Haruna's friend, who's mysteriously fallen ill, along with a couple of other young women around the city (including Yamaguchi-sensei), tracing it all to a mysterious love fortune-teller. They unmask the fortune-teller as the latest Bouma-Beast, busting that plan of the Bouma's. The Bouma then switch tactics to attack brides. The Turboranger are on a clock, because if they don't defeat the monster, all of those who were targeted by it will die. But there's too much ground to cover -- they sneak into weddings as guests to keep an eye on things, but still the Bouma-Beast attacks. Youhei and Haruna go undercover as a priest and shrine maiden, but are immediately sniffed out by the Bouma. Finally, what helps them win the day is Riki and Haruna staging a fake wedding as bride and groom, successfully luring the Bouma to them.
This is one of the better episodes of its type -- a lot of these types of episodes don't bother to make the threat seem all that serious, but this one does. But it also gets in some laughs (priest Youhei firing the Turbo Laser through a priest's onusa!) and has some good, dark atmospheric scenes within the fortune-teller's place. My complaint is that I think it should have been a Jinba plan; Fujii should know, he's the one who introduced Jinba's past, that he hates love because of what happened to him as a human. But this is instead a Jarmine plan, and it's born of her hatred and jealousy of love and...meh, it's hard to buy that coming from Jarmine. She's supposed to be the cold serpent, remember? (Maybe her anger in this episode comes from just not understanding love, which would echo the lyric in the opening theme about the "pitiful Bouma who don't know love.") Mostly, I just assume there was an interest in having this episode be heavily female-focused -- it's about Haruna, her friends, Yamaguchi gets in on it, Shiron's given a little more to do than she has lately, and so I guess they decided to use Jarmine for that purpose.
Yamaguchi having her fortune told, the episode puts out the idea that she might be in love with Dazai, which was always weird to me. She hated his guts early on! I like them more antagonistic, and when she's always misinterpreting Dazai's intentions. It keeps her all business and makes him look like the eccentric weirdo he's supposed to be.
Haruna gets stronger episodes down the line, but Yoshiko Kinohara's especially good here. I always liked her as Haruna, she's just so genuine in her caring for people, but she can give Haruna a real anger at the Bouma, and she gives Pink Turbo a real strength and fierceness; her voiceovers are really good. (She screams like a horror movie Scream Queen.)
One last thing: I still think Fujii's owed some money.
When people say Turboranger brought nothing new to the franchise... right here, it brought to life one of the most common Sentai episode tropes. That's pretty groundbreaking to me I feel lol.
ReplyDeleteHaruna, as per usual tradition of pinks during this time, is clearly the butt-kicker of the group, whom like you said, definitely has a certain anger to her. I think what makes Haruna what she is as far as pinks go, as that she's like you said, very genuine and caring. She's a really nice empathetic individual. While we've had Pinks with these traits before, I feel Haruna, despite her age, is possibly one of the most down to earth Pinks ever. She's not weird or eccentric, but is very earnest. And I feel that's what makes her stand out from other pinks like Rei or Momoko, just to name a couple.
Anyone who says Turboranger didn't bring anything new didn't watch it. Because, as I've already overstated, sooooooooo many subsequent shows ride its coattails. I'll just flat out word it that way!
DeleteI don't want to get ahead of myself, but Haruna proves why she's one of the greats later on, in episode 46. That episode displays all of her great qualities, but also breaks her a bit. It's one of the best heroine episodes, IMO.
Fujii's contributions to Sentai really get overlooked. Maybe he needed his own series to get the recognition he deserved (a la Inoue), I'm not sure.
ReplyDeleteThe episode has a pretty solid atmosphere and mystery aspect, and I like how the team has to act on their feet through the whole thing. I enjoy how Fujii ties the monster's victims to the high school setting, and makes good use of Yamaguchi-sensei. The "duel" between Haruna and the monster has some fantastic bits.
Haruna is fantastic in this one. I like her caring nature and the initiative she takes in solving her friends' problems. Throughout her focus episodes, she gladly makes plans and puts herself in danger to save the team and her classmates. Her strategizing is what helps separate her from her contemporary pink senshi (e.g., Momoko and Mai) and brings her closer to characters like Sara and Megumi. This prudence even pops up in little moments, like when she feigns losing her baton in front of Nagareboshi. Part of me thinks this was Soda adjusting to having just one female member on the team again, so he opted to merge the traits of previous female duos into Haruna.
Fujii has done a lot of great work, and one of the biggest mistakes in toku history is his never being given a show of his own. I can't imagine what a show of his would be like -- he can write some heavy stuff. I liken him to a less melodramatic Inoue, so I think he'd have done a show like Jetman, but without the heightened soap-opera-y angle. Maybe the world wasn't ready for that show!
DeleteStraying a bit off-topic here, but I kept wondering what Turboranger would have been like with two heroines. What if Yellow had originally meant to be female? A kind of silly, immature underachieving heroine would have been a change of pace, and then there wouldn't have been the people who were so quick to lump Youhei and Shunsuke together. Throughout this rewatch, I kept wondering why they went back to having just one heroine, when two heroines were still such a new thing, and Liveman only really ended up reverting to the pre-Bio style by accident. (If Turboranger had been made in the era of Sixth Heroes, I nominate Mika Yamaguchi to return as a hero!)