Flashman Episode 1 & Why Flashman and Japanese Superheroes Rock

EPISODE 1

I consider this episode to be one of the best premiere episodes of a tokusatsu series, mostly because of how efficiently it establishes everything in such a quick manner, and just the scope of it. On the surface, it might seem like an ordinary premiere episode -- the villains invade, the team forms to stop them -- but it's the first Sentai premiere with scenes taking place outside of Earth! Not only that, but the Flashman aren't government employees, they're not chosen at random -- there's a reason why they take action, why they're determined to stop this particular threat of villains.

There's just so much money and effort put into this show and these premiere episodes specifically. From the very first shot of Mess' Lab headquarters on. So many FX shots to bring the Flash planets to life, as well as the unique and incredible abilities that not only the Flashman, but Mess' reconstructed officers possess. Flashman is putting on a show, man.

The first scene of the show introduces us to our villains for the year. There are so damn many of 'em! I wonder how it had to be for fans to go from those early-'80s types of villains -- the lead, a couple of kunoichi -- to something like Flashman. People wonder why I always lament the use of rubber suits and seiyuu-only villains, but you can thank Flashman. Flashman spoiled me. Not only do we have truly formidable villains wearing awesome Yutaka Izubuchi designs, but you have genuine actores like Koji Shimizu (and later Joji Nakata) and good, game performers who relish their roles like Sayoko Hagiwara, Yutaka Hirose and Miyuki Nagato. (Sorry, Hiroko Kojima; Kiruto's good in a fight, but she doesn't stand out as much as the others.)

Mess is one of the more interesting and diabolical villain groups a Sentai has faced. Not merely content with invading and conquering, they like to use the lifeforms found on various planets for their scientific experiments. Great Professor Lee Keflen is a sickie who wants to play God and create whatever kind of lifeforms he can; Great Emperor La Deus, obviously, thinks he IS God, wanting to be the most supreme lifeform to ever have existed in the entire universe. The officers below them, the field commanders, all being experiments created by these two, give this group more of a unity than other villain groups, which are often at odds or backstabbing one another. Mess is a pretty well-oiled machine, and that just makes them even more formidable and threatening to our heroes.

We meet our heroes uniting, of their own volition, in another solar system. Word has reached the Flash planets that Mess is now targeting Earth, so leader Jin has sent word to his four human comrades to gather. This involves scenes of Dai, in the Jet Delta, picking up Sara on the Yellow Star, and Bun, in the Jet Seeker, dropping by the Pink Star to grab Ruu. The two ships meet up with Jin, in his Tank Command, at the Flash Star, where he informs them that he's found out that Mess -- whom he knows is responsible for their kidnapping -- has now set their sights on the conquering and decimation of Earth, and that they're the best chance to stop them. They all get to the Round Base, a massive ship capable of the journey through space. Despite warnings coming from of the Flash Planet natives for them not to leave, the pleas go ignored, and the five heroes launch, ready to begin their mission.

The set-up of this premise and their motivation is almost Kamen Rider-like. These five know the pain caused by the Mess, and they are determined to do whatever it takes to prevent the Mess from perpetuating any more of the pain they've caused them. They see it as their personal duty to spare Earth, their home planet, of any harm. (So, it's pretty fucked up the way the Earth ends up treating them.) They've survived a tragedy, and things get worse for them as the show goes on -- but they're all pretty upbeat and positive characters. And at the same time, as horrible as it is that they were all taken from their home when they were just babies, they were among some of the luckier ones who had been in the clutches of Mess. It was fortunate for them that the people of the Flash system interfered and raised them to be such decent people. (We'll find some Earthlings who WEREN'T lucky throughout the show.)

People see the Flashman team as being a team full of goody-goodies, but I like the way they're depicted, and how it's unique to the show's background. They're not uninteresting, flat depictions of virtue found so often in superhero entertainment. They're just decent people, good-natured. Pure. I think some of that comes from their not having a normal childhood on Earth, that they were robbed of that, so they retain a child-like wonder and innocence and are, in a way, stunted. Another is that the Flash people are said to be so kind-hearted and such believers in justice that that was surely an influence on our heroes, and they were taught those ways and beliefs.

They're basically a reverse Superman. Instead of an alien landing on Earth and growing up to be a decent person because he was raised honorably by humble Midwestern folks, here's five Earthlings who were brought up by the good citizens of an alien planet, raising them to be the best people they could be. (And I think the Flashman production is further inspired by Superman, taking Superman: The Movie's crystalline-obsessed Krypton and making crystals an important component to the Flashman's powers, especially their individual weapons. Spielban's got some Superman in it, too. I always thought the two shows were compatible, and as a kid who loved both, the idea of a Flashman-Spielban crossover is too cool to ponder. It's interesting that Toei's two toku shows of '86 had similar set-ups for our heroes in that both show's heroes were robbed of their childhoods by their villains.)

While I typically like superheroes with a bit of an edge or attitude or even some darkness to them, I never had a problem with the Flashman all being depicted as so positive and just GOOD. I don't feel like they're indistinguishable, either. They're all upstanding people, they're all serious and determined and often on the same page, but they're all clearly their own person, and they're not joyless or have a one-track mind about their mission to the point where you don't feel like they're living, breathing people. What they were taught by the Flash people, and what they each learned on their own being trained to adapt to the specific climates of Planet Flash's individual natural satellites, is a further way they're distinguished, but I'll talk a little more about that in the next episode.

The Mess make their presence known in a brutal sequence in which the officers and the Zoros are out just butchering people. Our five heroes arrive on Earth just in time, fighting with Mess' attack ships and then finally taking on their officers, the Zoros and the monster of the week, putting on such a display of power upon killing the monster, that Mess' forces retreat. (That's right, Flashman is the first Super Sentai since Battle Fever J to not cram in a combined robot fight in its already-busy first episode.) The fight, I have to admit, comes across a bit more sluggishly than you'd expect from action-director Junji Yamaoka, but it's still filmed terrifically, and is filled with great moments that you'll only see in this show; the Flashman using the powers they naturally developed on the Flash system, our Mess freaks showing their ferocity, the really cool crystalline weapons the Flashman are armed with. Flashman's trying to show you some new stuff, building this unique world and strange, wonderful displays of power. I find, if you look at the shows prior to Flashman and then at Flashman, you can see there's just this surge of liveliness, it's fresh, it's of-the-moment, it's fun, it's COOL.

Flashman is putting on a show. It's riding the last huge wave of the sci-fi craze going on at the time, and it is going to do it to the fullest of their ability. I honestly feel like there's a sense from the production -- from the writers to the directors to the actors to the crew -- that they took this thing seriously, that they wanted to put on a damn good sci-fi show that could rival anything out of Hollywood. And if the budget can't allow that, they'll compensate it with dedication and creativity.

Look, I was a weird white kid in Japan, yo. I didn't know a lick of Japanese. Something about these shows spoke to me, man, especially a good show that was competently presented like Flashman. It's like I understood them by osmosis. I watched my fair share of TV, and as young as I was, I can look back and realize I knew when a show was cheap or junk. (My mom was into soaps, and even as a kid I was like "Damn, why do the sets on these shows look like cardboard a kid made?!") While I think there was a glut of creative shows and movies in the 1980s, a lot of the superhero stuff that was offered left something to be desired. Like, who was the most popular type of hero at that time? He-Man. What's one of the most boring shows to ever be made? He-Man. Cartoons at the time were very formulaic and uninvolving, because nobody was interested in telling a story or depicting anything of consequence; they just wanted to teach lessons and sell merchandise, not necessarily in that order. And if you're talking live-action superheroes, forget about it. You'd get something procedural-like, that was barely superheroic feeling, like The Incredible Hulk, or movies that didn't want to take themselves seriously like whatever that crazy crap the Salkinds decided to do to Superman in the '80s.

I always liked superheroes, and I think what sparked my interest in tokusatsu, without really realizing it, is that is presented a wild, wonderful, imaginative world of superheroes as you expected it to be, in live action. With something like Flashman, you had a show that was unique and telling interesting stories -- it could be fun, it could be superheroic, it could be driven by action, it could be very, very tragic. It wasn't afraid to be dramatic. And one of the things I've always found frustrating about the world of superheroes -- to this day, even, in regards to trying to get back into comics -- is that the stories just go on and on. Comic book hero stories are really just soap operas, just going on and on without any kind of real plan. There will be arcs, but there will also be a lot of repetition, a lot of throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks, a lot of unresolved storylines. Unless it's a one-shot graphic novel, I find there's rarely a truly satisfying storyline in a comic. And most superhero comic books take such crazy turns, spiraling so far out of control that...whatever the most extreme example of jumping the shark would be, well...comics constantly find ways to jump THAT.

Something appealing about the world of toku heroes is the knowledge that there will be a full story told, there will be resolutions. Red Flash isn't going to let Sir Kaura get away the way Batman's let the Joker off for 70+ years just so he can have more comics and merchandise to sell. (This is where you get nonsense from American superheroes of not killing villains.) So, here with toku is the sense that these stories matter, there will be consequences for the characters, characters might not survive, and the story will come to a conclusion. I remember a "holy shit!" feeling when it got around to the time that villains were being killed off. And then a whole new show would start and...it was *exciting* to see what the new one would do. It was exciting to have the variety.

Flashman blew me away when I was a kid. I don't remember looking at it as "oh, some goofy, lesser production, with people who don't look like me who are talking in a way I don't understand." I didn't distinguish it from other shows, American productions or movies. The Japanese model of live-action TV-making lends itself more to a cinematic style of storytelling. The creators know what they're allotted and what they're able to do in that time allotted. Flashman's a show of such ambition and quality that I really see it as something that can hold its own against Hollywood's sci-fi offerings, I see it as something that could be considered a Japanese Star Wars. (Back when Star Wars still meant something.) Flashman's the big, fun superhero show I was looking for, but it also ends up being a show you appreciate when you're old enough to realize the care and craft they put into it, and its storytelling.