The culmination of the past several episodes as the Flashman finally get a power-up. I always kinda thought they should have obtained a power-up once their powers returned at the end of the last episode, but I guess that doesn't make much sense, so we get this episode which...looks to be kinda trying to save some money. We needed the wrap-up of this arc, with the Flashman successfully getting their power-up, but the save-some-money feel holds it back a little. It's a really reduced episode, with hardly any scenes of other cast members that aren't the Flashman. (Even Neferu spends most of this episode as Neferura, so...someone didn't want to pay Sayoko Hagiwara, just her suit actress! Who probably makes much less, and I can't imagine Hagiwara making that much herself...)
The episode is focused on Magu as he experiments on the Flashman suits' source of energy, their individual forehead prisms, to try to power them up. (Considering what they just went through, I don't think it's the time to be messing around with their powers, but that's me.) Thinking he's successful, the Flashman find out the hard way in their next battle he wasn't, as each of their prisms fall from their helmets and shatter. This leads to each Flashman member ripping Magu a new exhausthole, as Magu is determined to fix his mistake and complete his experiment.
The episode will work for you depending on how much you like Magu. I like Magu more than Peebo, but not as much as I like Koron. Magu's just supposed to be cute, they don't try to humanize him like Koron, and they don't try to make him as important as Earthur G6. (God, the ONLY thing that Flashman-wannabe Fiveman did better than Flashman was have Earthur G6 be a surrogate parent. If Magu had that same role, or even if he just was, like, the butler of the Flash aliens and the team got to know him and befriend him when they were kids, that would really help the show.) Anyway, I guess all of that about Magu's addressed a bit here, and it IS sad that he just wanted to feel useful to the team in this episode. There's a nice scene with Jin offering him encouraging words -- which leads him to come through and save the day -- but, like I said, I don't think Magu should've been messing with this stuff since they just went through a few episodes getting kicked around until their powers came back in full strength. He could have at least told them! I think that's what bugs me, that he does it in secret, the little round bastard.
Magu takes the shattered prisms and tries to restore them. How? He needs massive heat and massive pressure to do it, and uses the power reactor in the Flash Titan, the only thing that could have gotten the job done. I point this out because it's nice that he didn't just get a new package of upgraded prisms from Bandai, as he would have in a modern show. He used his saucer-shaped noggin to solve the problem.
In fact, he does successfully complete his experiment and gives the Flashman new powers and NONE of the new powers rely on a new toy or trinket or anything for Bandai to plug. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh. I've always kind of been mixed on these new moves each of the Flashman have, though, compared to the old ones they're replacing. I liked Red's Fire Thunder more than his new Super Cutter move and accompanying special effect. I liked Snow Freeze and Mach Blizzard more than Yellow's new Super Version, which just turns her into a taketombo effects graphic. (Not to mention -- the usage of coldness made more sense for her, duh.) Blue's Prism Ball effect is given a more updated effect, but since it's just a blob colored over in SFX, it loses the notion that it's a crystalized ball to match the other members' crystalized weapons. (Too bad they could never get Prism Ball to look crystalline to match the others. It's either a graphic or a large rubber ball, but imagine a plastic ball. Maybe that would have been too hamster ball-like, though?) So, the only new power I really like is Pink's Super Tap.
Now, it might seem weird for a superhero to have a tap-dance-based attack. And ordinarily I'd agree. But the way it's depicted in Flashman is pretty cool -- she causes tremors! She cracks open the ground for it to swallow opponents! The special effects might not hold up, but it's a pretty neat power, if you ask me. (And you didn't, but it's my blog, so if you're reading this, you might as well have asked me.)
The monster of the week also has a cool design, and his gimmick is that he turns things invisible. While this is shown through fun little sequences of turning cars invisible only to have them crash or Blue Flash's Flash Hawk being turned invisible as Blue Flash freaks at riding nothing, the coolest idea is the monster turning floating orb-bombs invisible and sending them the Flashman's way. The destruction caused by this monster isn't fully conveyed with the episode's money-saving feel, so that's a shame, since it's the first Mess plan in a few episodes to not focus completely on targeting the Flashman. They're finally trying to get back to messing with the world, no pun intended.
I don't want to give the impression that this episode is bad, or I don't like it or that it's -- ugh -- "filler." It just doesn't feel like the exciting exclamation point at the end of this arc that it should. It doesn't have the same urgency or tension as the past few episodes, and doesn't have the same heart or emotional resonance as the previous episodes had by using the Tokimuras. Sorry, Magu, you're just the cute mascot. I said it in my post about Sentai's Mentors and Allies -- Magu seems kind of pointless to me since Jin and Sara are supposed to be so intelligent and scientific, so they could and should easily figure out most of what Magu does. Magu's not like Peebo, in the role of mentor, because Jin is. And wouldn't this episode be more interesting if Jin or Sara had been trying to make the upgrades, but miscalculated? It would be an even bigger and higher stakes version of the Changeman episode with the Anti-Gravity belts. There's not a whole lot of conflict between the Flashman members, which is a bit understandable since they're supposed to be so close from sharing the same experience. But it's a bit of a cheat to have this situation that they can just take out on the cute robot, isn't it?
Shifting the episode to focus on Sara might have improved it from a character conflict perspective, but that would leave Magu without as much to do in the five-part arc (aside from Tokimura’s hacking in the previous episode). Magu growing more confident is definitely a good goal for his arc, but it comes at the expense of maybe developing Jin and Sara a bit more.
ReplyDeleteI’d argue that Flashman represents a “peak” in ‘80s Sentai effects. The video material looks far better than it did in Changeman or Maskman, while the optical effects are also on-point and rear-projection isn’t as prevalent as it was in the ‘90s. Some stuff, like the ball, would be hard to realize in any era of Toei-produced special effects.
I always thought Magu would have been way more effective if he came from the Flash System with the kids. Like he was their one connection to that upbringing on Earth, but on top of that, since he would have known all of them, it would help them become closer too considering I don't think they really hung out much before coming to Earth, right?
ReplyDeleteI feel like this is the second time Flashman has done an episode like this. Where there's a multi episode arc that ends, and then there's one more sorta anti-climactic episode that more definitively caps it off like this one. The FlashTitan arc had that same feeling too.
Yeah. Like I said, the only thing Fiveman improved on was making Arthur-G6 was important as Magu should have been. The way that the Flashman all developed their own individual abilities based on the atmosphere of the differing planets, that says that they probably didn't hang out a whole bunch in their childhood. My head canon says that the Flash aliens had to have at least set up holographic contact, though -- they wouldn't be cruel enough to keep them apart, and there's certainly a feeling in those early episodes that they really know each other.
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