Chouriki Henshin! Ole!! (Ohranger intro)

 

I was recently rewatching Batman Forever. The stuff with Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson is the strongest part of that movie, and I was kind of like "Have you ever seen a superhero thing where the heroes are so grim and yet the villains are so goofy?" Usually it's the opposite, you know? Or both sides will be either goofy or grim. There must have been something in the water in 1995, because Ohranger's similar.

It was a fun time in the late '90s, looking up all the tokus I remembered as a kid on the Internet and finding out about all the shows that came after. (And before, of course. At the time, I was more curious about the newer stuff.) Ohranger was one of the shows I was really drawn to. I remember watching the credits in shitty RealPlayer, for one. I liked the themes. I liked that the cast seemed mature and that they were military -- and the action bits looked great. I was let down when I got around to seeing it but didn't think it was atrocious until I saw the show in its entirety...

My biggest gripe was always the main villains. They looked stupid. They acted stupid. It's a complete tonal clash with the way the heroes acted. He might get hammy, but Masaru Shishido is taking this *seriously*. He's freakin' intense. We get all the info about how dangerous the Baranoia is...and then we cut to them: those fat, silly designs, those silly anime voices, the suit actors moving around too much, their base evoking goofy Rita Repulsa's and giving you nightmares about that show. It didn't match up. I think these villains, and villains like these, reflect negatively on Sentai. They're goofy and stupidly designed and not threatening and KIDDY. Why go so hard with the hero portion but be so damned kiddy with the villains?

And that was a big deal-breaker for me. No matter how much I liked the cast of heroes or the music or the awesome action, the villains were dumb, seemingly spliced in from a much lesser show. And the reason I've always doubted the whole "Ohranger was going to be super serious, but real-life events caused them to change gears" is because of the Baranoia. They were already designed and written and cast before the show changed gears. There was always going to be a style clash with these stupid dolts. (I blame the cartoonish cutesiness on Power Rangers; I've read that, since PR was a proven smash success by this point, Ohranger was the first Sentai really hampered by them keeping PR's needs in mind.)

But I've always felt a strange kind of...pull to the show. I wanted to like it. I have a reputation for hating every post-1980s series, but there are so many shows that I'll want to like more than I might. There's so much promise to it but disappointment in so many areas. I never had the greatest quality videos of Ohranger, but when I watched the full series, it was a heinous quality...like 10th generation VHS transferred onto VCD and then crammed all onto a total of 3 DVDs. I'm not even exaggerating -- if I still had those copies, I'd screengrab them to be like "See the shit the fandom put up with before downloads and official DVDs!?!" So to get to see the show in decent quality when the Shout Factory set came out...made a lot of difference. I already worshipped action-director Junji Yamaoka, but his scenes just really popped when they weren't reduced to 10,000 pixel squares. And CCLemon always talked the show up and helped open my mind to it a little more.

The state of modern toku helped. When modern day villains are non-existent or nicer than the good guys, the Baranoia start looking better. Nostalgia also helped. There are things about Ohranger that totally remind me of that time I described above when I got back into these shows. If you want to believe that the show was altered due to real-life events, then you have to allow some leeway there. Having so many staff members fluent in so many different styles, the show was bound to have an identity crisis...

...but getting all of those different people is something special about the show. From producers to directors to writers to a couple of cameo appearances, it was the first Super Sentai series to truly celebrate the anniversary. I love subtle homages to Goranger in Changeman. I love Liveman and Turboranger, but...they didn't go out of their way to celebrate the franchise or its legacy. Ohranger really was the first to go that extra step and try to acknowledge the series' milestone.

Chief producer Takeyuki Suzuki, who had been chief producer for Sentai since Goggle V, paired himself up with producer Susumu Yoshikawa with Kakuranger to lead Ohranger and the anniversary celebration. Yoshikawa had been chief producer of the Battle Fever through Sunvulcan run of Sentai and shared the title of chief producer on Kaku and Oh with Suzuki. Joining them as a sub-producer, being groomed to take over the future of the franchise, was Shigenori Takatera, making a triumvirate of past, present, and future. Both Suzuki and Yoshimura had planned to use this anniversary celebration as a note to go out on, both moving on after the show's conclusion, with Sentai then getting a surge of new faces behind the scenes as the millennium approached.

Main writer Noboru Sugimura returns after putting his quirky spin on the franchise as main writer of Zyuranger, Dairanger, and Kakuranger. But the really neat thing? All of the sub-writers are former main-writers! They got everybody -- Shozo Uehara (main writer of Go through Sun), who was returning to the franchise for the first time in 14 years; Hirohisa Soda, main writer of the Goggle through Fiveman run; Toshiki Inoue, the newest veteran as main writer of Jetman. They even included Susumu Takaku, who has long been credited as Battle Fever's main writer, despite having to step back from that show due to scheduling conflicts and having the show unfairly credited entirely to Uehara over time.

The characterizations of the Ohranger aren't always consistent, and there's a constant tug-o-war regarding the show's tone -- and a lot of that probably comes from the differing styles of all the writers contributing. There are parts of Ohranger that I used to dismiss as pointless and goofy, but yet another thing that opened my mind a bit about the show was when I finally got around to watching every Sentai series and more toku -- specifically the '70s or early '80s shows -- and you can see how certain aspects of the show (like Uehara's episodes) evoke those years. Growing up with the Soda Sentai shows, the ones that came at a period where they were trying to aim higher and appeal to a wider range of audience, it was an adjustment for me to get into, say, those early shows that are driven by (often kid) guest stars or the more comedic and mecha-focused '90s shows. Look at the villains of the Soda era alone -- when you're expecting a group of all face villains, played by the likes of Shohei Yamamoto, Yutaka Hirose or Akiko Kurusu, then getting to those early shows with a very small, masked villain group or the modern shows with all masked villains is a huge change.

(A weakness of mine, I must admit, is that I tend to think Showa = the mid-late '80s shows I love. So I would criticize people who said "Ohranger is a good tribute to the Showa era," because I didn't personally think it was a good representation of the Showa I knew, of MY shows. But Showa encompasses a big chunk of time, which include the '60s and '70s shows I mentioned -- that's the area Ohranger DOES attempt to focus its honor.)

I don't want to dwell on how much I dislike the Baranoia the way I dwelt on the problems I had with Koutarou Tanaka in my Jetman posts. (Remember, though, I came out of that last Jetman rewatch actually appreciating him a bit more.) I would like to say, though, while I don't like their designs, that the Baranoia suits are very well made. They look solid; they're detailed. They have all of these moving components and tons of lights. They look robotic, and toku's come a long way from the days of, say, Magma Taishi.

So, let's get started and then go pre-order the Memorial Edition Power Brace. OLE!!!!!