Cybercop: Cops, Crooks and Special-Defects

 

The special effects in this show are atrocious. That's the first thing you're required to say about Dennou Keisatsu Cybercop. People like to poke fun at Toei's SFX from the same time, but they're nowhere near the level of what Cybercop tries to continuously serve you. The stuff in Cybercop is like the stuff any schlub can create for their goofy YouTube videos; it most likely looked bad even back in the day. It would be laughable if it weren't so horrifying. And they use the SFX for EVERYthing! Even things that don't require it! They're just shoving it in your face that they have these bad effects, like someone's being dared on just how crummy of an effect they can get past the directors.

The bad SFX is usually the first thing people notice about the show, and it's often the first thing that turns them off of it. My biggest experience with this show was having the first few episodes on VCD (yes, VCD) in the early '00s and just thinking it looked terrible -- effects, design, production -- and that I thought the idea of cops having a band on the side was one of the stupidest ideas imaginable. This was around when Toho had just debuted Gransazer, and a lot of old-time toku fans were acting like that show was a savior of the genre, when I thought it seemed just as cheap and schlocky as Cybercop. Neither had the style or polish that most Toei shows had -- I was a real Toei snob, and I didn't like many of the shows or works that are non-Toei. I've just always preferred the Toei Method, and one reason I thought they always had the upper hand was because they used the Japan Action Club.

Well, anyway, cut to now, where Toei's betrayed me by making unwatchable dreck for a decade (or more, depending on my mood). Letting go of that silly loyalty to Toei is what got me to be able to get more into the Ultraman franchise over the past few years, for example -- in case you were wondering about that. And so I finally decided to end up checking out that funky old Cybercop. (I made a jab at it on Twitter, and a couple of Brazilian fans were talking it up. Because I am the U.S.'s Changeman Ambassador, I feel a kinship with the Brazilian fan. I wanted to find out what it was they liked about this show. It also helped to know that Junki Takegami was main writer and showrunner, so I figured I'd give it another shot based on that. On a sidenote: WHAT DO YOU SEE IN JUSPION, BRAZIL, TO RATE IT OVER CHANGEMAN?!)

I really had to push past the horrendous special-effects. "Special-effects." There's nothing special about these effects, they're special-defects. Even just in the opening credits as I began the first episode I was like "No. No, I just...can't. I can't take this seriously," seeing those toy cars flip over, and I almost stopped it there. I don't consider myself an effects snob or anything -- million dollar CGI in Hollywood blockbusters can look like crap to me. Tokusatsu shows are low budget, you know this, and iffy effects can be part of the package. But Cybercop just flaunts it, there's no shame. They're almost dedicated to doing everything in the cheapest, lowest way possible, almost like they want to see what they can get away with. It's hilarious some of the ambition the show has in an action piece or effect -- using Tokyo Tower as a motorcycle ramp! -- when they know damn well the effects people aren't going to be able to come close to pulling it off. The show relies heavily on blue-screen for effects and locations. And if all that's not bad enough? The show is shot on video, which further lends just a cheap, cheap, cheap, cheap, low down, ugly and scummy look. (So I'd just like to point out again: I first saw this show on awful VCD, which quadruples terrible filming quality, picture quality and effects.)

I see people liken this show to Kuuga. "It's a good show, just with bad SFX." I disagree. Kuuga's just all around a more solid and professional production (terrible Grongi acting excluded), but its worst effects are in things like the transforming or his bike transforming. Otherwise, the SFX in that show isn't as bad as the (new) legend says. Special effects go beyond just the digital; it encompasses practical effects, miniatures, make-up effects, pyrotechnics and so on. Kuuga's digital effects are wonky, but the show put the effort in other areas. If a building blew up in Kuuga, they blew something up. If a car crashed, they crashed a car. If they fight on the rooftop of a building, the suit actors are making the trek to fight on a rooftop. If Cybercop needs a building blown up, they draw some fire in Crayon over a photograph of a building. If a car crashes, it's a 1/6 scale model, which then explodes into cartoon fire. If they fight on a rooftop, they're fighting in a blue-screen-surrounded stage area that will be super imposed onto the image of a rooftop in post.

Reliance on iffy, burgeoning digital effects and being shot on video? Cybercop's more comparable to Changerion. But even Changerion managed its effects better, still relying on practical effects when needed. Both Kuuga and Changerion have far more style than Cybercop, and that goes a long way in making up for when they come up short in the SFX department. (Visually and budget-wise, and in terms of effects, Cybercop realllllly reminded me of Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future. I like that show -- and was even going to cover it on here at one time -- but that's not a compliment. Captain Power's budget was five dollars that they were able to double by shooting in Canada, which is the place to go for cheap genre television productions.)

Pushing past the SFX, the next obstacle: the designs. I don't mind Mars, Saturn or Mercury's designs -- they all remind me of a generic sort of "futuristic" design heroes or robotic characters from the 1980s were given -- but I don't like Jupiter's. He doesn't blend with the others, I don't like the kabuto-theme and it's pretty important that your main hero, especially if he's going to be the one to hog all of the glory like Jupiter, doesn't have an unpleasant or dull design. He doesn't look like he's part of the same team as the rest. (And, no, the difference isn't explained by his being from the future. They obviously wanted to have the main character, the "Red," stand out from the others. They just went about it in a bad way.) A huge problem I had with a lot of Toho's Chouseishin Series efforts was how mismatched a lot of the designs were to one another; there's always a fuggo sore-thumb who doesn't look like they belong on the same team as their comrades.

Pushing past THAT, let's judge the show for its material. What's it offer in terms of story and characters? The first thing I took notice of in this show is the cast. They're all fun and likable, even if...not the most memorable. This might not be a Toei production, but it's loaded with JAC -- all five transforming heroes were, at one time, JAC members (!), the action staff is JAC, the show's head action-director is Ryojiro Nishimoto (of Metalder fame) and there's guest appearances by JACtor heavyweights like Jun'ichi Haruta and Toshimichi Takahashi. So you're in for good action (when not bogged down in questionable effects, of course) and dedicated performers.

Either Noboru Sugimura or someone at Toei were big fans of the show; just a few episodes in, I thought "Wow, Toei was really like 'Hey, let's completely rip off of that show for our Metal Heroes.'" Winspector and its sequels owe quite a bit to this show. I won't call them rip-offs (I certainly prefer Winspector to Cybercop), but there's some Cybercop DNA in those shows. From trying to realistically depict the technological aspect of the heroes' arsenal to the focus on everyday police and rescue work to the villains being about technological threats... Cybercop also likes to film in Abandoned Factory #11, which the '90s Metal Heroes make their home.

And not even just his Metal Heroes, but I feel like this show influences Sugimura's Sentai -- even the way the transforming-villain-turned-good-guy is depicted plays beat for beat like a lot of the initial sixth heroes of that type in Sentai at that time, especially Burai. And then the show is set in 1999, which was a good idea in the '80s, but a little pointless when Ohranger did it. See? Sugimura must have loved this show! (Or envied it.)

It might be too bad Masaru Yamashita didn't play Takeda instead of being Ryouma in Winspector... Yamashita wasn't JAC, but he was an action guy, and just a likable dude who held a lot of Winspector together. He seemed like a leader, the star of a show. Takeda/Jupiter has more going on as a character than Ryouma ever did, but I feel like actor Tomonori Yoshida is a little miscast. Takeda's supposed to be the brash guy who's led by his emotions, a mysterious rookie whose courage and dedication pulls the team together. Most of the show's focus goes to him and Yoshida's just not a strong lead. If you're looking at Cybercop like a Sentai, you'd cast someone like Yoshida as the youthful, screw-up Blue, he'd never cut it as a Red. He's not bad, but for as much as the show focuses on him, he needed to be a little stronger.

Takeda's story is what kept me interested in the show. An amnesiac with only memories of an apocalyptic wasteland, I thought from the hints early on that he might be one of the cyborgs or androids he hates so much. The show then settles into a mystery that he might have actually been an ally of the villains in the future, before backpedaling and chickening out of that story, resolving it in such an unsatisfying way that my interest in the show started to wane soon after.

My favorite of the heroes is probably Houjou/Mars. I like the no-nonsense characters in toku, but he also had a dark past they'd briefly allude to (he was Zero Cool), and it led to a later interesting development in him befriending the villainess Luna. He goes from being the all-business pro guy to opening himself up over the course of the series. I kept being reminded of Dekaranger's Houji, but I think Houjou is the more successful attempt at that character. Actor Shogo Shiotani can be about as stiff as Dekaranger's Tsuyoshi Hayashi, but he's good at the lighter moments, making it more believable he eventually respects Takeda and allowing himself to be more emotional around his teammates. (It was sad to look Shiotani up and read that he committed suicide in 2002, at age 35.)

Mouri/Saturn and Saionji/Mercury (or Marcury as the show says) -- I ain't gonna lie, it took me a dozen episodes or more to tell them apart. They're just mostly in the background and they're both the comedic guys of the team and are often paired with one another on missions. Both have backstories involving family members wanting them to quit and return home. (For one, it's a bunch of siblings and dead parents and for the other it's a parent and a dead sibling.) Saionji's actor, Ryuma Sasaki, it was pointed out to me by Ricardo Cerdeira, can be seen at the auditions for Kotaro Minami in the Kamen Rider Black special. Sasaki's a decent performer and skilled action actor, and deserved a little more than he got in Cybercop, but I can't see him working out as Kotaro. He has a much more old-fashioned vibe to him, and needed to be in a show that was a throwback.

Mika Chiba's pretty cool as Uesugi, the female ZAC field officer who, sadly, doesn't get to transform. The show addresses this, and they try to make up for it by pointing out all she offers the team. For some, it's a positive that she's so important to the team and that it's a point the show makes that she doesn't need to transform, but for me, it would be cooler if she got her own suit at some point. (If not just simply starting the show as the fully-transforming fifth member.) Chiba also provides the catchy ending theme. It would have been nice for her to have gone on to do more toku.

One thing that immediately grabbed me, though, were the villains, the Deathtrap. It was cool to see a villain group of seven who were all actors. I've always said that it's a shame toku doesn't have the schedule or budget to do prosthetics on actors for toku villains, but that doesn't stop Cybercop! Cybercop's dreaming bigger, even if its aspirations are out of its league and budget. Money's not going to stop it from doing an effect it shouldn't! So a couple of the regular villains have cheaply-made Klingon, scrunchy-forehead applications, and I appreciate the effort. It beats just having some masked villains. (If the villains were masked, they'd really suffer. The villains of the week are masked, and just a rotating roster of the same three designs -- something Blue SWAT goes on to do. The worst part is that they're all wearing repainted athletic gear, so...sticking to the cheap side.)

The standout villain, for me, is Baron Kageyama -- a mysterious guy who's always just very chill, very reserved, but with authority, and you can tell he's operating on a whole 'nother level from his teammates. Kageyama's played coolly by Jinya Sato, who I can't believe is the same dude who played '70s hero Condorman. Too bad Sato never ended up playing a villain in one of the big franchises.

The Deathtrap being mad scientists with access to another dimension, wanting to replace humanity with computers, headed by a tech-obsessed fellow human who has android underlings, they're kind of the blueprint for what Takegami would do with the villains in his Megaranger. I wonder if he wanted the Nejirejia to be more like the Deathtrap, but didn't want to repeat himself. (A shame, since the Nejirejia end up being so under-utilized in the show, with any of the meaningful connections between the heroes and villains never really going anywhere, unlike in Cybercop. I'd really like to know how Megaranger would have turned out if it stayed on in the evening; I think Takegami would have felt a lot looser to push his ideas, and we would have had more seriousness, especially with the villains.) Stick the Deathtrap in Megaranger and we'd be cooking.

The show gets a Sixth Villain, Lucifer, who dons his own Cybercop-styled Bit Suit. They rush through his story of working with the Deathtrap and being antagonistic because he's been misled into believing Takeda/Jupiter betrayed him, and then after that becomes an ally for Cybercop, who's only used by the show as a Get Out of Any Jam Free card. It's really reminiscent of Burai's arc and how Zyuranger handles his character post-redemption by just pushing him to the periphery after focusing on him so heavily during his introduction. The prototype Sentai Sixth Hero was hinted at with Maskman, but the approach Toei would end up taking is found in this rival Toho series. (On a sidenote, I think actor Takashi Koura is far better at playing the heroic side of the character; he seems awkward when villainous, just as he was as Ultraman Tiga's big bad.)

There are moments of surprising maturity throughout the show, like what the show tries to do with its villains (from Baron Kageyama's betrayal to his underlings turning on him to what they try to do with Houjou and Luna) or Takeda's identity crisis when he thinks he could have evil origins or how the show tries to handle a potential Takeda and Uesugi romance. There are only about three episodes that fall into the "kids" category; the rest are surprisingly straight-forward, lesson-free, with not too many toys shoved down your throat. It was a nice change of pace for me, since the only toku I had been watching around the same point I watched this was modern shit that's stupid and all about shilling shit you don't want to buy. That's not to say the show takes itself too seriously or doesn't have humor -- this is Junki Takegami we're talking about, humor's not far behind him. (Especially humor that's self-aware of the genre it's in and its trappings, something he was ahead of the curve on.) But it's interesting to me that Toho's Cybercop doesn't feel so kid-friendly at a time when Toei had been forcing their darker shows to be lighter (Black, Metalder, Liveman) or making shows with more kid appeal (Jiraiya, Turboranger, RX, Jiban).

I think a lot of storylines in this show suffer from it being a short, 34-episode run. They take time establishing something and then rush through it once it's clear that the show's not making it to a full run. The show ends up committing one of my least favorite TV sins -- doing a whole reboot ten episodes away from the finale. (Surprise, surprise, that's where some of those standard, for-kids episodes fall.) Jupiter and Uesugi come to a decision in the finale that could have fueled a whole new series. The show's budget didn't match its dreams -- it had Ridley Scott taste on a Lloyd Kaufman budget.

So, I found myself surprised to enjoy as much of it as I did. I'm not saying it's a favorite or I'm buying any of its toys, I just think I happened to watch it at the right time when I was looking for something different in toku. (And it was interesting to see the way Toei just ripped it off in the '90s.) It made me consider giving Guyferd and Gransazer another shot. But, holy moly, are the special effects bad.