Gosei Sentai Dairanger: Highest Highs, Lowest Lows

Gosei Sentai Dairanger (Five-Star Squadron Dairanger)

Year: 1993

Number of Episodes: 50, approximately 20 minutes each, and one movie

Subtitles viewed: Shout! Factory official DVD release. You can watch the whole series for free at the Shout! Factory website. 

Subtitle quality: Excellent

Like many other regular guys getting into Super Sentai, my next stop is Gosei Sentai Dairanger, the series that came immediately after the spandex gateway drug that is Zyuranger. It also helped that the series was available for free on the Shout! Factory website, but I digress.

As the follow-up to Zyuranger, Gosei Sentai Dairanger has awfully big shoes to fill, at least in the minds of longtime Power Ranger fans. So how does it stack up?

Pretty darn well, actually.

Synopsis (No spoilers)

Thousands of years ago, but definitely not in the time of dinosaurs, three (definitively not five) tribes flourished in China: the Dai, the Shura, and the Gorma. Everything was cool until the Gorma went the M. Bison route and tried to take over the world, albeit without Raul Julia or Bison dollars. The war raged for 5,000 years between the Dai and the Gorma – I guess the Shura are the Super Sentai equivalent of Switzerland – culminating with the mysterious disappearance of both. With no one to keep them in check, the Shura spread out and populated the Earth.

Cut to modern day Japan, where the Gorma suddenly resurface and continue their bid for world domination. The mysterious Master Kaku, sensing this new threat, rounds up five teenagers with attitude (also strong Qi power) to become the Dairangers!

Oh, and later some pervert little boy becomes Kibaranger, kind of like Justin in Power Rangers Turbo but much less rage inducing.

Evaluation (Spoilers)

You ever hear an album where all the songs were pretty good, like a solid 7/10? Something like “River of Dreams,” Billy Joel’s unspectacular 1993 farewell to songwriting. Okay, I bet you also know an album where about half the songs were just awful, but the other half were eargasmic, like U2’s uneven “All That You Can’t Leave Behind” from the futuristic year 2000. Despite half the album being terrible, I bet you listed to that one a hell of a lot more than the mediocre one.

What I’m getting at with this strained metaphor is that Dairanger, despite about 15 awful episodes, more than makes up for its shortcomings. Compared with Zyuranger’s good but never great consistency, Dairanger is clearly the better series.  

To start, Dairanger’s mystical Chinese ambiance is simultaneously more relatable and more interesting than Zyuranger’s ancient warriors gimmick. It’s almost like you’re watching an old-school kung-fu flick that just happens to include Super Sentai, a welcome departure from Zyuranger’s kid of the week formula. The episodes with Red Ranger’s nemesis, Jin Matoba, nail this esthetic particularly well. 

The series looks like it was filmed mostly in the fall, with bare trees and brown grass, evoking all the joy a crisp autumn afternoon. A badass theme song and stock music that borrows more than a bit from “The Imperial March” punctuate the action. And the Gorma’s tux-wearing foot soldiers are the best dressed putties around.

The Dairangers characters are developed pretty well for a Super Sentai offering. For example, Kazu is my favorite yellow ranger of all time, thanks in part to his sweet drunken boxing style and his cool, confident demeanor. Also, it’s implied that he’s in a relationship (or at least flirting) with an almost certainly mentally challenged man who just happens to morph into a giant robot turtle sometimes. Oh, and Kazu once beat a man-sized, sentient piece of tofu in a drinking contest. In contrast, the coolest thing Trini ever did was have an ugly doll with a stupid, stupid name who grew to the size of a blimp and tried to kill her.  

Also, this show loves whacking people in the dong. Seriously, it happens all the time, to the point where it stops being a joke and starts making you wonder about the mental state of the writers.

Unfortunately, Dairanger’s lows are just as potent as its highs. A small example is the little boy who becomes Kibaranger and his obsession with sex. His rapey actions towards the only female ranger are supposed to be funny I guess, but especially though a modern American lens, they’re just disturbing.

A bigger problem is the abundance of throwaway episodes, like the arch with ancient peacock woman Kujaku or the “Three Gorma Stooges” who are obsessed with the Blue Ranger. I can take a few crumby plotlines here and there, but where the series really falls on its face is the nonsensical ending. Throughout Dairanger, the story seems to be leading up to an impressive conclusion: the rangers’ mentor reveals himself to be a Gorma and attacks them, Kibaranger’s mom bites the dust, and for a while, the rangers are forced to continue fighting without their powers.

So what’s all of this leading up to? Gormas are made of clay, of course, and melt with you stab them. Oh, and Kibaranger is suddenly the size of a child, despite having morphed into an adult literally every other time. And the Dianger’s grandchildren show up at the end and are Dairangers too! And apparently nothing anyone ever does matters, because the cycle of good and evil is never-ending, making the entire series seem pointless. It’s not incredibly stupid and disappointing at all!

CLEARLY A CHILD

Except it is. Dairanger’s war crime of a finale is such a sore spot that it puts a damper on the entire season. That’s really too bad, because Dairanger is something special when it’s not stifling its awesome cast, suits, and mechs with bargain bin plotlines and sucktastic baddies.

Dairanger vs. Power Rangers (Season 2, Mighty Morphin’)

Zyuranger to Power Rangers was mostly a simple affair: give the teens a reason to morph, then cut to Japanese fight scenes. But the decision to retain the Zyuranger suits for MMPR season 2 severely limited the amount of footage Saban’s team could cop from Dairanger. In some ways, the comparison between Dairanger and MMPR2 is almost an unfair one to make, since so many Dairanger elements never found their way into North America. The result was a Sentai mishmash that had to work hard to be even a little bit coherent.

There were some iconic storylines in MMPR2, mostly involving Tommy’s journey from one ranger persona to another and the teens’ frightening new adversary, Lord Zedd. But after we lose the green ranger, gain the white one, and run out of Zyu2 footage (extra Zyuranger footage commissioned by Saban to extend MMPR), it’s all downhill. Desperate editing, recycled monsters, and aimless, meandering plots really drag down MMPR2. And it doesn’t help that new rangers Rocky and Aisha are basically placeholders for their more popular predecessors.

Billy discovers a hole in the plot, MMPR season 2.

While bad episodes were peppered throughout Dairanger, culminating with the aforementioned dumpster fire that is the series’ ending, most of MMPR2’s unbearable shows are found in the second half of the season. Going back to my music metaphor, instead of one pretty good album and one album with a few bad tracks, we now have two albums of uneven content. In this case, Dairanger just has more great “songs” than MMPR2. Sometimes I think that Saban should have just started airing select subtitled Dairanger shows in place of MMPR2’s last 20 episodes. It wouldn’t have made much sense, but it would have made for a great season. (“Meanwhile, in Japan…”)

If Saban had cut MMPR season 2 short, it would have been easy to say that Power Rangers outclassed Super Sentai again. But as it stands, Dairanger is clearly the better series.

Overall

Gosei Sentai Dairanger succeeds in being excellent despite bland episodes and a putrid finale. Coming at this series from a Super Sentai to Power Rangers angle yields interesting results, because most of the footage was left on the cutting room floor. This allows Dairanger to have more of its own identity than Zyuranger did in the eyes of a Power Ranger fan, and that’s certainly a good thing.

If you can put up with occasional disappointments – akin to socks and underwear hidden amongst the Nintendo games in your Christmas loot – Dairanger offers memorable characters, monsters, and plots. Highly recommended, though I also recommend that you temper your expectations for the last two episodes.

With the two Super Sentai seasons regular guys would most likely want watch under our belts, let’s get out of our comfort zone and bit and head back to an era before Mighty Morphin’. Join me next time for what was long-considered the first Super Sentai program, 1979’s Battle Fever J!

SPOILER: The costumes are horrifying.