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.

Kyoryu Sentai Zyuranger: Not quite the rangers you remember

Kyoryu Sentai Zyuranger (Dinosaur Squadron Zyuranger)

Year: 1992

Number of Episodes: 50, approximately 20 minutes each

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

Subtitle quality: Excellent

There’s no better place to start one’s Super Sentai journey than with the series that introduced millions of Americans to the “spandex team vs. rubber monster” genre. In case you’re some kind of caveperson, emerging from your cryogenic sleep and stumbling upon this blog in your first moments of reanimated consciousness, you probably know that footage from the Japanese Super Sentai series is recycled to make the Power Ranger franchise. Though Kyoryu Senti Zyuranger was the 16^th Super Sentai, it was the first to be adapted for English speakers, splicing scenes of American actors with Japanese fighting footage.

The result was the legendary Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers. MMPR was a megahit when it debuted in 1993, and even decades later, it’s still ingrained in the American cultural consciousness. The comparison between it and Zyuranger is unavoidable, but I’m going to do my best to review Zyuranger as its own show before getting into which series had the best villains, who handled the Green Ranger better, and which cast I’d rather do Jell-o shots with. (Spoiler: It’s both, at least for the shots.)

By the way, Zyu is pronounced “zew,” almost like the word Jew, but with a Z instead. Say it out loud. Go ahead, aim for the Z.

So without further padding, it’s, uh, Zyuranger time!

Synopsis (No spoilers)

Millions of years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth with Palm Piolets and 28.8 dialup modems, five human tribes flourished with aid of the mystical Guardian Beasts. Everything was cool until Queen Bandora lost her son, Kai, and blamed the dinosaurs for the tragedy. After selling her soul to The Great Satan, Queen Bandora was imbued with dark, magical powers and declared war on the dinos. In the end, the five tribes were virtually destroyed and the era of the dinosaur came to an end.

With no other options, the Guardian Beasts sealed Witch Bandora away. But after much more than 10,000 years, Bandora is accidently set free, and decides that it’s time to conquer Earth. Sage Barza, Bandora’s white mage counterpart, wastes no time in reviving the five legendary warriors – one from each of the ancient tribes. They become Earth’s only defense, the Zyurangers!

Evaluation (Spoilers)

I don’t know what I was expecting going into Zyuranger, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t wizard janitors, gun-wielding gnomes, and ancient warriors who, despite hanging around in the current time, hardly ever wear anything beyond their bajillion-year-old robes. On some levels, the marriage of fantasy and modern day is charming: one minute we’re in 1992 Japan and the next, we’re on some ancient island, or in the mystical woods or something. But there’s too much focus on fantasy elements for the show’s own good, like the long-running and terribly boring dinosaur egg subplot. Fantasy themes are a double-edged sword that simultaneously provide Zyuranger with its identity while dragging it down like an anchor.

Barza, in his day job as a janitor. Can you hear him now?

 The child-centric plots can be grating. Nearly every week, the Zyurangers meet up with some annoying kid for young viewers to project themselves on. Seeing as how I’m pushing 35, it really started getting on my nerves after a while. But Zyuranger was meant to be a kids’ show and here I am writing a nearly 2,000 word review 25 years later, so I guess the joke’s on me.

Speaking of, good thing there’s all those children lying around, because Bandora really loves plotting their murders all the time. The implication is that losing her son 170 million years ago made her hate kids somehow, but it’s not explained very well. Call me crazy, but want my villains to have a motivation beyond “kids suck.”

You’d think a child-murdering psychopath like Bandora would be cold and heartless, but in between attacking kids and tormenting Burai with green (potentially scented) candles, she sometimes hosts impromptu dance parties. That’s right, Bandora and friends drop what they’re doing and just start singing and dancing. There’s a difference between comic relief and tonal suicide, and Zyuranger just gleefully leaps across that line at the oddest times.

As it turns out, the Guardian Beasts are the five pieces that comprise the Zyurangers’ mech, Daizyujin. Unlike other Sentai/Power Ranger shows, they’re not robots, but sentient gods. They can communicate with the Zyurangers, giving them advice and taking on a secondary mentor role when Barza’s not around.

The idea of sentient mechs is kind of cool, but it feels a little out of place. If Daizyujin can act on its own, why do we even need the rangers to pilot it? And why are the Guardian Beast such dicks sometimes? For example, Geki (red) didn’t want to fight Burai (green) in one episode, because Burai is his long-lost brother. Daizyujin was watching the battle, and instead of stomping Burai into a fine green powder, it shot Geki with lasers in an attempt to goad him into fighting his sibling. See? Total dickery.

The final episodes are a bit of a letdown. Without the threat of Buari’s death hanging over the viewer’s heads anymore, the series’ ho-hum conclusion goes down exactly as you would expect. The rangers beat bad guys, the stupid dino eggs hatch, and…  Grifforzer (Goldar) and Lamy (Scorpina) have a baby? Ok, so it’s not all bad. And hey, the villains don’t get killed at the end, instead being sealed away and sent back out into space.

It’s a kid-friendly concussion for a child-centric series.

How is ZyuBabby formed?

Zyuranger vs. Power Rangers (Season 1, Mighty Morphin’)

Zyuranger is better than Power Rangers, wouldn’t you think? I mean, Power Rangers is essentially a hack job, right? Well, I’m shocked that I’m saying this, but the first season of Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers is the superior show.  

Yes, I’m adjusting for nostalgia. Listening to self-made bootleg tapes of PR tunes like “We Need a Hero,” Ranger merchandise everywhere, the mix of joy and shame for loving a show designed for kids ever-so-slightly younger than I was – I did my best to put all that aside and look at the two series objectively.  And while they share plenty of elements, Zyuranger and Power Rangers are two very different shows.

A lot of early MMPR plots are paper-thin one-offs, but that changed with the introduction of the Green Ranger. You ever see The Dark Knight, the second in the Christopher Nolan Batman trilogy? The tension doesn’t quit in that movie, keeping the audience on-edge. On a smaller scale, the same can be said for Tommy’s the five-part origin, “Green with Evil.” The threat of the Green Ranger is ever-looming, leaving the other five rangers constantly in fight or flight mode, even while they’re attending to their normal lives. Episodes pick up right where they ended, so cut out the opening and ending credits and you wind up with a pretty badass movie.

Zyuranger takes the opposite approach. The episodes that introduce Burai are standalone pieces where he shows up, moves his plot thread along, and leaves again so the rangers can concentrate on other things. Though later multipart Zyuranger episodes do a better job of keeping the tension going, there’s almost always a clear break between parts.

You're telling me this is a flute?

It’s weird to think of MMPR as having character development and an overarching storyline, but as the episodes chug on, that’s exactly what we get. Billy begins the series unable to defend himself without morphing, but by episode 60, he’s fighting on par with the rest of the team. In the meantime, Kimberly starts to shed her selfish valley girl attitude, and Tommy loses and partially regains his powers, severely affecting the entire team’s morale over an extended period of time.

We don’t really get that in Zyuranger, with character development relegated standalone episodes. For example, we find out that black ranger Goushi’s sister taught him how to be a great warrior before she died. But don’t worry if you missed it, because the revelation doesn’t change his character in any way. By the next episode, we’re already worried about something else and Goushi has been reabsorbed into the Zyuranger team collective. Burai’s death near the end of the series is one of the only events that has lasting consequences, and that’s mostly because we’re down a ranger. Don’t get me wrong: Power Rangers does the same one-off thing, but within the context of the larger plot evolution I mentioned before.

There’s little things too. Power Rangers’ rock ‘n’ roll soundtrack fits the action better, the everymen-turned-heroes concept is more relatable than ancient warriors in modern times, Tommy losing his powers is a more satisfying plot device than Buari’s weird expiration date, and so forth.

On the plus side, Zyuranger is lightyears more coherent than MMPR’s erratic plots thanks to not having to splice up footage like Jason Voorhees at a national Boy Scout meeting. After watching Zyuranger, it’s hard not notice the jarring jumps into the middle of the action that MMPR makes. There’s also the matter of the yellow ranger switching genders, from a young man (ironically) named Boi in Zyuranger to Trini in Power Rangers. Frankly, Boi and Trini had similar body types, so it looks OK to me. But the switch drives some people mad, and you’re one of them, I get it.  

In the end, Zyuranger just isn’t as fun as good ol’ Mighty Morphin’. Well, at least for season 1, that is. But that’s a conversation for a different day.

Overall

As something that’s been built up as legendary since the days of MMPR, I really wanted to like Zyuranger more than I did. But the truth is, it would be a somewhat unremarkable Sentai entry were it not for the fact that it begot the global powerhouse that is Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers. 

Let me stress that Zyuranger isn’t a waste of time. It’s certainly worth watching, especially if you’re a fan of Mighty Morphin’. But as the episodes wear on, you’ll find yourself asking, “Is this it?” Much of that is because Zyuranger had mighty big shoes to fill. But even without the inescapable shadow of MMPR looming over it, Zyuranger is a fun but kinda forgettable experience.

You’ll enjoy watching Zyuranger and noticing all odd ways its footage was recycled for MMPR. It’s like meeting the Wizard of Oz. This is the man behind the curtain, people. But there are better Sentai out there. Speaking of…

Join me next time for Gosei Sentai Dairanger!

I know the guy in the middle, but who are those other weirdos? 

It's morphin' time: A Sentai for Regular Guys overview

I’m not an otaku, a television expert, or fluent in Japanese. I’m just a regular guy who likes Power Rangers.

My first exposure to Japan’s long-running, spandex wearin’ Super Sentai occurred in 1993 when the world was introduced to Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers. My young self didn’t realize it at the time, but that team of “teenagers with attitude” was actually lifted straight out of a Japanese show called Kyoryu Sentai Zyuranger, the 16^th in the Super Sentai series.

At first I was amused in a Mystery Science Theater 3,000 kind of way. But with the introduction of the evil Green Ranger, crazy new robots, and a rockin’ soundtrack, the show blossomed into a great way to spend my afternoons.

And then I got old. Too old, I thought, to waste my time on a kid’s show. And so, a few months before a new Ranger team rocketed into space, I traded the teens in brightly colored spandex for the gritty antihero of HBO’s afterhours classic, Todd McFarlane's Spawn.

As time marched on, I completed college, got a job, moved out of my parent’s house, and got married. You know, all that cliché regular guy stuff.

But old fascination with Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers stayed with me, tucked away somewhere in my mind. One day, out of the blue, I wondered to myself about that show before Power Rangers – the one from Japan. I jumped on Google and did a little research. And a little more. And a little more after that.

By the end of the week, I was halfway done with Zyuranger and hungry for more.

Sentai for Regular Guys will chronicle my voyage through the 40-plus seasons of Super Sentai, recording my thoughts and experiences through the lens of a regular guy. My hope is that other regular people like me – the ones who grew up with Jason and the gang battling Rita Repulsa’s evil minions – can learn from my journey. I hope that my suggestions will save new Sentai fans from spending time on a series that isn’t for them, and to highlight the shows beyond just Zyuranger that an old MMPR fan might want to get into.

I want to give back to the Sentai community’s more seasoned fans as well. I’ve learned quite a bit in this last few months about video file formats, creating and encoding subtitles, and which Sentai series haven’t been subtitled yet. As I said, I don’t speak Japanese – but I do have a few tricks up my sleeve. (See here for details.)

My first order of business is to review Kyoryu Sentai Zyuranger. But if you’d like to jump into the action now, it’s available to watch for free on the Shout! Factory website. 

In the meantime, as Zordon would say, may the power protect you. (Or something less lame. I don't know, I stopped watching after Turbo.)