To recap some of what has come before, tokusatsu was (is) a specific genre of effects-heavy show which aired on Japanese television. This genre owes some of its stylistic leanings to the ancient Japanese art of Kabuki. There are examples of the genre from the very beginnings of Japanese film to the present day.
In the popular imagination the first tokusatsu show was Godzilla in the 1950s. The Godzilla series, influenced by the Western King Kong, featured giant monsters doing battle, a science-based team of "experts" tasked with protecting Japan from these monsters, and other motifs that will be familiar to anyone who's seen giant monster movies.
Godzilla was followed by Ultraman in the 60s, a show in which a giant alien does battle with a "monster of the week." After a brief lull in the genre, Ultraman was followed by Kamen Rider in the 70s. Kamen Rider introduced the transformations, cybernetic humans and other tropes often associated with tokusatsu today.
Super Sentai, released in 1975, also helped formulate the genre. In Super Sentai we see a large cast of unlikely heroes, these opposing shadowy groups bent on world domination. Super Sentai, created by the same man who created Kamen Rider and often shown alongside that earlier program, ups the ante on Kamen Rider, giving us an entire team of costumed superheroes instead of just one.
Super Sentai would, two decades later, give rise to the American show Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, a distinctly Western take on the genre which intercut footage of American actors and actresses with footage from the original Japanese TV shows.
Anyway, on to the show itself!
Gorenger Episodes 1 and 2
This is the original series, also known as Himitsu Sentai Gorenger. The plot of both episodes is extremely minimal, involving four individuals (a kind of Mod Squad, if you will) recruited by a secretive military guy who gives them battle suits.
The funniest part of both episodes is the weird soccer thing they do at the end. The pink one makes an explosive ball, they kick it back and forth, and then the red one jumps and kicks it into the bad guy, thus rocking him like a hurricane. Neither of the two bad guys who conclude the first two episodes are especially smart, and the assorted henchmen who attack our heroes seem to do so entirely at random.
J.A.K.Q. Episodes 1 and 2
Check the company logo on the playing cards. Yep, Nintendo! In the 70s that's what they were better known for.
As an occasional player of poker it bothers me that the best hand we can muster with this team (assuming that their leader Joker is "wild") is a straight. They're all wearing suits, after all - why not make them wear the same suit? Royal flush to the ace - that would feel much better.
Besides, Texas hold 'em is a better game anyway. Change Joker's name to "Ten," make them all clubs (seems appropriate, given how much they fight), and then you'd have a nice royal flush to the ace. Five cards and five cyborgs suited up nicely.
The bad guys in this series are named Crime with a capital "C." It gets a little confusing sometimes, but yes, that's both their name and what they do. They spread crime so that they can call themselves Crime. Seems like the name might make it hard to keep a lower profile, but whatever.
The more ridiculous parts of this show are their helmets, which they'd have quite a bit of difficulty seeing through. There's also the "Covack" finishing move, which combines "atomic, electric, gravitational and magnetic forces" in one go. Our four heroes don't have a giant robo - at least not in the first two episodes - but rather a flying plane which looks decidedly uncool and less than aerodynamic.
All of the above said, the girl in the hot pants is kinda hot, even if she can't, in my humble opinion, hold a candle to Spider-Man's "Amazoness." I think what really does it for me with Amazoness is the scowling.
Battle Fever J Episodes 1 and 2
This is the Super Sentai series which would close out the 70s. It ran in 1979.
Weirdly enough, like Spider-Man this show was also a co-production between Toei and Marvel. It was supposed to feature Captain America (!), but that idea fell apart somewhere along the way.
Instead of Captain America we get Miss America, an American-born espionage agent who does battle in a revealing leotard. At some point in the tokusatsu shows producers got wise to the fact that having a sexier member of the team was more attractive to young boys, and given the popularity of shows like Sailor Moon this might have been a selling point for young Japanese girls as well.
Battle Fever J pits our cybernetic heroes against Egos, an organization that wants to get rid of "bad technology" in favor of their own "good technology" which predates modern civilization. If you ask me the whole thing sounds a lot like a metaphor for Scientology, but even if it's there such a metaphor would have been lost on a Japanese-speaking audience - at least in the late 70s.
The bonkers part of Battle Fever J is that each of the cyborgs have dance moves representing their geographical region. Oh, and they also (somehow) jump into the sky and make letters with their bodies before launching their final attack.
Gotta love how the team puts together seemingly random facts to uncover a sinister plot in the second episode. Some guy in a car accident? A girl's suicide? A man who gets a promotion at work? Way to connect the dots, Battle Fever!
This team, by the way, does get its own giant robo. It doesn't get used in the first two episodes, but there are scenes of it under construction.
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NOTE: It's not that I wouldn't enjoy more Super Sentai and Kamen Rider. It's just that Toei keeps a tight grip on those shows, and what I've discussed here was all that I could find on YouTube.
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