Yeah, Gai's treatment of Kaori hasn't aged well, but I'm taking the period into account. And I think it was clear that there was a line he wouldn't cross.
And yes, it was very soapy, but that's what made it stand out from the pack. At least all five leads (and Commander Odagiri) had clear, well-drawn personalities, which is more than can be said of many of the subsequent seasons.
In theory, yeah, but the Red guy was still the central character. And Tsuruhime was made the butt of sexual-harassment jokes more than once.
As it happens, that's the only Heisei season I haven't seen yet.
I can't really say why I liked Gaoranger so much; I think it was more a matter of the execution than the stories, given that Wild Force told almost exactly the same stories but was much less satisfying.
Yes, one of my favorites. It's refreshing to see a less serialized Sentai, basically a '70s cop show pastiche with aliens, with a number of really solid one-and-done crime stories. Great characters, terrific humor, catchy music. It's from Naruhisa Arakawa, who's in the running with Kobayashi for my favorite Sentai writer.
The one thing I can't stand about Dekaranger is the "Delete" bit. Unlike the Timerangers, they don't arrest the alien criminals; rather, they call for instant judgment from the "ultimate court of the galaxy," which gives supposedly infallible verdicts in seconds and authorizes the Dekarangers to execute the criminals on the spot. The heat of battle is one thing, but this is downright fascist stuff. (The 10th-anniversary reunion movie elaborated that the court's planet was accelerated in time so that it actually took 8 months to render a verdict, but that still means the criminal isn't given any chance to offer a defense or appeal for a reduced sentence.) In Power Rangers S.P.D., they revised it so that the blown-up monsters were actually imprisoned on cards, making it more like Timeranger/Time Force. That's the one thing I like better in S.P.D. than in the original.
Not a favorite of mine. Okay but nothing special, and the constant recitation of magic spells got really annoying.
I found this one weak too. It had an interesting premise, with the rival martial arts schools and the emphasis on training and learning, and the focus on the villains was interesting, but I wasn't crazy about the execution, especially with the anthropomorphic-animal masters. I particularly loathed the return of sexual-harassment "humor" with the elephant master who harassed GekiYellow when she was his pupil. That kind of humor is bad enough normally, but here it was an authority figure harassing someone under his power, downright Harvey Weinstein stuff, so it was horrifying to see it treated as a charming comical quirk.
This is another of the rare cases where I think the Power Rangers version was better than the original. Jungle Fury was one of my favorite PR seasons. It kept the best parts of Gekiranger -- the emphasis on training and the two main sympathetic villains -- and ditched the more problematical parts. (The only other case is RPM, which is far better than the mediocre Go-Onger. Although I guess maybe I like MMPR season 3 better than Kakuranger, but I'm not sure if I'd call it objectively better.)
Here we agree. I liked it a lot. The characters and actors were appealing, the villain designs were intriguing and elegant, and the emphasis on trains was nice (and clearly calling back Kobayashi's much-admired Kamen Rider Den-O). It was unusual in that the focus was less on saving the whole world and more just liberating individual towns/cities that had fallen to the Shadow Line.
Other seasons I'd recommend:
Boukenger: A very entertaining season with an adventure/treasure-hunting theme similar to Warehouse 13 or The Librarians. It had a strong, engaging cast, and an interesting story approach in that there were multiple villain factions competing with each other as well as the Boukengers.
Shinkenger: Possibly Kobayashi's best season, very rich and dramatic with great characters, and tied deeply into Japanese culture and history. Power Rangers Samurai was an incredibly verbatim adaptation, so much so that its episodes actually gave script credit to the Japanese writers, yet somehow was incredibly more inept in the execution, with dreadfully weak acting and unimpressive direction -- even aside from the jarring incongruity of adapting such a profoundly Japanese story so literally for American characters.
Gokaiger: Similar to Kamen Rider Decade and Zi-O in being an anniversary season whose heroes could change into past heroes, but much better than either, with terrific characters and cast and excellent writing (it's another Naruhisa Arakawa season). Probably best to save it until you've seen at least some of the previous series it homages, though.
Go-Busters: I'd pretty much recommend any Kobayashi season, but I quite like this one for its unconventional take on Sentai, avoiding a lot of the usual tropes. As viewers of Power Rangers Beast Morphers know, it goes for a more technological, pseudo-military approach to the mecha, with even kind of an Evangelion feel to the giant robots and their hangars and maintenance crews and such, though it's a lighter, much funnier series than Evangelion, thank goodness. It's one of Kobayashi's weaker seasons, but even that makes it well above average, with the usual rich character work.
Zyuohger: A solid season in which a biologist Red Ranger is teamed up with four anthropomorphic animal-people from a parallel world, disguised as humans in our world except for their tails. More well-drawn characters, and effectively vile enemies who are wreaking havoc and mass murder purely as recreation. Although the mecha are among my least favorite, inexplicably inspired by Minecraft and based on cubes.
Lupinranger VS Patranger: Longtime readers of these threads may have already seen it from when its episodes were posted here. It's the series that got me hooked, with fantastic character work on both the team of phantom thieves and the rival team of police officers. Pitting two teams against each other made for really rich characterization through the contrasts and all the different character pairs they could explore. One of my favorite Sentai scores too, really jazzy. Both it and Zyuohger are from the same head writer, Junko Komura.
) but I can see why people wouldn't think Magiranger's special. For me it's really the characters, I liked them all both heroes and villains.
