Super Sentai Savvy Part 1

I'm loving Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger right now. It's that kind of show that brings a fan to tears out of sheer nostalgia. But before them, there were the Super Sentai of old.

I remember watching Bioman when I was in elementary. Our weekends back then comprised of  Saturday morning cartoons, Uncle Bob's Lucky 7 Club and the usual Famicom sessions at a friend's house. And of course prime time Super Sentai and tokusatsu shows with  Bioman, Masked (Kamen) Rider Black and Shaider forming the trinity. Let's leave Kamen Rider and Metal Heroes for another day and talk about Super Sentai first.


Super Sentai are the equvalent of super hero groups of the West. 'Sentai' roughly translated means 'task force'. Bioman was my (and for other people my age) first foray on Super Sentai. I heard Goranger was first aired but never caught steam because there were few TV sets available back then. Bioman was the first to be big in a sense that it was the only Super Sentai show at that time. It was a breathe of fresh air and even though there were other great '80's cartoons back then, Bioman was a world apart.

Typically a super sentai show flows like this: the arch villain hatches a nefarious but often silly plan to conquer the world like building a theme park to enslave children or using pollen to spread some sort of disease.  The heroes respond, change into their color-coordinated suits and battle the villain's minions with their arsenal of personal and team weapons/techniques. The minions get beaten, but it doesn't end there.  The minions are almost always accompanied by a monster-of-the-week which the team beats but then the said monster is transformed into a giant  version of itself.This is when the team summons and boards their giant robot to do battle with the monster-of-the-week. The heroes' robot does its finishing move and the heroes win, leaving the villain cringing and vowing to get the heroes another day.

Bioman follows that formula but has an engaging main plot that many consider to be one of the best fro any Super Sentai series. Up to this day, whenever my friends and other acquaintances reminisce, one way or another, Bioman comes up and it'll be a topic for a while in our conversations. Things like "Hey, remember that episode when Yellow Four died?" or "Remember when Peebo was kidnapped?" were the stuff of nostalgia. There were even times when a not-so-close colleague wouldget involved and eventually get bonded because of Super Sentai.
 
More of old Super Sentai in another installment!