Kyōryū Sentai Zyuranger -- A Review

I mentioned about a month ago that I was having an attack of Power Ranger nostalgia. I ordered Shout! Factory’s new, subtitled release of the original series, Kyōryū Sentai Zyuranger, from Amazon, and over the course of a few weeks, watched it in its entirety. It was an interesting, surreal experience to see something that is both familiar but different. I imagine that Marty McFly felt the same way back in the 1950s.

I should mention again that my last viewing of Power Rangers is old enough to drive, so I can’t compare the two shows in much detail. I did notice that Zyuranger is darker than Power Rangers at times, and just as wacky at times, and that a lot of the footage makes a lot more sense in its original context--for example, the Tyrannosaurus' fight against Giant, in which Tyrannosaurus never turned into Megazord. (In Zyuranger, this was the first giant-fight, and the Zyurangers didn't have any other mecha yet.)

As a stand-alone work, Zyuranger is (allegedly) seen as a mid-tier Super Sentai series: not terrible, but not great. I haven’t seen any other Sentai series to compare, but if I were to compare it to everything else I've ever seen since the beginning of time, that's about how I'd classify it. This isn't a masterpiece, but I did enjoy it.

Super Sentai is a tokusatsu series. In Japanese, tokusatsu means “special filming,” and refers to a special-effects-heavy live-action TV series or movie, but English-speakers use the term to refer to a Japanese-produced special-effects-heavy live-action TV series or movie that uses rubber suits instead of CGI. Ultraman, Kamen Rider, and Godzilla belong to this genre. If you've seen Power Rangers, you know what to expect with Zyuranger: spandex-clad martial artists, cheap special effects, and clunky robots fighting sluggish monsters.

Those Mighty Morphin' Zyurangers, before morphin'.

Mighty Morphin’ borrowed a lot of footage from its eastern cousin, but most of the suitless scenes were re-shot, and the series as a whole was rewritten, sometimes beyond recognition. In America, Zordon forms the Power Rangers from a group of five teenagers with 90’s-brand Diet Attitude. In Japan, there's no Zordon. There's just Barza, played by actor Jun Tatara, who you may recognize from Kurosawa’s landmark film, The Seven Samurai, where he played “Coolie A." While Barza is not a Zordon-style giant head in a tube, and has only enough magic left to grow his ear comically large, he did have the foresight to bring his own warriors with him instead of relying on a pack of high school athletes. They're the Zyurangers: TyrannoRanger Geki (Yuuta Mochizuki), MammothRanger Goushi (Aohisa Takayasu), TriceraRanger Dan (Hideki Fujiwara), TigerRanger Boi (Takumi Hashimoto) and PteraRanger Mei (Reiko Chiba). If the actors’ ages are any indication, only about two fifths of the Zyurangers are teens; the rest are in their twenties.

The villain is a Witch named Bandora, played by Machiko Soga. In Power Rangers, she's named Rita Repulsa, but the footage is taken from Soga’s work in Zyuranger, which, if I am not mistaken, makes her one of the only actors or actress (along with Ami Kawai, who played Lamie in Zyuranger and, by extension, Scorpina in Power Rangers) with a visible face to appear regularly in both versions of the show. Bandora will feel familiar to Power Rangers fans. Like Rita, Bandora’s campy, immature, and dangerous. She’s also a petty bully who hates children. Trapping them in trees, feeding their souls to a goblin, sending a pig in a roman centurion helmet to steal their food--anything for a laugh. Rita at least has the decency to pick on teenagers, but Bandora learned villainy from Roald Dahl.

This could have ruined the character, but Machiko Soga is a wonderful actress, and her hammy portrayal makes Bandora one of the best parts of the show. (She even sings a few times, which is itself worth the price of the DVD!) Yet when she does get to do dramatic work, she nails it. I’m not going to spoil anything else, but if Machiko hasn't made you weep like George Harrison's guitar by the end of the series, then you should see a ca

rdiologist, because you clearly have a heart of stone.

In-universe, Barza, Bandora, and the Zyurangers were around 170 million years ago, during the Jurassic period--an era of great fascination among paleontologists because it's the only know time period in which dinosaurs co-existed with mammoths, humans, and mecha. Through a combination of suspended animation and immortality, the cast reappear in the 90s. At first blush, this doesn't seem like a big deal--and by that, I mean that it should be a huge deal that influences the Zyurangers’ interaction with the world around them--but the fish-out-of-water angle is never explored or even acknowledged. This makes it a little harder to see the Zyurangers as real people at first, but it sort of makes sense; they awoke to save the world, not live in it. There is drama, of course, but it usually relates to combat and death, not the Saved by the Bell-style antics of Power Rangers.

But if you do want lighter drama, don't worry--that's what the dozens of kids the Zyurangers are always hanging out with are for. In a lot of episodes, these children get more screen time than the Zyurangers. The heartache of puppy love, the anxiety of harsh parenting, and the terror of being hypnotized into thinking that your father is a vampire, are all legitimate plots for these youngsters to wrestle through, with a little help from the Zyurangers. Whether or not this is a problem is a matter of personal taste. I didn't mind the children per say, but I did think that the best and most emotionally satisfying parts involved the Zyurangers themselves, which makes the children's plots suffer by comparison.

A lot of people think that the highlight of the series is Burai, the DragonRanger (played by Shiro Izumi, who, according to all the sources I've seen, was around thirty at the time). Burai is a badass loner and a fan-favourite, but unlike so many other badass loners who inexplicably become fan-favourites, he's actually interesting. Power Ranger fans will remember Green Ranger Tommy, who starts off evil then becomes good then loses his powers. In Zyuranger, Burai has a similar story, but darker and (with maybe one exception) better. (To avoid spoiling too much, I am going to fall back on the old web practice of making the font and background the same colour. Highlight to read, at your own risk.)

Geki and Burai are brothers, but Geki was adopted by a royal family and raised as a prince. Their biological father led a rebellion, but died in the process, and Burai swore vengeance on the King's family. When the Zyurangers were put into suspended animation, Burai followed them. Unfortunately, at some point in those 170 million years, there was an earthquake. Burai died, but the gods, knowing that he would be needed to defeat Bandora, decided to give him some extra time on Earth.

Once he wakes up, Burai joins Bandora and helps beat up the Zyurangers for a while, but eventually Geki's power of brotherly love wins him over to the side of good.

Now that Burai is a hero, and the Zyurangers (and presumably the audience) have decided to forgive him for all the people he attacked and tried to kill, the writers decide it's the right time for him to find out that he's living on borrowed time, and in fact is down to only 30 hours of it. For the time being, the best solution is for a spirit named Clotho (played by child actress Mayumi Sakai) to show up and take him to a magical chamber where time doesn't pass.

No, I don't know how that works, either. But the result is that Burai spends most of his remaining life sitting alone in an empty chamber, emerging only when the Zyurangers need him to save their butts or when the boredom and loneliness get too strong. 

At first, the other Zyurangers don't know any of this--they probably assume that he's just too cool for school or something. They do find out eventually, and, through hard work and hours of research, find out out about a magic elixir that could save his life. And surely they get it, right? I mean, the good guys can't die, can they?

Of course they get the elixir. But just a second too late--Burai dies, and the Zyurangers end up using the elixir to save some kid who probably hasn't destroyed as many buildings as Burai, but is a considerably less interesting character nonetheless. I doubt that long-time Power Rangers fans, still remembering what happened to the Mighty Morphin’ Green Ranger, will be too surprised when all that DragonRanger footage dries up, but for a first-time viewer, it must have been a shock.

My only real problem with Burai's character arc is that he's forgiven too easily. Tommy was brainwashed; Burai was just a jerk. But then none of the other Zyurangers ever had believable characterization, so why should I expect that to change now? Overall, Burai is probably the best part of the series. And I'm saying that as someone who usually hates the "anti-social bad boy who is so strong and so cool OMG!" cliche. But with Burai, it works. 

The other Zyurangers aren't exactly living it up, but Burai has it worse. The Zyurangers have each other in their moments of peace. Burai would like to have company like that. He'd like to be with his brother. He doesn't want to be that guy that stands in the corner, arms crossed, scowling and acting all Vegeta-like. The life he's living in that chamber is no life at all, and he knows it. But he wants to do the right thing, and fight alongside the Zyurangers, and that means that what's left of his life will consist of long stretches of loneliness interrupted mostly by giant mecha fights. He could leave that chamber, and try to live his last day out in peace and something resembling happiness. If nothing else, it would shorten his suffering.

But he doesn't. He stays in that chamber, and for days on end he suffers in solitude. He does it willingly, but he does it for other people--not himself. And as far as I'm concerned, it's this level of superhuman self-sacrifice that makes him a hero, and probably the most compelling character in the series. Like many anti-social fan-favourite heroes, Burai has done some awful things, but how many others have given nearly as much as him to redeem themselves? We may question how easily the others forgive him, but you can't deny that Burai is doing his best to deserve it.

Surprisingly, there was one thing in this series that made more sense in the American version than in the original: the nature of the giant robots themselves. In Mighty Morphin’, they were called Zords. They were non-sentient machines, like an AT-AT or any other traditional mecha. But in Japan, they’re called Guardian Beasts, and are sentient, and are gods, while Daizyuzin (Zyuranger’s version of Megazord) is the head god. But the designs and much of the footage are the exact same, which means that people in the Jurassic era apparently worshipped Autobot-like mechanical dinosaurs, complete with cockpits, who merged into their version of God. 

The Zyurangers and Mega... I mean Daizyuzin.

Sort of like the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit being separate aspects of the Christian God, I guess.

Would I recommend Zyuranger? Yes, but hesitantly, and only to fans of Power Rangers, or at least fans of camp. The show is imaginative, the costumes are cool, there are some interesting stories, the cheesy special effects have a certain charm to them, and overall none of the episodes feel really bland. It’s fun, and that’s what a show like this should be. But it never really reaches a plateau of greatness; the absolute best episodes of Zyuranger would only rate as “pretty good” on a more subjective scale. Even Burai's character arc, wonderful as it is, is only watchable if you ignore the big, glowing, pulsating problem of how quickly and easily he's forgiven. I was willing to overlook that fumble, but some will probably feel like they're expected to eat a slice of gourmet cake because it only has a live tarantula in the first bite.

Nonetheless, if Shout! Factory decides to release some of the other (supposedly better) Super Sentai series in the west, I’m all for it.