Taiyo Sentai Sun Vulcan!
Follow the sun, catch the sun!
When the Black Magma Machine Empire emerges in the North Pole and targets Japan for it's rich geothermal power, the Guardians of World Peace assembled a three-man team to be equipped with the most advanced technologies of the day to face this threat. Together, the members of that team are known as the Solar Squadron, Sun Vulcan!
Airing in 1981, Sun Vulcan is the fifth entry in the Super Sentai franchise, and being such an early-on entry, they were still figuring things out, still trying out new things. That's the only explanation I can come up with as to why the team is comprised of three men, no women at all. This is not to say that there is no female presence on the show, but I'll discuss that in depth down below. The other big experimental feature of this show is that it is a follow-up to the previous year's sentai, Denshi Sentai Denziman!...At least, nominally it is a follow-up; while one of the main villains is the Big Bad of Denziman, Queen Hedorian played by the eternally brilliant Machiko Soga, outside of one brilliant two-parter the show doesn't really use this fact, and furthermore never even brings back the Denziman team. It just strikes me as very odd.
Well, to start with, this is easily the single dullest team I've encountered in my journey through the franchise. There are occasional episodes that focus on our team, but the majority of the time, the heroes are basically just spouting their hero lines without much sense of any individual personality; good actors can make use of lacking material, but they still need material to work with. This is especially notable with Ryuske Owashi/VulEagle, AKA the Red Ranger of the team, who never shows any personality at any point at all; as such, when he is replaced halfway through the show's run, it isn't really possible to feel any sort of emotion over his departure. Fortunately, the same can't be said about his replacement, Takayuki Hiba, who right away is just brimming with eagerness and energy and determination and so even with the often lackluster scripts he is given he becomes someone that can be invested in.
In supporting roles are Chief Arashiyama, his daughter and chief assistant Misa, Misa's pet talking dog C.C., and curry chef assistant Sukehachi. Chief Arashiyama is pretty good, he rocks the sunglasses and provides a sense of gravitas in what can frequently be a very very silly show, and the relationship between him and Misa, when focused on, is very sweet. Misa, while not a front-line member of the team, is never-the-less a more-often-then-not active asset in the teams investigations and activities, figuring out the mystery behind what the heck Black Magma is doing this week. C.C. is cute in that Misa taught her to talk just because, but the show never does anything with this at all, and don't even really try to make it look like the dog is talking, so it leaves one wondering why; I guess it's because the mentor in Denziman was a talking dog apparently. Finally, Sukehachi is meant to serve as comic relief, and all such things are subjective so you might receive him differently; personally, I found him to be cartoonish and annoying for much of his run on the show, only becoming human amusing near the end. There are also a lot of guest-of-the-week characters, many of them kids, and many of them end up with more development than any recurring member of the cast.
On the villain side of things, there is the Big Bad of Black Magma, Fuhrer Hell Saturn, who is meant to serve as the imperious overlord type, but sadly lacks the grandiosity and presence necessary to pull that off. Naturally, he very early on brings in Queen Hedorian to serve as his Number One, and she more than makes up for his deficiencies, and how could she not? Again, Machiko Soga. Beneath them are the Zero Girls, a quartet of badass young women that halfway through the show's run is reduced to a trio to make room for Amazon Killer; Amazon Killer is a badass master of disguise devoted to Queen Hedorian and is a major step-up from the Dark Q robot spies that were utilized in the show's first half. Finally, near the end of the show the galactic outlaw Inazuman Ginga shows up and shakes things up, prompting a civil war in the villainous ranks that makes things a lot of a lot more exciting than they were before.
The suits for the team are made of cloth as opposed to spandex, so it creates a very different visual impression. The Sun Vulcan Robo...it grew on me, but it's still pretty near the bottom on my Sentai mecha lists. The monsters of the week, the Bio-Machine Mongers, vary from being interesting and creative to "Okay, we blew our budget for the next weeks and we all have hangovers, pick random objects and stick that on a guy's head and call it a monger". So, you know, some hit and miss action going on there.
The fight scenes for Sun Vulcan are often hailed as the high-point of the series, and maybe if I'd been watching the shows that had come out before it I might feel the same way, but personally I feel that the fight scenes for the show drag on too long, not helped by the fact that every fight scene is accompanied by either the opening theme or one of the ending themes or some other song, or sometimes multiple songs, and while the songs are fine on their own, as fight scene accompaniments they are terrible, they don't give energy they drain it.
Outside a two-parter and the endgame arc with Inazuman Ginga, the show is episodic, everything is wrapped up with no loose ends at the end of every episode, and so there's no real ongoing story to speak of. There was the re-tool which saw Amazon Killer replacing Zero One, the introduction of Sukehachi, a new base for the team, and the changeover in VulEagles, and while this did change some things, the show remained the same on a deep, fundamental level.
So, in the end, Sun Vulcan isn't as bad as I dreaded it would be, knowing that there would be no female members of the team, but it wasn't as good as I'd hoped it would be, knowing that Machiko Soga would be one of the main villains.
When the Black Magma Machine Empire emerges in the North Pole and targets Japan for it's rich geothermal power, the Guardians of World Peace assembled a three-man team to be equipped with the most advanced technologies of the day to face this threat. Together, the members of that team are known as the Solar Squadron, Sun Vulcan!
Airing in 1981, Sun Vulcan is the fifth entry in the Super Sentai franchise, and being such an early-on entry, they were still figuring things out, still trying out new things. That's the only explanation I can come up with as to why the team is comprised of three men, no women at all. This is not to say that there is no female presence on the show, but I'll discuss that in depth down below. The other big experimental feature of this show is that it is a follow-up to the previous year's sentai, Denshi Sentai Denziman!...At least, nominally it is a follow-up; while one of the main villains is the Big Bad of Denziman, Queen Hedorian played by the eternally brilliant Machiko Soga, outside of one brilliant two-parter the show doesn't really use this fact, and furthermore never even brings back the Denziman team. It just strikes me as very odd.
Well, to start with, this is easily the single dullest team I've encountered in my journey through the franchise. There are occasional episodes that focus on our team, but the majority of the time, the heroes are basically just spouting their hero lines without much sense of any individual personality; good actors can make use of lacking material, but they still need material to work with. This is especially notable with Ryuske Owashi/VulEagle, AKA the Red Ranger of the team, who never shows any personality at any point at all; as such, when he is replaced halfway through the show's run, it isn't really possible to feel any sort of emotion over his departure. Fortunately, the same can't be said about his replacement, Takayuki Hiba, who right away is just brimming with eagerness and energy and determination and so even with the often lackluster scripts he is given he becomes someone that can be invested in.
In supporting roles are Chief Arashiyama, his daughter and chief assistant Misa, Misa's pet talking dog C.C., and curry chef assistant Sukehachi. Chief Arashiyama is pretty good, he rocks the sunglasses and provides a sense of gravitas in what can frequently be a very very silly show, and the relationship between him and Misa, when focused on, is very sweet. Misa, while not a front-line member of the team, is never-the-less a more-often-then-not active asset in the teams investigations and activities, figuring out the mystery behind what the heck Black Magma is doing this week. C.C. is cute in that Misa taught her to talk just because, but the show never does anything with this at all, and don't even really try to make it look like the dog is talking, so it leaves one wondering why; I guess it's because the mentor in Denziman was a talking dog apparently. Finally, Sukehachi is meant to serve as comic relief, and all such things are subjective so you might receive him differently; personally, I found him to be cartoonish and annoying for much of his run on the show, only becoming human amusing near the end. There are also a lot of guest-of-the-week characters, many of them kids, and many of them end up with more development than any recurring member of the cast.
On the villain side of things, there is the Big Bad of Black Magma, Fuhrer Hell Saturn, who is meant to serve as the imperious overlord type, but sadly lacks the grandiosity and presence necessary to pull that off. Naturally, he very early on brings in Queen Hedorian to serve as his Number One, and she more than makes up for his deficiencies, and how could she not? Again, Machiko Soga. Beneath them are the Zero Girls, a quartet of badass young women that halfway through the show's run is reduced to a trio to make room for Amazon Killer; Amazon Killer is a badass master of disguise devoted to Queen Hedorian and is a major step-up from the Dark Q robot spies that were utilized in the show's first half. Finally, near the end of the show the galactic outlaw Inazuman Ginga shows up and shakes things up, prompting a civil war in the villainous ranks that makes things a lot of a lot more exciting than they were before.
The suits for the team are made of cloth as opposed to spandex, so it creates a very different visual impression. The Sun Vulcan Robo...it grew on me, but it's still pretty near the bottom on my Sentai mecha lists. The monsters of the week, the Bio-Machine Mongers, vary from being interesting and creative to "Okay, we blew our budget for the next weeks and we all have hangovers, pick random objects and stick that on a guy's head and call it a monger". So, you know, some hit and miss action going on there.
The fight scenes for Sun Vulcan are often hailed as the high-point of the series, and maybe if I'd been watching the shows that had come out before it I might feel the same way, but personally I feel that the fight scenes for the show drag on too long, not helped by the fact that every fight scene is accompanied by either the opening theme or one of the ending themes or some other song, or sometimes multiple songs, and while the songs are fine on their own, as fight scene accompaniments they are terrible, they don't give energy they drain it.
Outside a two-parter and the endgame arc with Inazuman Ginga, the show is episodic, everything is wrapped up with no loose ends at the end of every episode, and so there's no real ongoing story to speak of. There was the re-tool which saw Amazon Killer replacing Zero One, the introduction of Sukehachi, a new base for the team, and the changeover in VulEagles, and while this did change some things, the show remained the same on a deep, fundamental level.
So, in the end, Sun Vulcan isn't as bad as I dreaded it would be, knowing that there would be no female members of the team, but it wasn't as good as I'd hoped it would be, knowing that Machiko Soga would be one of the main villains.