Zyuden Sentai Kyoryuger
“Dinosaurs, plus Humans! Crossing over millions of years to protect the world, history's strongest and bravest team have now arrived! Listen and be amazed!”
Millions and millions of years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, the Deboth Legion arrived on Earth with the sole intention of wiping out all life on the planet. Fortunately, the divine birdman Torin grants a group of dinosaurs supernatural power to fight off their enemies and seal them away in the polar icecaps, and after the battle is done, he seals the spirits of those dinosaurs within special, and coincidentally battery shaped, capsules so that if the Deboth Legion ever rises again, those powers will be available to new heroes. Thus, in the modern era of humanity, when the Deboth Legion awakens and resumes their work, Torin recruits a band of humans and pits them against the power of the dinosaurs so that they can become the Kyoryugers!
The 37th entry in the Super Sentai franchise, this was in many ways Sentai playing it safe, recycling the always popular dinosaur theme while also integrating a music theme whereby our heroes must perform a little dance while their transformation device plays a little samba theme, and just an overall emphasis on being a bright, colorful fun show full of loud noises, bright colors, and over the top action. That said, it also does some different things; at the start of the show the members of the team try to keep their identities secret from one another and only come together when they have to fight, and so it takes a few episodes for the team to really and truly assemble as Daigo “King” Kiryu, Kyoryu Red, calls on them to work together all the time. In addition, the Deboth Legion intends to revive its master Lord Deboth by harvesting human emotions, and so while you have the entirely expected Anger and Sorrow that lead to straightforward villain schemes, they also need to harvest Joy as well, leading to some interesting and very cute wrinkles to the equation. Plus, the head writer of the show, Riku Sanjo, wrote every episode of the show, something that has never been done before in Super Sentai.
Unfortunately, while the show has a lot of fun and silly and cute moments to it, it distinctly fails to become more than the sum of its parts, particularly when it comes to its characters; despite how much the show likes to go on about how the Kyoryugers are part of a team, the fact is that there is very little in the way of real interaction between the members of the team; sure, if the episode is focusing on those characters there's stuff there to watch, but when they're all just hanging out at the base and what have you, they're just basically lumps waiting for their lines, no little moments that serve to show how they really relate to one another. It also doesn't help matters that the show really over-emphasizes just how practically perfect in every way Daigo is to the point where he has a mini-arc about how his flaw is that he has no flaws; it should be no surprise that that one had a lackluster conclusion at best.
It also doesn't help matters that Kyoryuger is quite possibly the most sexist entry in the Super Sentai franchise, and there was a show in which there were no female members on the team! Between an executive producer who made some very sexist comments before the show's premier, an action director who pushed for a second female Kyoryuger halfway down the line simply so he'd have another girl who's legs he could ogle, and a head writer with a mixed at best history of handling of female characters, it's just an ugly ugly mess that really drags the show down. Amy/Kyoryu Pink, the lone female member of the main team, gets no real character arc as compared to the male members of the main team, and there is a wretched attempt at a love triangle that just goes nowhere and is vexing and frustrating when it does rear its ugly head. Oh, and Daigo and Amy get paired up at the end out of nowhere and it is just really dumb and uncomfortable. There is also a decided dearth of supporting female characters as well, pretty much consisting of Nossan/Kyoryu Blue's sister and her six year old daughter, who make sporadic appearances at best.
There's also an ongoing sub-plot concerning Daigo's father who abandoned him as a child in the middle of the desert when he was five, and while Daigo does put on a strong face about the whole thing, it very clearly troubles him...or at least it would if the show regarded Daigo's dad as anything other than a perfect walking plot device who always shows up at just the right time to resolve whatever crisis the team is facing that it can't handle on its own. Being that Daigo and his dad are highly central to the plot and take up a lot of screen time, this is another factor that really drags everything down and makes the show a lot less enjoyable than it otherwise could have been.
Finally, beyond the overall handling of characters and women, there's also how the show handles its own story; on the one hand it's a really big story with a great sense of history and scope and scale to it, but on the other hand there's this weird mix of everything going too fast and not moving at all, this weird sort of status-quo in which things are constantly happening but nothing ever really changes, and this heavily ties back into what I'd said about the characters and their relationships but I feel it still deserves its own mention in this review.
In the end, I don't know that I'd say that Kyoryuger is the worst Super Sentai I've ever seen, but it's pretty near to the bottom of my list.
Millions and millions of years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, the Deboth Legion arrived on Earth with the sole intention of wiping out all life on the planet. Fortunately, the divine birdman Torin grants a group of dinosaurs supernatural power to fight off their enemies and seal them away in the polar icecaps, and after the battle is done, he seals the spirits of those dinosaurs within special, and coincidentally battery shaped, capsules so that if the Deboth Legion ever rises again, those powers will be available to new heroes. Thus, in the modern era of humanity, when the Deboth Legion awakens and resumes their work, Torin recruits a band of humans and pits them against the power of the dinosaurs so that they can become the Kyoryugers!
The 37th entry in the Super Sentai franchise, this was in many ways Sentai playing it safe, recycling the always popular dinosaur theme while also integrating a music theme whereby our heroes must perform a little dance while their transformation device plays a little samba theme, and just an overall emphasis on being a bright, colorful fun show full of loud noises, bright colors, and over the top action. That said, it also does some different things; at the start of the show the members of the team try to keep their identities secret from one another and only come together when they have to fight, and so it takes a few episodes for the team to really and truly assemble as Daigo “King” Kiryu, Kyoryu Red, calls on them to work together all the time. In addition, the Deboth Legion intends to revive its master Lord Deboth by harvesting human emotions, and so while you have the entirely expected Anger and Sorrow that lead to straightforward villain schemes, they also need to harvest Joy as well, leading to some interesting and very cute wrinkles to the equation. Plus, the head writer of the show, Riku Sanjo, wrote every episode of the show, something that has never been done before in Super Sentai.
Unfortunately, while the show has a lot of fun and silly and cute moments to it, it distinctly fails to become more than the sum of its parts, particularly when it comes to its characters; despite how much the show likes to go on about how the Kyoryugers are part of a team, the fact is that there is very little in the way of real interaction between the members of the team; sure, if the episode is focusing on those characters there's stuff there to watch, but when they're all just hanging out at the base and what have you, they're just basically lumps waiting for their lines, no little moments that serve to show how they really relate to one another. It also doesn't help matters that the show really over-emphasizes just how practically perfect in every way Daigo is to the point where he has a mini-arc about how his flaw is that he has no flaws; it should be no surprise that that one had a lackluster conclusion at best.
It also doesn't help matters that Kyoryuger is quite possibly the most sexist entry in the Super Sentai franchise, and there was a show in which there were no female members on the team! Between an executive producer who made some very sexist comments before the show's premier, an action director who pushed for a second female Kyoryuger halfway down the line simply so he'd have another girl who's legs he could ogle, and a head writer with a mixed at best history of handling of female characters, it's just an ugly ugly mess that really drags the show down. Amy/Kyoryu Pink, the lone female member of the main team, gets no real character arc as compared to the male members of the main team, and there is a wretched attempt at a love triangle that just goes nowhere and is vexing and frustrating when it does rear its ugly head. Oh, and Daigo and Amy get paired up at the end out of nowhere and it is just really dumb and uncomfortable. There is also a decided dearth of supporting female characters as well, pretty much consisting of Nossan/Kyoryu Blue's sister and her six year old daughter, who make sporadic appearances at best.
There's also an ongoing sub-plot concerning Daigo's father who abandoned him as a child in the middle of the desert when he was five, and while Daigo does put on a strong face about the whole thing, it very clearly troubles him...or at least it would if the show regarded Daigo's dad as anything other than a perfect walking plot device who always shows up at just the right time to resolve whatever crisis the team is facing that it can't handle on its own. Being that Daigo and his dad are highly central to the plot and take up a lot of screen time, this is another factor that really drags everything down and makes the show a lot less enjoyable than it otherwise could have been.
Finally, beyond the overall handling of characters and women, there's also how the show handles its own story; on the one hand it's a really big story with a great sense of history and scope and scale to it, but on the other hand there's this weird mix of everything going too fast and not moving at all, this weird sort of status-quo in which things are constantly happening but nothing ever really changes, and this heavily ties back into what I'd said about the characters and their relationships but I feel it still deserves its own mention in this review.
In the end, I don't know that I'd say that Kyoryuger is the worst Super Sentai I've ever seen, but it's pretty near to the bottom of my list.