The fact that Japanese housewives were horny for this man above directly led to Power Rangers becoming a worldwide phenomenon.
Let me explain: Power Rangers was based on the long running Super Sentai series, which by 1990, years before it was even introduced to the rest of the world, was utterly exhausted creatively, how Supernatural and Smallville were in their 103rd seasons. By 1990, Sentai was a spent force. They completely ran out of steam, with low ratings, and more importantly, lower merchandise sales. The writing was on the wall: 1991 was going to be the last year, followed by cancelation. And since, as with all long running shows, at a certain point nobody was really paying attention to what they were doing all that closely, the creators said, well, since this series is probably going to be canceled no matter what we do…why don’t we do one our way this time? Take risks, use soap opera type storytelling?
That’s exactly what happened with Chojin Sentai Jetman, an aviation and bird-themed sentai show - after all, doesn’t every boy dream of growing up to be a pilot? None of these Sentai shows are exactly Casablanca (they’re made to sell robot toys to kids) but Jetman made the show soap opera esque, with character centered storytelling. The villains had tragic love stories and episodes centered on their backstabbing each other. The stories were character centered, and was the first sentai show to go into surreal humor (which would become a staple of Sentai to the point some shows were outright parodies). In many ways, it reminds me of Stan Lee’s Marvel Universe, where the usual superhero story was envigorated with strong characters who bickered with each other as much as they fought monsters. If you can only watch one Sentai show, watch Jetman. To this day, it’s the only Sentai show fans push for a direct sequel/continuation on, and its reputation for quality is such that it’s the only Sentai show that wasn’t not chopped into Power Rangers to get a full release in the West.
Most importantly, at the heart of the show there was a love triangle reminiscent of Gone With the Wind: the beautiful girl heroine in there loved the handsome, genteel leader of the team - but he could not return her love because, beneath his leaderlike bravado, he was a traumatized guy with survivor’s guilt who watched his fiancee die. Meanwhile, the team’s “bad boy,” a Rhett Butler type, was in love with her and, like Rhett Butler with Scarlett, pursued her aggressively and intensely:
To anybody who knows anything about female psychology, it should have been obvious from the start bad boy Gai was going to be the favorite of adult women. Explicitly shown as a cigarette smoking, motorcycle riding degenerate who is clearly a gambling addict and alcoholic (literally every time we cut to whatever he’s doing, he’s in a bar of some kind), he was a Wolverine-esque surly loner, but also a bad boy tamed by the power of love.
Ratings for Jetman soared (no pun intended) because housewives started to tune in with their kids. Letters came in by the dozens from housewives who just loved the show. It reminds me of how the revival of My Little Pony in the 2010s got unexpectedly colossal because of an unexpected audience, except instead of 4Chan neckbeards, the new audience were Moms watching the show with their kids, who got horny for a sexy bad boy at the heart of a love story. And that led to higher merch sales, because it’s a well known fact in the toy industry that Moms are the ones who buy toys, not kids (I especially recommend the surprisingly playable NES/Famicom game).
In other words, thanks to Moms, Jetman was a hit that prevented the cancelation of the Sentai shows, which will now, probably…for good or ill….be with us for the rest of our natural lives. If they were all as good as Jetman, though, it would be a delight to have them still around.
Because Jetman (and horny Japanese housewives) saved the Sentai shows from certain cancelation, by the next year, a new sentai show went into production: Dinosaur Sentai Zyuranger. It may look a bit familiar.
The follow up to Jetman, Zyuranger, is weird even by the standards of these shows. It is stunning to me that anyone could see something this strange and think it would be a huge hit to market globally, and the weirdest part of all is that it was. That’s the part that gets me! Up until this point, Sentai shows were a mix of spy, martial arts, and scifi, with most ranger teams formed by the government or military, who trained commandos or special agents in martial arts. Jetman had things for the adult audience, but Zyuranger was a pendulum swing away from Jetman to the core kid audience. Instead of spies vs. alien invaders, Zyuranger was pure Disney-style fantasy. The hero was a ridiculously handsome prince hunk who looked like Prince Eric, the villain was a wicked witch based on Disney’s Maleficent (same hat and everything), surrounded by creatures who looked right out a Disney fairy tale and lived in a clockwork castle. I’m legitimately surprised there were no talking mice who help the good guys. Quite a departure for a scifi/spy series. While the Jetman team had rich inner lives and love triangles, the Zyurangers seemed to have no private lives of any kind, merely wandering around aimlessly (in full costume, as if that wasn’t strange enough) until they met whatever child guest star they’d build the episode around.
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