Taking my first dip into the "Super Sentai" genre, which in layman's terms appears to mean Japanese TV shows where peeps save the world while wearing spandex, superhero costumes, and frequently hop on board a giant robot in order to cobber monsters. Choudenshi Bioman is the kind of hyper, action packed, sugar rush of a TV show (with a fiendishly catchy theme song) that you'll really wish you'd experienced as a kid, rather than arrived to the party more than thirty years too late. I doubt though that 1980s children's TV in Britain would have been ready for a show where the heroes get to say "bastard" or where villainess Farrah Cat is allowed to attack people with the dreaded nunchucks. Considering that the show has five protagonists (Red one, Green two, Blue three, Yellow four and Pink five), one villain (Dr. Man), three deputy villains (Farrah, Mason, Monster), minions of the deputy villains, five 'beastnoid' villains, and the type of camp, comic relief robot that appeared to be mandatory post-Star Wars, it is nothing short of amazing that the first episode manages to whizz through the premise in just under twenty minutes, it is that fast paced. The actor who plays deputy villain Monster has the even cooler real life name 'Strong Kongo', although I think Farrah (not to be confused with Farrah Cat) might well be my favourite of the baddies. My initial reaction to seeing a picture of Farrah- played by the late Yûko Asuka -was “there is no way I can go through life without seeing this show”, closely followed by “could this possibly fill the hole in my life that has been left since I ran out of Spectreman episodes to watch”.
The genre crossed over to the West in the 1990s with Power Rangers and arguably continues to exert its influence on Hollywood, thanks to the Pacific Rim and Transformers movies, but even on lower budgets and with 1980s practical effects, you have to agree that the Japanese managed to pull off this type of crash, bang, wallop with much more panache.
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