Well that's just questionable. I mean, I find it hard to believe anyone that's a fan of Sentai can watch Dagwon and somehow think its terrible but then go back and watch like, Dekaranger and go, "Epic." unless they just hated cartoons.
At no point were the Dekarangers so utterly incompetent that they all got into a fight with a tree
and lost. I repeat: all seven members of Dagwon attempted to fight a tree, a plain old immobile-if-sentient tree with no superpowers other than a "has a gun,"
and lost that fight. There is also an episode where Dagwon lead En tries and fails--
fails!!-- to fight a log suspended from a tree limb by a piece of rope.
Dagwon's problem is that the scripting is absolutely, completely awful on a near-unbelievable level. It is impossible that anyone working on the show put any thought into it whatsoever. While Dekaranger was cartoonish in a way that was highly inappropriate to live-action, Dekaranger's scripts could've been used to make a passable cartoon. There are a lot of Dagwon plots that fail to pass the test of basic coherence, like the one where they attempt to stop an incoming tidal wave
by throwing tires at it.
Neither Dagwon nor Dekaranger have anything amounting to substantial story arcs, but Dekaranger manages some solid one-off episodes and actually sketches the principle cast personalities to a passable degree. I've seen more of Dagwon than any human being should and there are Dagwon characters for whom I could not name even a single recurring character trait. For Dekaranger I could at least get that far with the main five characters.
Dagwon is not just one of the worst anime I've ever seen, it is probably one of the worst scripted television series I've ever watched in any language. It is really,
really bad and I'm totally baffled that any part of the Western fandom finds it noteworthy. I mean, stuff like Might Gaine I can understand, but Dagwon is nearly interchangeable with Reideen Superior and worse in every single possible way.
(And it's not like Reideen Superior was very good, either!)
garfield15 said:
I saw Betterman. It was meh.
My personal opinion of Betterman is that it was an incredibly stupid and self-indulgent series. It was still one of the... uh, arguably two dual-pilot mecha shows made between Ga-Keen and Dendoh.*
The other arguable series is Zeorymer, but one of the pilots there is so passive that the character is kind of not really a pilot. Given how popular and profitable the dual-protagonist formula has gotten in the years since Dendoh, I think Betterman deserves its props despite being bad in a lot of ways.
* Except Gunbuster, which I brainfarted on for some reason. How could anyone forget Gunbuster?
I really want to see Dendoh one day though. Too bad TV-N couldn't sub it anymore
They probably died on the comedy episode that's loaded with Engrish-style French and Chinese. I had to watch that one a few times before I really got it. I will point out that fans have ripped a Dendoh HK set that's not nearly as good as the show's scripts deserve, but quite passable for just getting through it.
If you have any kind of eye for direction, you will be
astounded at how many shots from Dendoh were recycled by Sunrise and outright copied by other directors through the decade following its initial airing. Not just mecha show directors, either, I think Nanoha StrikerS has a character who never seems to do anything that isn't referenced heavily from Dendoh footage.
