Anyone noticed Sun Vulcan blatant sexism?

[Kaiju]

So if Sun Vulcan is blatantly sexist, wouldn't starting this thread be blatantly sexist as well? :loltongue: haha

 

[Forever Knight]

They don't. All that is just in your head.

:laugh::buttrock:

Timeranger and Kakuranger had female team leaders as well ...

To me that is very sexist. TimePink & NinjaWhite (aka KakuWhite according to Keith) belong in the kitchen and being shy.

 

[live jetabare]

Toei has blatantly recycled male personality types throughout this decade. I'd also point out that modern male rangers also tend to kick a lot less ass than their older counterparts. The older shows were a lot more violent and more focused on pure ass-kicking. Toei toned things down over time.

It's probably due to a blend of parental complaints and a shift in the market. Generally the most bankable franchises in tokusatsu and anime now have a strong element of comedy to them. While the older shows weren't totally devoid of comedy, it was far from being their selling point.

I can't entirely picture a way to do modern tokusatsu comedy alongside old-school tokusatsu violence without the end result being unpleasantly schizophrenic. If you emphasize comedy, you really need to lighten up the whole tone of the show or the comedy scenes just won't fit.

I don't think that comedy is typical of modern sentai and violence is typical of old sentai. Some modern sentai have been pretty violent (gekiranger,shinkenger) and comedy was very present since the beginning.
Even in older show, comedy was a selling point (that's why Machiko Soga (Queen Hedrian), after Denziman came back in Sun Vulcan, and even in Goranger, the comic relief character was important)
Even WITHIN a series you have an alternance of very light comedy, and much darker stories (Kakuranger example: in one episode you have the red ranger dressing like a baby; in another, the black ranger must fight his adoptive dad who killed his biological father).
Super sentai is in my opinion a franchise which tries new ideas almost every year to try to bring diversity in a simple concept (warriors in colored outfits fight monsters which grow big at the end, and destroy the big monster with a big robot)

 

[Sage Shinigami]

I don't see any sexism in Sentai. For Example, Jetman had a Female Mentor, so she counts. Bioman and Liveman had two supporting Female robots and Boukenger's mentor was secretly a girl who disguised her voice to sound like a man. Plus, Gekiranger had a Female co-worker who is not only a designer for the suits and weapons, but is also a Geki Juuken-user.

Get the drift, bub?!

Seems like they could've cast an adult female as their mentor rather than a have a girl pretend to be a guy for the series. I actually would've been cool with that.

 

[ChaosApprentice]

Seems like they could've cast an adult female as their mentor rather than a have a girl pretend to be a guy for the series. I actually would've been cool with that.

Yes...but when Burkion says Armor Hero isn't original you have to bash his opinion...but when sentai does try something more original, you don't agree with it...hmmm ok. :eyebrow:

 

[Lynxara]

I don't think that comedy is typical of modern sentai and violence is typical of old sentai. Some modern sentai have been pretty violent (gekiranger,shinkenger) and comedy was very present since the beginning.

I find the fighting in Gekiranger and Shinkenger extremely cartoony and unrealistic compared to some of the fights you see in, like, Bioman. There's a sense of brutality in the older stuff that's just gone now, everything is brightly colored and the danger is melodramatic at best. There's very little sense of people just beating on each other in the newer shows, even Shinkenger's swordfights are low-tension because the weapons look so ridiculous.

Older shows had comic relief characters. Modern shows are... like, Go-onger, where the tone is just wacky and whimsical 24/7 with no particular point to it.

Even WITHIN a series you have an alternance of very light comedy, and much darker stories (Kakuranger example: in one episode you have the red ranger dressing like a baby; in another, the black ranger must fight his adoptive dad who killed his biological father).

If something that cheesy is honestly your idea of "dark" then we have very little to say to each other on this topic. I would never in a million years consider that episode dark or even worth taking particularly seriously.

Kakuranger to me can be kind of interesting when it's focusing on satire and kind of generic when it goes into the potboiler melodrama. It's not really a personal favorite series, though, I didn't like its approach to building character and the fewer Kosugis on my TV screen, the better.

 

[live jetabare]

If something that cheesy is honestly your idea of "dark" then we have very little to say to each other on this topic. I would never in a million years consider that episode dark or even worth taking particularly seriously.

Kakuranger to me can be kind of interesting when it's focusing on satire and kind of generic when it goes into the potboiler melodrama. It's not really a personal favorite series, though, I didn't like its approach to building character and the fewer Kosugis on my TV screen, the better.

In your opinion, what do you find "dark" in a series? In earlier sentai, cold blood murder by the villains was routinely shown, but often very quickly and random characters killed were completely forgotten two minutes later in the show.

Besides, cheesiness was present in early sentai: the villains were already over the top and even in those series, there were certainly stories as much cheesy as the one I quoted.
I guess the way the fights are shown is important, and I guess sentai showed more crudely the violence then than now.
Perhaps my example wasn't accurate; but in your opinion, is there a post -Timeranger sentai with some violence you could take seriously?
Besides, I don't think why this topic is closed to discussion because of my example, which you find inaccurate. Perhaps my point of view is flawed, and it would be interesting to know more about yours to understand your opinion.

 

[ChaosApprentice]

Besides, cheesiness was present in early sentai: the villains were already over the top.

Does anyone remember that Denziman episode where Queen Heridan gets an egg from her machine that is in the form of a burger. She claims the egg is in a premature state until she sticks it in some oil and it changes from it's burger shape to an actual egg.

 

[Lynxara]

In your opinion, what do you find "dark" in a series?

I've never seen anything in Super Sentai I consider dark. My idea of dark is writers like Garth Ennis. There's a scene in The Boys where a villain tears a baby's guts out with his teeth on-camera. Holy ****! That's a hell of a thing to see when you turn the page.

Ennis's Japanese equivalent would be Takeshi Miike doing Ichi the Killer, I guess? Basically I think a story is dark when it addresses the human tendency toward utter depravity and cruelty in an uncompromising, honest way. Super Sentai is by nature a family-friendly fantasy so to be honest I wouldn't really want to see it become dark. A dark parody or satire of it might be interesting.

Murder in Super Sentai tends to show very little blood and depict death extremely unrealistically. It might be upsetting to a child who is still struggling to accept the idea of mortality, but such a stylized depiction shouldn't be particularly affecting to an adult.

Adults should have long since either come to terms with the reality of death or at least been exposed to grimmer classic fiction like Titus Andronicus, A Clockwork Orange, 1984, Catch-22, etc. For Japanese adults it would be Ranpo horror stories about the Man With no Face, I guess?

Honestly, if I find anything grim or startling in a Super Sentai series, it's usually something that a child in the audience wouldn't think about very much. I watched some Hurricanger last night and the cicada monster's plan was to kidnap 100 humans and have its children magically consume the host bodies and turn them into more cicada-monsters.

Gahhh!!! That is a concept that could be total body horror nightmare fuel in a less G-rated context. I'm sure most kids who watched the show wouldn't think about it realistically and so wouldn't find the monster disturbing at all.

In earlier sentai, cold blood murder by the villains was routinely shown, but often very quickly and random characters killed were completely forgotten two minutes later in the show.

Man, they still do that. Goseiger is a typical happy-shiny-squeaky modern show and it routinely blows up Tokyo buildings offhandedly in its villain fights. Realistically, just one incident like that would kill tens of millions of people. In real life, it would be a horrible tragedy with repercussions felt for decades. Goseiger just doesn't focus on it at all or even mention any consequences! The violence has been completely sanitized so I'm sure kids watching the show don't find it the least bit upsetting.

Perhaps my example wasn't accurate; but in your opinion, is there a post -Timeranger sentai with some violence you could take seriously?

Not really, but I don't think any of those shows except maybe Abaranger even thought about depicting violence somewhat seriously. The action in the modern shows is very choreographed and artificial.

That can be very exciting and dramatic but it just doesn't feel like real fighting at all. The less realistic fights aren't strictly bad in any way, I'd say, but they're trying to be a different sort of entertaining.

The older shows, I think, really wanted you to worry about the heroes when they started fighting the bad guys. The modern shows cater to a younger audience so I think it's more of a struggle just to do something that will hold the kids' attention. Even when the Gouraigers are beating the **** out of the Hurricangers, it doesn't feel like the heroes are in real danger.

Besides, I don't think why this topic is closed to discussion because of my example, which you find inaccurate.

That's not really what I meant... more that, if your idea of dark is just a guy fighting with a revenge motivation, our thoughts on the subject might come from such radically different points-of-view that we'd have nothing all that useful to say to each other on this particular topic. For my part, I'm not too interested in making everyone agree with me or telling people that their opinions are wrong, I like discussion for its own sake.

(But I also don't think you're calling a show bad if you call it sexist, or saying it's wrong for people to like it anyway. Some people might have that mentality but they're not really people I agree with. There's no intrinsic reason why any work of fiction should treat any issue "fairly," least of all gender.

With Super Sentai, it's just that most people seem to agree the shows are more interesting when there's a substantial female cast and the women all have proper personalities. So I don't think with regard to Super Sentai that the sexism debate has any moral or ethical dimension, it's just a matter of wishing the shows would be more rather than less interesting.)

 

[live jetabare]

The older shows, I think, really wanted you to worry about the heroes when they started fighting the bad guys. The modern shows cater to a younger audience so I think it's more of a struggle just to do something that will hold the kids' attention. Even when the Gouraigers are beating the **** out of the Hurricangers, it doesn't feel like the heroes are in real danger.
.)

The problem I have with that is that usually, you know that the characters are going to survive and fight in the next episode (Yellow Four in Bioman being one of the few exceptions). Sometimes, when the villains beat the **** out of the heroes, but I see the heroes nonetheless fight and win, and usually, at the end of the episode, they are ready for the next fight, I have difficulty to take all the beating seriously, even if it's shown realistically.


About dark storyline: if your opinion is that everything in super sentai is too cheesy to be considered "dark", I completely understand your viewpoint, and it's clear that if I want to see real darkness, I have to look for it elsewhere.