Black Ranger Battle: Showa Edition

[Lynxara]

HJU has argued and argued and argued about who's the best sixth ranger, who's the best red ranger... but what about who's the best Black Ranger? Black is an interesting and unusual color in Sentai. Out of 36 series to date, 20 have boasted some form of Black Ranger. Sometimes he's the Strong One, sometimes he's a strong rival, other times he's a tough second-in-command. There's no one archetype associated with Black Rangers, really.

So if HJU had to pick just one as its favorite, who would it be? Let's use a poll to determine that scientifically. This poll will remain open until people stop adding votes and I feel like beginning the second round. The top five vote-getters from the Showa category will move on to round two, where they'll compete against the Heisei top five. At the end of the voting process, only one Black Ranger will remain-- HJU's favorite!

 

[Shougo B'Stard]

I voted for Gai, everyone should know why by now, geez.

 

[areaseven]

Clover King is GREEN, not Black!

Also, Showa ended with Liveman.

 

[Painted_Outlaw]

Voted for Change Gryphon; while I don't think I've finished a series from this area yet, I really like what I've seen of Hayate so far.

 

[lazycoconut]

Voted for Battle Kenya. Sure, I like Gai, but he's the obvious winner by a landslide. He's a strong contender for fans' favourite Sentai hero of all time. So I thought I'd pick someone else :sweat:

 

[shingamyeonblack]

Clover King is GREEN, not Black!

Also, Showa ended with Liveman.

This post is awesome. :castlerock:


Edit: I'm voting for Clover King. :laugh:

 

[Lynxara]

Clover King is GREEN, not Black!

Yeah, so, I swear in the pictures of the JAKQ cast I looked at before making the poll, the guy's costume looked like it was mostly black-and-white with a few green highlights. Looking at more images now, it's pretty clear the guy is a Green and, I dunno, I was high or something? My bad. Clover King will be disqualified from advancement.

Also, Showa ended with Liveman.

I am aware of this. The qualifying brackets are not meant to be a strictly accurate representation of all shows in a given era. HJU's forum software limits polls to a maximum of 10 options, so it's not actually possible to construct a strictly-defined Heisei bracket. There's too many Heisei guys.

That said, I still wanted qualifying groups where older characters and more recent characters would compete against each other. I felt like that would be fairest. So what I did was chop my initial list of Black Rangers exactly in half, since that generated two groups of approximately the same size and grouped them in a way that was chronologically sensible.

I suppose I could've called the brackets... I dunno, newer and older? Qualifying Groups A and B? But I felt Showa and Heisei would be more flavorful and be consistent with the way most fans understand the terms, meaning older stuff and newer stuff. It is quite correct that most fans understand the terms incorrectly, and maybe I shouldn't have decided to cater to that.