^ You mean the brown cat, right? I really like the actress, Miyuki Nagato, who was with the Japan Action Club. I always thought she would have made an awesome Kamen Rider -- if they ever let women be Kamen Riders and if Kamen Rider didn't peter out around the time she was active. (She played J5 of the Neo-Jetman team, if you remember those episodes and want to see more of her -- she kicked ass there, too!)
Flashman, still one of my favorites. I don't understand the complaints here about the action, though, especially the mecha scenes. The '80s shows were so nice in that they placed such little importance on mecha, the mecha scenes were probably about 30 seconds total. Can you believe the focus of the shows then was actually on story?! *gasp* :laugh: Repetitive moves...eh, go watch Battle Fever or Goggle V, where they would sometimes replay the SAME EXACT fight scene from another episode, and then come back and slam Flashman for having sorta similar fights with the grunts.
I've read people say that Flashman came at a time when parent groups were complaining, but I don't really buy that. Not only do I think it was that the shows at the time were becoming more story oriented (so they needed to lose some of the action they used as padding), but I think the chief action director was just getting burned out -- he had been the main action director of mostly every Sentai by that point -- which is why he leaves just a few episodes into Maskman. (He moves over to the metal heroes for a bit, and returned to Sentai to do Ohranger and Carranger, both of which had cool action, IMO. His name's Junji Yamaoka, and I think he's been the best of Sentai's action directors.) So, even with the diminished amount of action, Yamaoka would still come up with some pretty cool stuff, IMO.
And what makes a great fight scene? When you care about what built up to that fight, who the players in that fight are. Flashman has some strong storytelling that helps support the fight scene. Maybe kids today wouldn't appreciate the actual choreography in Kaura's final duel with Red Flash, but think about it from the storytelling standpoint, from a filmmaker's point of view. It wasn't just a shallow, quickly filmed scene with a lotsa flash and slick moves. It held a deeper meaning, you know?
