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I remember seeing advertisements on TV for the Mighty Morphing Power Rangers when I was a kid. I may have even seen an episode or two, but I certainly didn't watch it on a regular basis. I don't think it was until much later that I found out it was originally a Japanese show called Super Sentai. When they brought it to the USA they cast american kids and refilmed scenes where the characters weren't in costume, and then spliced that new footage with the action sequences from the Japanese show.
Well, I hadn't heard anything about the Power Rangers or Super Sentai for a long time, and I had sort of assumed the show was long gone. Just today, I discovered that it is currently in its 35th season in Japan. I also learned that each season of the show is treated as a separate series, dealing with a totally different set of heroes dealing with a totally different menace. All of this was brought to my attention when I found this video of the opening to the 33rd Super Sentai series.
Now, party of me wants to laugh at the pure campy-ness of that, but part of me feels like a ten-year-old boy sitting in front of the TV on a Saturday morning thinking "This is so awesome!" I did a quick Google image search and found the picture below of the main cast from that series. Why are campy Japanese superheroes so awesome? And why do Japanese kids look so much cooler than American kids?
