Welcome to TMS, which stands for both Too Much Stuff as well as Toku Mikaku Shiken, or Tokusatsu Taste Test! With so, so, soooo many wonderfully fun-looking Toku shows now available on Blu-Ray, as well as streaming on outlets like YouTube and Amazon Prime Video, it can be a daunting task to pick a new (or old) program to jump into. With an incredibly vast menagerie of characters and literally thousands of collective episodes spanning decades and decades, the task of choosing where to start is all too daunting. It’s a feast no one could consume in its entirety, no matter how much time or access they have. So, to kick off this writing series, I’ve decided to take some time to sample many of the tokusatsu that has been catching my eye by watching a ton of pilot episodes.
Steering clear of the usual suspects like Ultraman, Kamen Rider, or Super Sentai, I plan on letting my mood and impulses dictate the direction, and consequently I have no set list or plan. I hope you jump on board with me and come along as I watch one new episode a week, for the foreseeable future. Quick, tasty bites of stuff new to me, and maybe some new to you as well. I imagine the most difficult part is going to be deciding what to go back and watch all the way through, given I am sure I am going to fall in love with more than one while on this ride.
To start, I went with Tokusou Robo Janperson from Toei. Set in the Rescue Police universe, this is my first time watching something from the Metal Heroes franchise. Am I glad I did? Read below and find out!
Click to watch Tokusou Robo Janperson Episode One: “The Mysterious New Hero”
Original air date 1/31/1993
Little Yumi, returning home to Japan with her mother, has been stricken with a rare and lethal pox-like virus while visiting abroad. With only a few hours left to live and her condition worsening by the moment, a vaccine is rushed to Tokyo in an effort to get it to the hospital before she dies.
Elsewhere, a disguised man robs a bank and shoots two security guards dead while making his escape amidst a hail of bullets. Jumping in his getaway car, he speeds away with the stolen money, eluding capture. Now, in the call to action, Tokyo badass supercop Chief has his delicious lunch interrupted by his underling, the excited and bumbling Tokaido. Now racing through the city streets in hot pursuit, things get worse when the homicidal maniac takes a local news reporter Miss Wakabayashi hostage and makes off with her in the very emergency transport vehicle that was delivering the life saving cure to Yumi!
Things go from bad to insanely worse when a group of assassin robots swarm the vehicle and punch holes through its roof with battle-axe hands, with the chaos escalating as heavy weaponry sets the surrounding area ablaze. All hope seems lost: neighborhoods are destroyed, police are laying burned and maimed in the streets, Miss Wakabayashi and the much needed vaccine are still in the clutches of a psychotic criminal, and terrifying tech-enhanced terminators are laying waste to everything in their path. This city needs a savior.
A purple armored warrior comes blasting onto the scene. It is Janperson, zooming to the rescue with his super-vehicle, the Dark Jey Car!
What follows is some of the most bad-ass tokusatsu action I’ve seen. Huge pyrotechnics, stunt people flying around on wires shooting guns and laser cannons at each other, cars and vans being hurled around, and hand to hand combat action that differs massively from the style usual for these shows. Whereas combat is usually a lot of spinning and jumping with the choreography coming closer to a dance routine than a potentially neck breaking battle, Janperson breaks the mold by having the action be much more violent, with fists landing real damage and the frequent gunplay actually leaving people D-E-A-D. Not totally surprising, given Janperson‘s obvious influence of not only Robocop, but also Judge Dredd, Batman, and The Terminator. Still, it’s a little shocking for the tokusatsu genre, in that for a show that seems aimed at kids and young teens, Janperson is unflinching in its supposed cartoonish brutality.
Cool stuff like decapitated robot heads that still have the ability to attack using blow-torch breath and mouth rockets, cybernetic body parts that open up, blooming like mechanical flowers to reveal ominously serrated blades, or laser spitting canons, plus more basic stuff like legit car chase scenes and shootouts, all come together to make one darned exciting ride of a program for tokusatsu fans.
Running from January 1993 to January 1994, Janperson (or Jumperson in international markets) had a fifty episode run. With all the craziness in the first episode, I can’t imagine how much more nuts the series is going to get. How am I supposed to wait knowing my eyeballs have a massive gallery of despicable villains and a plethora of awesome techno-gadgets awaiting them with a healthy forty-nine more episodes to go?
Yup. I’m jumping in the Dark Jey Car now, and in for the full ride with Toei’s Janperson.
Other awesome images from the episode –
