A phrase I hear all too often. It annoys me, and some may ask, why do I care? I care for the same reason that anime fans get annoyed when someone looks at Miyazaki and says "Hey isn't that one of those ultra-violent Japanese porno cartoons?" I care for the same reason a Half-Life fan would be annoyed if someone said "Hey that looks just like Halo!"
And I don't want to speak for her but I'm sure Crimmy would be just a bit annoyed if someone saw her watching Gamera and said "Hey it's Godzilla!"
Anyway, when you actually sit down and take a good look at it, the Super Sentai series (this is the series Power Rangers is based on) doesn't look anything like most other tokusatsu shows (tokusatsu is the Japanese word for "special effects" which is what live-action shows that use them are called).
So here is a quick, handy guide to show you the differences between Super Sentai ("Japanese Power Rangers") and other shows, starting with the obvious visual differences and going down.
PART ONE: The helmets
This is the easiest way to tell Super Sentai from any other toku. The helmets in Super Sentai have black visors, and are styled somewhat, but they look like regular helmets for the most part. Here we have the Green Ranger's helmet.
.jpeg)
Again, note the black visor, and the relative lack of anything sticking off the helmet itself, and nothing really special about it.
Here, we have our good friend Tsurugi's helmet, also known as Kamen Rider Sasword from Kabuto. Note the lack of black visor, an immediate clue that it is not related to Power Rangers (as I said before, black visor is a definitive property of Super Sentai). Also notice that stuff comes off of the helmet, almost never seen in Super Sentai.
Another clue is that if the helmet has recognizable facial features...
...like good ol' Ultraman here, it's not Super Sentai, since they never have facial features on the helmet. At the most they will have a mouth (as visible on the Green Ranger's helmet) but that's about it.
PART TWO: The outfit
The helmet's the biggest and most obvious clue, but there's also the rest of the outfit. Super Sentai/Power Rangers always use spandex. ALWAYS. Unless you're talking about the earlier stuff (like Battle Fever J), and then it's cloth. But for the greater part of 20 years, Sentai has always used simple spandex outfits, and always will. And when I say simple, I mean that. Simple. Sometimes you have small additions (like the Green Ranger's shield or the MagiRanger's cloaks) but for the most part, there's nothing else on the spandex suit.
Go-On Red here shows us the standard simple spandex suit of Sentai.
Now other tokusatsu do sometimes use spandex. However when you're talking Kamen Rider there's only one word you need to know: PVC. Kamen Rider NEVER uses spandex, and probably never will. Further, Kamen Rider always has plastic/foam armor attached to the PVC suit. It looks ornate, detailed...not simple like Sentai's.
And here we have Kiva showing the complexities of a Kamen Rider suit...lots of stuff on there eh? Not just a simple suit, that's for sure.
PART THREE: Common suits
Sentai is a show about teamwork. I'll get to that later. But what I'm saying is that in Sentai/Power Rangers, you have five guys (sometimes less, sometimes more) that are a team. As such, they have matching outfits. They have slight differences between them but for the most part they look exactly the same, just different colors.
Here we have Fiveman showing us that the helmet designs are varied, but the suits themselves look basically the same, just differently colored. It shows they're all part of the same team, they're related. It's like when your mom made you and your brothers all wear the same kind of shirt when you went somewhere so you could be easily located.
Now here's the four main Riders of Kamen Rider Blade.
Completely different suits! The only two that look remotely similar are Blade and Garren (the red and blue guys) and that's for storyline reasons, but even then they don't look THAT much alike. Certainly not as similar as the Sentai groups.
PART FOUR: Giant robots
Sentai has 'em, Kamen Rider and most other toku don't. Ultraman actually grows in size, so he doesn't use a giant robot. Kamen Rider J was able to grow too, but he's the only Rider that has ever been able to do that. So basically what this boils down to is, if you see a giant robot, it's Sentai/Power Rangers. If you don't, it isn't.
HOWEVER. One addendum to that rule.
If the giant robot is NOT a guy in a suit, it's not Sentai. For example, Rescue Force has a giant robot, Rescue Max.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmw0Cvim2zM
But as you can see, it's completely CG. Sentai never does CG for the giant robots, they always use guy in a suit.
PART FIVE: Henshin! and the rest
Now we get to the less noticeable stuff. The first is that Sentai uses a lot of stock footage. Stock footage for the transformations, stock footage for the attacks, stock footage for the giant robots, stock footage for the ultimate attacks...you get what I'm saying.
Kamen Rider on the other hand uses very little stock footage. In fact the only series I can think of with any was Kamen Rider Ryuki, when they went on the Ride Shooters through the Mirror World...but even then it wasn't that often, and they basically never showed it at all after episode 15 or so.
Basically Sentai thrives on stock footage, whereas many other tokusatsu don't even use it at all.
Another difference, though slight, is that Sentai will have a different transformation phrase for each series. "Let's Go On!" "Ippitsu Soujo!" "Megaranger Install!" "Dinobuckler!" What I'm saying is, it's always different.
With Kamen Rider (except for Hibiki) the transformation phrase is always the same..."HENSHIN!" It's like the trademark of the KR series.
Next we have the themes. Sentai is about teamwork. Though occasional episodes will showcase one certain character and give him/her a chance to shine, for the most part Sentai/Power Rangers will show you a person working by themselves is weak, but when friends combine their powers, they become even stronger. That's why the finishers always use all five members.
Other toku doesn't rely on teamwork as much. Kamen Rider especially is usually about one main person, who's normally a "lone wolf" type and can handle everything themselves.
This mainly only applies to Kamen Rider, but there's also "sexism." It's mostly a joke among fans, but the way it works is, Sentai almost always has a woman on the team. Sometimes two. Kamen Rider on the other hand is notorious for never having female Riders. It's strictly a boys' club. There actually HAVE been a handful of female Riders over the years, but they're either minor characters or barely Riders at all.
Anyway. This was a long post. And I'm sure almost nobody read it, or even really cares that much. And I'm sure I'll have to continue to deal with "Hey that's Power Rangers!" until the day I die. But I wanted to show that if you really look at it, the differences are obvious between Sentai and other toku shows. It's just that, like people who think all anime is hentai, the people who don't understand don't care to take the time to learn.
But, I just wanted to get that off my back.
