Jetto, Jetto, Jettoman! soaking up some birdonic energy

I've been avoiding tokusatsu a bit, recently, and I'm not exactly sure why. I suppose that a lot of my memories of watching toku are mixed up with episodes in my past life that I've been reluctant to remember in detail. I was far more of a wreck in those days, although I still feel like a wreck...in some ways I feel even less able to function. Back then if I needed to make myself do something unpleasant I'd just...hurt myself in some way until I could do what was needed. Simple! I'll avoid getting into details on that stuff.

Back then, watching movies and TV was one of the few things that made life more bearable. I wanted to watch stuff that was meaningful, that felt substantial, but I don't remember that I ever imagined in those earlier 200x days that tokusatsu would ever come to feel pertinent and even important to my life. It's like when I was reading anguished comic books at Caltech in a previous decade; I could read about grim magical struggles and the doings of gods and demigods, but I don't remember thinking that I'd ever get mixed up in such things myself. I suppose we are unused to feeling like we've got agency. Only very late in life, comparatively speaking, did we first realize that we were capable of being more than a speck of dust on the margins of human affairs, a powerless and meaningless observer.

At some point...heroism began to matter again. I have only the dimmest memories of early childhood faith in heroes and knighthood and justice. My sibling and I also picked up some frail but enduring spark of revolutionary leftist ardor from our RL mother, a true passion for social justice. But slowly all that got beaten down and stifled, curdled into cynicism and misanthropy—but not quite. At least in my case, the cynicism never took deep roots. Even when I'd gotten disappointed with mainstream U.S. superheroes, for example, I found that I could still believe in the heroes of Japanese television. Super Sentai and Kamen Rider kept alive that frail spark of passion for justice.

Choujin Sentai Jetman was one of my early favorites from when my partner Daria was first introducing me to the genre; she's much more knowledgeable about it than I am. Even though I disdained the daytime soap operas that my mother liked watching on TV when she was knitting or reading or whatnot, I revelled in the unabashed soapiness of Jetman. (I think what I mostly dislike about U.S. soaps is that they unreel at a glacial pace.) It allows Jetman to be a bit more adult in its themes than most Super Sentai shows, while making it so melodramatic and stagy that it's acceptable kids' TV. So you've got angsty love-triangle plots, massive PTSD, a high body count for Sentai...good stuff.

~Chara of Pnictogen