TORRENT

Olé! It’s time for Ohranger! These 8 episodes are full of nothing but amazing and awesome things. Episode 1 is, quite possibly, one of the best opening episodes you could ask for in a Sentai. Ohranger is a show that tried to be slightly different from the shows before it and these eight episodes showcase that pretty well. Episode 1 is unlike any other Sentai first episode, and is an incredible breath of fresh air in my opinion. You’re gonna be blown away by it. You’ve probably heard a lot of things about Ohranger, but nothing can really prepare you for actually watching this wild ride.

HISTORY LESSON!

The intent with Ohranger was to do a throwback to the military shows of the 80s, and celebrate Sentai’s history. Every single creator who had ever been a head writer for a Sentai season contributed scripts to Ohranger. This staff included head writer Noboru Sugimura, and episode writers Shouzo Uehara, Hirohisa Soda, and Toshiki Inoue.

The Ohranger villains, the Baranoia, were intended to be portrayed as brutal terrorists trying to intimidate Earth into surrendering to them.

Ohranger’s backstory involved the heroes having gained a mysterious superpower unlike any other from the ancient super-civilization that once existed on the continent of Pangaea.

Unfortunately, shortly after the show’s launch, the real-life terrorist cult Aum Shinrikyo, whose leader actually believed he’d inherited secret superpowers from a lost civilization, launched a real-life terrorist nerve gas attack on a subway station killing 15 and injuring 30.

Everyone involved with the series felt this made it impossible to produce the show as originally envisioned. Ohranger staffers have confirmed that at that point, the decision was made to take the series in a different direction.

The first 8 episodes contained in this batch contain Ohranger’s first story arc. It is not known with certainty at what point the show’s content began to be modified as a result of the nerve gas attacks. Based on airdates and accounting for production time, it seems likely that the first impacted episode was either 8 or 9.

Presented here is a glimpse of the show that might have been. Future releases will show off the series that Toei ended up making instead.

TRANSLATION ASIDES

The “Cho-Riki” in Ohranger’s title is written 超力 in Japanese, combining the characters that could be individually translated as “super” and “power.” This has lead to a lot of prior fansubs of Ohranger rendering the show’s title as something like “Superpower Sentai Ohranger,” which isn’t wrong. But “superpower” in Japanese is usually written with the word 超能力.

Ohranger’s 超力 is a term that’s much less commonly seen, and is most often used as a setting jargon term in anime or tokusatsu where it appears. You may also notice that we’re translating the villain names differently than most websites and prior fansubs did. Our research into the series indicated that all of the villains’ names were meant to be taken as references to different breeds of dogs. This suggests Baranoia was supposed to have a sort of animal motif to them, also reflected in the ape-like Barlo Soldiers and the octopus-like Takonpas. Ohranger is not incredibly consistent with presenting this motif, but we decided to translate the references where we could confirm they were definitely there.