A Very Special Rescue: The Exceedraft Review

 

It's late 1991. Your big trilogy of Metal Hero Rescue shows for the kids is starting to dwindle in terms of ratings and toy sales. Your attempts at leaning into drama and moral conflicts didn't exactly hit it off and your budget is being dialed back substantially. You might as well wrap things up with one last shot to your franchise before changing gears again.

And to top things off, the man who handled your last two shows, Noboru Sugimura, is going over to do the Super Sentai entry about guys in dinosaur costumes (one that surely would just be another entry in the franchise and not the start to a worldwide 90's phenomenon). What do you do? For Junichi Miyashita and the team working on 1992's Special Rescue Exceedraft, the answer was "make it exciting." They just didn't worry about how the plot would unfold in order to make the thrills happen.

Boy did they whip something up.

Exceedraft's basic plot is one not unlike its predecessors Winspector and Solbrain. In the nebulously not-too-distant future, humanity wishes for kindness, hope and understanding as they wrestle with high-tech crimes and perilous dangers in their daily life. To counter this, an elite trio of officers are selected to protect the peace: Ex-Interpol Hayato Kanou (aka Draft Redder), former Tokyo MPD investigator Kosaku Muraoka (aka Draft Blues), and ex-Fire Brigade Ranger Ken Okuma (aka Draft Keace). United under the guidance of commander Juukichi Katsuragi, these fiery young heroes form the elite team known as Special Rescue Exceedraft (or SRED for short) to save lives and protect the peace with their trusty hi-speed Turbo Units to literally run into the the fray.

Right out the gate you can tell that Exceedraft is going for something a bit different from Solbrain. This time around the show isn't a sequel to the last two installments, barring a single character who returns near the show's finale. There's no robotic crew members, and instead Exceedraft is made up of three human heroes who gear up in special armor. The designs are cheaper, there's barely any miniature work, and for much of the show the default vehicle for SRED is a custom Chevrolet Blazer 4WD (although the later Variable 7 transforming car gives us the show's one Cool Transforming Ride needed by every Metal Hero).

There's less of the fancy gear, the explosions are dialed back and the climax of any given episode is far less over-the-top than they were in Solbrain, or even Winspector. Hell, most of the show's music is just recycled Solbrain BGM. This is very much a show made with half of the funds that they had previously... and yet it still works. Exceedraft's lighter suits and heavier focus on speed and escaping crises gives us fast-paced and brisk fight scenes that have to work within stricter limitations for more exhilarating results.  We see some upgrades to the action via the few major upgrades this time around: You get your early toy plug via the Guardler shields so kids can stick their arms out and run FASTER than with the Turbo Units, but the most notable change to the formula comes midway through the series, and I'll touch on that later, as it's tied to some wild stuff that happens in the plot.

The cast of Exceedraft is quite solid. With neither the pluck of two robot sidekicks, nor the chance to give us a multi-gendered team, Exceedraft instead relies on impressing the audience with three handsome guys and their own dash of charm. Shigeki Kagemaru is outstanding as Hayato Kanou/Draft Redder (and later SyncRedder). I was actually quite familiar with him from his later work in Tsuburaya Production's Ultra Series (particularly as GUTS officer Shinjoh in 1996's Ultraman Tiga), but it shocks me that he didn't end up the lead for more shows out there. As Kanou, he's fiery and full of vigor and compassion. He's got the looks and guts to lead a team and absolutely shines in any scene he's in. By the end of the show he's absolutely going ham with some real fiery delivery and one of the most heated fights in the trilogy. Even without the suit actor background of his predecessors, his action scenes are great. I seriously think that if more people had actually watched this show by now, they'd realize what a great charisma he's got as a leading man.

Meanwhile, Mamoru Kawai brings the closest thing Metal Hero ever got to a Sentai Blue in his performance as Kosaku Muraoka/Draft Blues. Teetering the thin line between aloof prettyboy and the team clown with his disguise and impersonation skills, he's a fun character who tends to be the most prone to griping in the trio, but never fails to bring some particular heart to everything. The show frequently notes the loss of his parents at an early age, and it leads to one of my favorite episodes that follows his mentor, an ex-police sniper played by the legendary Susumu Kuroobe, and it shows just how well he can lay on the heartbreak and guts in his own way. Blues here has more than one episode showing that his life has a cop was one rife with changing people's lives, and it makes for a fun through line.

Wrapping up the trio of leads is Iori Sakakibara as Ken Okuma/Draft Keace. Ken's the sweetheart of the group, the most naive and most innocent of the trio. A lot of his episodes have him either smitten in love, dealing with a pesky look-alike coasting by on his looks before getting caught up in crimes, and in several cases showing off his outstanding martial arts techniques. Oh, and cooking pancakes - Ken loves cooking pancakes. While I feel like he's arguably the least developed of the team in a sense despite them getting an even cut of episodes, his vibes and youthful gusto round out SRED's dynamic. Even though it's clear that Hayato is the one getting the most focus as the face of the team, there's still a strong sense of comradery between the trio that I appreciate after how imbalanced things wound up in Solbrain.

On the supporting side we've got our obligatory girl with Ai Hyuga, played by Yuri Nakamura. She's fine for the most part, settling into the role of gathering information and hitting buttons to activate SRED's navigation satellite, SIM, to track the action, with the occasional moment to bust heads peppered throughout. Where she gets her most memorable moments are through some truly insane storytelling near the show's finale, but, again, we'll get to that after I cover my bases here.

As a clear split from the past two shows, we don't have trusty captain Shunsuke Masaki here leading the team. He shows up in the final three episodes of the series, but for the most part our mentor role is fulfilled by the playful but fatherly Jukichi Katsuragi, played by Toyoto Fukuda. Katsugari's a shift from the stern and action-focused command Masaki has, instead traded for an older, wiser, more laid back figure who knows how to play it serious when the scene demands it. Aside from a brief run of episodes where he's replaced by an alternate Superintendent due to his actor's health issues, he's with the team the entire way and really shows his acting chops as the series takes a darker turn in its final arc. 

And speaking of arcs, that's where Exceedraft really shines: Because this show's storytelling fully tosses aside any pretense of realistic police drama or grounded sci-fi and shoots for the fence. You go from an early plots about rescuing a kindergarten bus held hostage and loaded with a dangerous piece of overloading scientific gear and a plot about Kanou and a young kid being trapped in the middle of a plot with a dangerous explosive experimental fuel. Alright, fair enough, reasonable rescue police stuff. This soon gives way to the first intermittent ongoing story arc with a criminal organization called Red Spade. Which then gives way to a bizarre plot about clones, drugs and supercrime and a laser wheelchair.

EEBY DEEBY MOTHER F***ERS

That's when I saw it, when I saw Junichi Miyashita and co truly go "screw it" and embrace having fun over logic with this show. Exceedraft then only dives further and further into the most wildly entertaining, yet downright insane, trips you could ask for. Tales of Ken having to face his biggest fangirl after she was murdered and remade into a cyborg by her father to appease some thugs. A scientist enlisting SRED to join him in a Time Travel experiment to see who kidnapped his son, only to find that said son faked his own kidnapping to steal the Time Travel tech for himself. A NASA robot Ai once befriended turns to a murderous rampage when he thinks she tried to have him destroyed. The stories just escalate into new levels of chaos throughout.

David Akiba: The man with the universes' most gravely throat.

And then come the aliens. The intermittent mid-season villain Carlos Togo, a South American druglord who is in fact dead. And possessed by an alien criminal. Who is being pursued by David Akiba. An FBI agent who is also dead. Because he and Carlos Togo killed one another. But was then possessed by the alien's brother, a space cop, and is now turning to Exceedraft to help him stop his brother's crimes. It's baffling to just suddenly introduce space action and psychic abilities (yeah, I'm serious), but it's this constant amount of twists and turns in these intermittent story arcs peppered alongside episodic plots that just kept me watching in disbelief and with sheer joy, which brings us to the true climax of all this madness: The show's final arc.

Miyashita, I really need to know what you were going through in 1992.

You see, Exceedraft at this point had already been going wild, but it's the final third of this series that truly must be seen to believe. Hayato is plagued with eerie dreams about a mysterious young girl named Mika warning him about the end of the world. Soon Exceedraft faces villains too strong for Redder and co's abilities, giving us a permanent change in armor for our lead with the new SyncRedder battle jacket alongside some updates to Blues and Keace's suit. But these powered up enemies aren't just some coincidence, oh no. The first sign of this is when Mika shows up to Kanou again as they fight an assassin by the name of Yuda, whom Mika reveals has sold his soul to a sinister businessman known as Daimon Iwao. Daimon, as in "demon"... as in, the Devil himself. How does Mika know this? Because she's actually the Archangel Michael himself in disguise.

And she's wanting Hayato to join God's forces in the impending Armageddon. The actual, Biblical Apocalypse. Junichi Miyashita pulls no punches here as we get scenes of Bibles burning up, pentagrams and flames rising around and Hayato putting the pieces together (Yuda = Judas, Mika = Mikael, Daimon =  Daemon) while we're now set on a course of intermittent and utterly wild events to one of the most unforgettable final arcs I've ever witnessed in a tokusatsu series. Exceedraft is now caught within the middle of the last battle between Heaven and Hell for the souls of mankind, starting with the insane Christmas episode that features a battle between Holy and Demonic Santa Clauses with Weapons and Exceedraft saving children from a UFO version of Noah's Arc. 

Our space cop friend David Akiba returns to reveal that his evil brother Carlos turned to crime due to the influence of Satan, and that Alien Satanists exists. Hayato is left in a paranoid state from Mika's constant warnings of the end times, while also declaring Exceedraft's decision to take a True Neutral path to defend humanity from both God and Satan if they have to. I am not making any of this up, and I couldn't if I tried. Any pretenses of this show being about rescuing civilians from supercrime or science fiction melt away into a truly bizarre  and declaring their efforts to fight both God and the Devil to protect mankind. What comes next is one of the most hilarious and sacrilegious plot twists of all time: Ai immaculately conceives the Second Coming of Christ and Exceedraft must protect it. It's here that we get the return of Commander Masaki, who reveals that Daimon has murdered hundreds of pregnant women around the world to prevent the second coming.

And now he's gunning for Ai. And preparing to engulf the world in the fires of Hell by annihiliating the Ozone layer and literally burning the surface until every life on Earth bows down to him.

This is a children's show. This show was made for kids. This show aired on Sunday mornings. And they got away with one of the most baffling, gripping, and downright Lynchian final arcs I could have ever imagined. I spent these final 5 episodes with my mouth agape at everything happening. The twists did not stop coming and end up with our boy SyncRedder getting into a fistfight with Satan for the fate of all mankind. This is a Shin Megami Tensei plot for kids, and nobody at Toei told them to reconsider for this grand finale to three year's worth of Rescue Police shows.

And it is incredible.

I won't even spoil the final moments of the last battle, as it throws in yet another unbelievable twist wrapping all this occult endgame up in a strange, but undeniably happy ending that really emphasizes what it is that makes Exceedraft such a beautifully chaotic show. It throws everything at the wall to see what sticks, refusing to back down from its bizarre and high-concept ideas while managing to execute them in a wildly entertaining way within its limits. While I do wish that these major story arcs had actually been more consistently threaded through the show rather than being used as intermittent three-parters amidst other episodes, there's no denying that they've stuck with me and demonstrated the staff's willingness to just have fun and bring back the type of thrills and surrealism that the Metal Hero Series was built on 10 years prior with the likes of Space Sheriff Gavan. They knew this was the end of the Rescue Police era, and they weren't going to let it fizzle out.

By the end of Special Rescue Exceedraft, I was mesmerized, amused and baffled all at once... but I felt like the show knew where to end. The finale, for all its wild twists and turns, is mostly shot in one underground location and with the last gasps of that budget and a real sense of going for the highest of stakes to wrap this trilogy up on. You can't really go further than having your Rescue Team save the entire human race from the end of the world. You can't really top a show that checked off the boxes for "space invaders" and "demonic warfare." And that's fine. Because I will never forget this show for a long, long time. It may even be my favorite of the trilogy (though it and Winspector are tied for that spot) and is easily worth calling a cult classic. 

While I'd highly recommend the entire Rescue Police saga, do yourself a favor and put Exceedraft on your radar: It's a turbo-charged roller coaster ride that you won't regret.