The Dorkside Chronicles

  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.

Sometimes, you just get an odd hankering to pop in a Japanese superhero show from 1990 and gun it. You just want a show full of shiny costumes, excessive pyrotechnics, a surprising bit of heart and drama, and a sprinkle of vintage fashion. It’s the reason I love the tokusatsu medium, and specifically the henshin hero subgenre of transforming superhero action from Japan. Needless to say, I went into Special Rescue Police Winspector with all that on my mind. I’d been meaning to watch this installment in the defunct Metal Hero series of tokusatsu hero programs for a while now, and I ended up popping it in on a whim back in December. I took my time with it: Sometimes watching in chunks, other times just putting on an episode after work, but always finding myself going “wow, that was a wild time” by the end credits. Now that I’m all done with it, I can say that this 34-year-old show has plenty in it worth looking at today. Set in the far-flung year of 1999, Winspector presents an image of ...

January 17 through 21, 2024. On this frigid weekend at the National Harbor in Maryland, and I was right there in the middle of MAGfest 2024 to spend time with friends and enjoy 84 hours of non-stop music, video games and panels with folks from around the world. After a fairly rough time in December, I considered the chance to spend several days at one of my favorite conventions a godsend, and I’m happy to report that it was one of the best ones I’ve been to do date.  So Much to Do, So Little Time If you’ve never been to MAGfest, short for “Music And Games” Fest, it can be an overwhelming experience for newcomers. Each floor of the Gaylord Hotel is loaded with things to do, and you can easily find yourself spending your entire weekend on one segment of the hotel. This year, however, I gave it my best effort to split my time between the Music and the Games and, just as importantly, the time with friends old and new. First off came the games, with one of MAGfest’s biggest selling poin...