Toei executive reveals why Super Sentai is ending; his next challenge

Original article

The Super Sentai Series will end with the currently-ongoing No.1 Sentai Gozyuger. In this interview, we spoke to Shinichiro Shirakura (age 60), senior executive officer at series producer Toei, who has been involved in tokusatsu for many years and is also responsible for its character business, to find out what truly led to this decision. Why is the 50-year history of these national heroes coming to an end? What were the disruptive factors that backed Super Sentai against the wall?

— This year marks the 50th anniversary of the first Super Sentai, Himitsu Sentai Gorenger (1975). Does the ending of its anniversary series Gozyuger next year mean the Super Sentai Series will end too?

I don't think it will end, but rather, it'll go on hiatus. A new series will take up Sentai's broadcast time slot (Sunday 9:30 am on TV Asahi), but the Super Sentai shows themselves may come back some other time. News of Sentai's ending came out in October, before the official announcement, so I didn't expect such a strong reaction. It makes me glad to know Sentai was so beloved, but I think it'd be better to wait at least ten years before it can come back.

— Why is the series ending?

The Sentai format has many limitations. We've tried various methods to overcome them, but on the milestone of the 50th anniversary, we've reached a point where we need to reconsider our approach.

— And these limitations are why it's ending?

I think there were two major disruptive factors for Sentai.

First was the streaming boom, following the COVID-19 pandemic. With streaming, you can view all kinds of tokusatsu works, new and old alike. So Super Sentai is facing competition from not only Kamen Rider, but also older Sentai seasons.

Every year, Super Sentai shows aired with a clean slate. There's no connection between the season, so it doesn't matter where you start watching... but it's hard to know where to start. It's becoming increasingly difficult for new seasons to compete against older, more acclaimed shows, unless they stand out enough.

Another factor was the wave of American comic book superheroes. Marvel's Avengers are popular in Japan as well: whether it's Captain America or Iron Man, characters that originally came from different works are now being delivered in one package. They're a superhero team, sure, but they have clearly defined personalities and skills. And then you have Super Sentai—a different superhero series that had a new work every year, but had some issues with characterization.

We've tried many methods to overcome these two factors, but we came to the conclusion that it'd be better to take on a fundamentally new challenge.

— That said, Sentai has shaken up the formula before. Kikai Sentai Zenkaiger (2021), for which you served as chief producer, has an outrageous plot with a five-man team of one human and four robots. So the series has historically faced new challenges.

Of course, it has. These may be new attempts within the format of Super Sentai, but to truly appreciate them, the audience needs to be literate enough to understand the genre's conventions. And if they don't know the conventions, will they appreciate when they're broken?

— So everyone knows about Super Sentai, but the actual shows don't get much recognition?

This was a fundamental problem for Super Sentai, but after fifty years, it's become taken for granted, like a Japanese cultural fixture. While different people have watched different amounts of it, it seems the word "Sentai" makes Japanese people think about five superheroes in color-coded suits. It's become well-established, but there's a fear that it people will think it's not something you need to watch.

Every week, at the same time on the same channel, it's always on. The stories may be modernized, but the general plot remains the same. Say you watch it as a child and grow out of it, but as a parent, you watch it with your own children and feel safe doing it, because it hasn't changed at all. In fact, you'd rather it stay that way.

It's dangerous to accept this situation. There are two sides to this coin: on one side, the sheer consistency of the work gives it an enduring, "timeless" appeal; on the other, it's something people don't feel the need to watch, since they know the story anyway. If they feel like it, they can just watch an older season they feel nostalgic for. Every creator fears that there won't be a need for a new work. Sentai becoming "a fact of life" is dangerous even for the production crew. It's not enough to think about how to stand out within the format of Super Sentai; we have to consider what works are truly necessary for children in 2025, and what we have to show to the world.

Toei has the know-how to create a Super Sentai season, but that know-how sometimes gets in the way of creating something truly new. Our generation, which is used to Super Sentai, has moved on, and that leaves ample space for a new generation to take up Sentai. That's why I think the series needs to wait at least ten years before it can come back.

— There are many viewers who prefer the lightheartedness of Sentai shows compared to the more serious Kamen Rider.

The typical Sentai series goes like this: the five characters transform into their colored suits and strike a pose. They defeat a monster in battle, and it goes up in flames behind them. They ride a giant robot, fight a giant monster, and there are explosions. Every time. People might call it cartoonish and make fun of it, but it's a light-hearted story. That's its enduring appeal.

When I joined Toei in 1990, I participated in a planning meeting for Kyōryū Sentai Zyuranger (1992). The producer, Takeyuki Suzuki, opened the meeting by saying: "How do the giant battles happen this time?" The scriptwriter got really angry and responded, "That's not right! We should start by talking about what kind of show we want to make."

Suzuki was a veteran who'd worked on many Sentai seasons up to that point, but after all the trial and error he had gone through, I think that really opened his eyes. He realized that this was the only format that Sentai could have success in, and then he'd reached this frightening point where the first thing he was thinking about was the giant battles. From an outsider's perspective, it makes sense to be like, "that's where you want to start?"

Zyuranger was going to be "the last Super Sentai"

— So, thirty years ago, the production team felt they'd already done everything they could?

At the time, Sentai was creatively exhausted. For Zyuranger, the team went, "If this is the last Sentai team, let's go all the way." The younger members of the staff banded together to do something completely new, and introduced a "Sixth Ranger" midway through the story.

Zyuranger was the first Super Sentai to have a sixth team member as a regular. Nowadays, it's common for "additional heroes" to appear partway through the story, and some modern Sentai teams have more than six members.

It's a classic now, but at the time, no one expected Sentai to have a future, much less continue for 30 years more. Maybe that unexpected stroke of luck guaranteed the success of Power Rangers: the American series based on Zyuranger.

— Both Kamen Rider and Ultraman have had hiatuses. Except for a brief lull early on, Super Sentai is the only tokusatsu superhero series that has been on the air for almost 50 years straight. Why do you think Sentai has been so beloved?

There's no real logic to Super Sentai. It was originally born from an accident: there was a plan to have five Kamen Riders gather together to fight, but for some reason, this fell through. So, Shotaro Ishinomori was asked to quickly come up with the original Himitsu Sentai Gorenger. Then, when giant-robot anime like Combattler V (popular in the 1970s) stopped airing, the lifeblood of giant robots flowed into Sentai.

The creators of early Sentai didn't have the luxury of thinking about how to create the ideal heroes. They had to slap something together quickly and go through lots of trial and error, and Super Sentai was the result. Did they have to fight in groups of five every time? Did they always have to use the giant robot? What was all that for? It's pretty cool and captivating, somehow; the essence of humanity is in overcoming logic. I think Super Sentai is a show that laid bare the essentials of an entertaining series.

It's become harder to portray conflicts between good and evil

— It must mean a lot, to have kept these superhero shows going for so long on television.

The portrayal of good and evil, in Sentai, has also changed considerably since its inception. With the end of the Cold War, society found it difficult to imagine a hypothetical "absolute evil." Even in fictional superhero shows, it became harder to portray good and evil in a one-dimensional manner. Despite this, we've stayed creative and continued to create shows with the characters fighting evil enemies while respecting their personalities.

Sentai are different from solo heroes like Kamen Rider. They were usually five-man teams, banding together to defeat the enemy. Children may not understand these things right away, but when they grow up, they may at least realize that Sentai were doing something important. I said earlier that Sentai has become "taken for granted", but I believe it has a place in the hearts of Japanese people, and I'd be happy if it had even a small positive impact on society.

— Was there any hesitation about ending Super Sentai's broadcast after 50 years?

No hesitation at all.

— Straight and narrow answer, just like Sentai characters.

I'm grateful to fans who love Sentai, but, for the sake of the next generation, we needed to begin a new challenge somewhere. The time has come for a transformation: not only for the superheroes, but also the shows as a whole. That is why we're following up No.1 Sentai Gozyuger with Super Space Sheriff Gavan Infinity.

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Pub: 30 Nov 2025 16:30 UTC

Edit: 01 Dec 2025 13:56 UTC

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