Kyojuu Tokusou Juspion (1985)

Everything the show did well:
-Amazing use of props + great set variety.
-Juspion and Anri interactions are really entertaining in the first half.
-Consistently amazing action from start to finish, weather it's inside of mecha or not.
-Mad Gallant is a really entertaining rival.
-Decent story.
-Aside from the tree episode, ton of entertaining cases of the week in the first half that made the show's world feel alive.
-Boomerang's mini-arc is really fun.

Everything the show did bad:
-The giant sentient tree episode.
-The characters and tone change drastically in the second half for the worse. After Juspion gets a haircut he goes from a flawed hero inspired by Han Solo to a generic Showa hero. This would have been fine if he got a proper character arc but this change in personality felt unnatural. Juspion modifies Anri against her will to make her a generic Showa main girl yet he never gets reprimanded for it nor does she ever go back to her original personality.
-The cool heroic companion Boomerang from the first half only comes back to lose in the second half barely accomplishing anything.
-The second half introduces the Nambara family. While their story is good, they aren't compelling characters and lot of episodes are two siblings causing trouble by jumping the gun. Which results in various episodes in this half feel draggy and repetitive.

There really isn't enough info on the show production that I could find to know what resulted in the final product. All I know is that there was a schedule change half-way trough due to the show not being popular in Japan at the time. So I have to assume that the show had a really talented staff but due to not being popular they tried to make the show more generic after the schedule change to improve its popularity resulting in the second half being way worse than the amazing first half. But this is just speculation.

Overall:
The show is enjoyable overall but most if its great moments happen in its first half. Once the second half starts, the show loses most of its identity and what made it original and just becomes really generic with nothing going for it besides its cool action. It's a heavily flawed show and hard to recommend unless you're really into showa tokusatsu or if you love the action enough to watch it all the way through.

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