A Philippine television memory of five numbered helmets, absurd masked enemies, and the English voices of a Japanese superhero classic that almost vanished.
There was a particular kind of logic to children’s television in the Philippines during the late 1970s. Robots were enormous, villains announced themselves without the slightest concern for discretion, and superheroes wore costumes bright enough to be recognised from the other end of the street. Subtlety was never part of the arrangement. If someone was going to save the world, you needed to recognise him before the opening credits finished.
I remember that television landscape rather better than I remember every individual episode. Star Rangers belonged to it: five heroes dressed in red, blue, yellow, pink and green, with numbers on their helmets, a useful collection of motorcycles and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of peculiar masked enemies. Today, those ingredients sound like Power Rangers. For Filipino children who encountered the earlier programme on RPN-9, the formula had arrived long before the American adaptation became a household name.
Five Colours, Five Numbers, One Very Strange World
The programme was a Philippine English-language localisation of Himitsu Sentai Gorenger, the first Japanese Super Sentai television series. Toei originally broadcast its 84 episodes in Japan between 5 April 1975 and 26 March 1977. The series grew out of the extraordinarily productive imagination of Shōtarō Ishinomori, already associated with Kamen Rider and Cyborg 009. It combined the camaraderie of a military adventure with superheroes, broad comedy, practical effects and an unusually clear visual identity.
The local dub reportedly called its heroes Star 1, Star 2, Star 3, Star 4 and Star 5, names conveniently matched to the large numbers already printed on their Japanese helmets. It was the sort of localisation that hardly needed explaining to a child. Colour told you which hero you were watching, and the number reinforced the point. Someone involved in that decision understood both television and basic design.
Philippine fan histories generally place Star Rangers on RPN-9 in the late 1970s, often around 1978–79, although recollections of the precise schedule differ. I would be wary of declaring an exact Saturday timeslot from memory alone. What mattered to children was that the show appeared on an ordinary television set, in English, as another piece of the international entertainment mixture that characterised Philippine broadcasting at the time.
A Japanese Series That Invented a Familiar Formula
The original story begins with a deadly campaign by the Black Cross Army against EAGLE, an international defence organisation. Five survivors from different Japanese branches are brought together under commander Gonpachi Edogawa. With a hidden headquarters beneath a snack shop, specialist equipment and matching uniforms, they become the Gorengers. It is a surprisingly bleak origin for a programme that regularly solves disputes with a football-shaped weapon and a succession of smoke charges.
I like that contradiction. The background gives the team a reason to exist, but the series is not particularly interested in brooding about trauma. Instead it moves along with the confidence of a weekly adventure serial, allowing each new enemy to become an opportunity for another disguise, fight or improbable gadget. A headquarters with ready access to food is also a sensible touch. Secret agents have to eat sometime.
The programme arrived alongside manga adaptations and related publishing material. Rather than treating the television show as an isolated original and everything else as an afterthought, it is better understood as part of a deliberately connected world of comics, magazines, toys and broadcast characters. Its five bold colours worked across all of those formats.
Star 1 to Star 5: The People Beneath the Helmets
Star 1 was Tsuyoshi Kaijo, Akarenger, played by Naoya Makoto. Red was the team leader, dependable and appropriately serious, the figure around whom the more comic personalities could orbit. Kaijo’s history is linked to the Black Cross assault that created the team, giving him a personal reason to continue the fight. There is a reassuring economy to his costume: one strong colour, a conspicuous helmet number, and absolutely no confusion about who is in charge.
Star 2 was Akira Shinmei, Aorenger, played by Hiroshi Miyauchi. The blue ranger was the skilled marksman and pilot, a composed second-in-command whose steadiness helped balance the rest. Miyauchi had the sort of screen presence that could make an alarming amount of rubber, fabric and helmet plastic seem completely natural. In a series that might pit him against a locomotive-headed villain, that was a useful gift.
Star 3 was Daita Oiwa, Kirenger, played by Baku Hatakeyama. Yellow was strong, mechanically resourceful and memorably keen on curry rice. For a group entrusted with defending civilisation, the programme spent a surprisingly effective amount of time establishing one member’s appetite. Daita briefly left the team and was replaced by Daigoro Kumano, played by Jirō Daruma. The replacement was killed, an abrupt and genuinely sombre episode in a series better remembered for colourful action. Daita eventually returned.
Star 4 was Peggy Matsuyama, Momorenger, played by Risa Komaki. She was the explosives specialist, capable of fighting alongside the others and equipped with famously dangerous earrings. This was the 1970s, so the character was still framed by plenty of familiar gender conventions, but she was considerably more than a decorative addition to the team. Her technical role mattered, and that distinction deserves remembering.
Star 5 was Kenji Asuka, Midorenger, played by Yukio Itō. Green was the younger, more energetic member, often more impulsive than his colleagues and armed with a boomerang-like weapon. His relative youth gave the squad another recognisable personality. Together, the five were deliberately easy for viewers to distinguish: not just five uniforms, but five different temperaments presented through a simple graphic system.
The Costumes Did Half the Storytelling
Looking at the originals now, I am struck by how robust the character design remains. Five bold colour fields, contrasting chevrons, capes, white boots and heavily numbered helmets make a group readable in a fraction of a second. The uniforms do not pretend to resemble plausible contemporary military equipment. Their job is to make a small superhero team instantly identifiable to a young audience watching a television picture that may not have been particularly sharp.
The vehicles are similarly unapologetic. The motorcycles and fantastic aircraft, including Variblune and Varidreen, occupy a delightful territory between science-fiction engineering and a designer’s ambitious sketchbook. There are moments when the models look fragile and the scale is difficult to believe, but the practical construction gives them weight that computer animation sometimes lacks.
One detail often gets lost when people talk about the franchise retrospectively: the original Gorengers did not pilot a giant combining robot. They had specialist weapons, vehicles and a distinctive teamwork-based finishing attack. The robot-centric formula familiar from later Super Sentai productions came afterwards. On Philippine television, that made Star Rangers a different proposition from the enormous machines of Voltes V and Daimos. Here, the five figures themselves were the main attraction.
When the Villain Looks Like Something from a Kitchen Cupboard
The Black Cross Army provided the show with a parade of masked villains that wandered confidently between threatening and completely ridiculous. Where other programmes might rely on monsters drawn from nightmares, Gorenger found inspiration in animals, objects, machines and apparently anything its costume department could make wearable. The results are one of its greatest pleasures. You cannot help wondering who proposed some of these designs, or whether anyone ever asked a performer how difficult it would be to see through the mask.
Locomotive Mask is a fine example of the show’s temperament. A threatening masked enemy based on a train is already a considerable creative leap, yet the programme presents the idea with almost total sincerity. The same straightforward commitment runs through the action, which makes considerable use of quarries, outdoor locations, explosions and physical stunt work. They were not pretending the effects were invisible. They were asking viewers to join in the imaginative contract.
The Gorenger Storm and later Gorenger Hurricane pushed that contract still further. The heroes passed a ball-like weapon between them before firing it at their enemy; in classic series fashion, it could become whatever specialised object was needed to exploit the monster’s weakness. No amount of adult rationalisation makes the mechanics convincing, but that misses the point. As a child, the question was never whether it made engineering sense. The question was what extraordinary thing the weapon would become this time.
The Music and the Physical Noise of 1970s Television
The original Japanese production had music by Chūmei Watanabe, one of the composers whose work gave classic superhero and giant-robot programmes their recognisable energy. The opening theme, “Susume! Gorenger”, sung by Isao Sasaki, Mitsuko Horie and a children’s chorus, is all forward motion: bright brass, firm percussion and vocals that seem to be announcing a mission rather than introducing a television programme.
I am less certain exactly what Philippine viewers heard in every broadcast. The surviving documentation is too incomplete to establish which original opening and closing cues were retained, replaced or edited in the local English version. It is tempting to fill the gaps from the Japanese episodes available online today, but remembered television soundtracks are not necessarily reliable archives.
What I can remember is how watching television felt before on-demand viewing became ordinary. A programme appeared when the broadcaster said it would; missing the start meant missing the start. Nobody could casually pull up the opening titles to settle an argument about the characters. The routine of a scheduled broadcast, with all its inconvenience, became part of the memory. So did the noise of those songs and the slightly unstable picture through which we first saw the costumes.
A Great Formula, and All Its Limitations
The series is not difficult to criticise. Eighty-four episodes create a great deal of repetition, and the standard routine—new enemy, investigation, trap, confrontation, team finishing move—can become painfully clear. Some comedy has aged badly, villains are occasionally more interesting as costume designs than as characters, and the emotional aftermath of serious events can disappear surprisingly quickly. Anyone expecting the careful continuity of a modern prestige drama is going to have a difficult time.
Yet it would be equally unfair to demand that sort of writing from a 1975 children’s adventure serial. The performances have energy, the practical action has a physicality that is appealing in its own right, and the visual identity scarcely puts a foot wrong. I find its weaknesses easier to forgive when I remember the enormous constraints under which weekly television of that period was made. Much of what looks rough now is also evidence of people building things, wearing things and sometimes quite literally throwing themselves into the work.
The series occasionally reveals a harsher streak, too. The Black Cross assault that begins the story leaves real survivors; Yellow Ranger’s replacement does not receive a miraculous rescue. These moments do not transform the programme into adult drama, but they give its insistence on solidarity something more substantial to push against. For all the silliness, the heroes are there because nobody could defeat the enemy alone.
The Final Battle, and What the Ending Actually Means
Spoilers for the original Japanese finale. Episode 84 brings the Black Cross Führer and his remaining forces into a final struggle with the team. The villain’s apparent invulnerability becomes the problem to solve, and the constellation Cassiopeia plays an unlikely but crucial part in revealing his weakness. The Black Cross Castle becomes the last spectacular threat, drawing the Gorengers into a battle that costs them major equipment but finally destroys the organisation.
The ending is an extravagant piece of period superhero television, complete with aerial action, explosions and the collective resolve that had always been the programme’s real superpower. I appreciate that it does not suddenly try to become another kind of story. It trusts the visual language it has spent 84 episodes establishing and gives the five-colour team a suitably oversized final adversary.
There is an important qualification here. This is the ending of Himitsu Sentai Gorenger, the Japanese original. We cannot safely assume that the Philippine English dub carried all 84 episodes, or that a recording of the finale in its Star Rangers form survives. The two histories overlap, but they are not interchangeable.
Lucky Aces, Bioman and the Argument About Who Started It
Philippine superhero television history gets untidy when people try to arrange it into a perfect sequence. RPN-9 also presented the Japanese J.A.K.Q. Dengekitai as Lucky Aces, and retrospective accounts disagree about which programme aired first locally. J.A.K.Q. followed Gorenger in Japan, but television import schedules did not have to follow their country of origin. I would rather acknowledge the disagreement than write an attractive but unproven chronology.
Later series such as Choudenshi Bioman inspired their own intense enthusiasm in the Philippines, and I understand why many viewers see those later programmes as the beginning of the great local Super Sentai craze. Cultural impact is not simply a contest over who had the earliest broadcast or the most impressive toy line. An early show can introduce a visual vocabulary, while a later one turns that vocabulary into a national obsession.
That is where Star Rangers belongs for me. It helped make five colour-coded Japanese superheroes seem like an ordinary part of Philippine popular culture. By the time the American Power Rangers arrived, the fundamental idea was hardly revolutionary to everyone watching.
The Version We Heard Has Almost Disappeared
The melancholy part is that the original Japanese series has been preserved, redistributed and repeatedly celebrated, while the local English dub remains difficult to access. Lost-media enthusiasts have documented the recovery of around ten Star Rangers episodes at one point; some were uploaded to the Internet Archive, but the public collection was later removed. That does not mean every copy has vanished. It means the material available for general viewing is fragile and incomplete.
What particularly bothers me is the disappearance of the Filipino performers’ voices. For viewers in the Philippines, those voices were not an optional feature layered on top of the programme: they were the characters. Yet the dubbing cast and production circumstances have never been documented with the care that the Japanese original has received. I can recognise the costumes immediately in a modern image search, but I cannot simply select an episode and hear the version that local children knew.
There are also recollections of Philippine merchandise, tribute songs and all manner of local enthusiasm surrounding the programme. Those memories matter, although specific claims about manufacturers, dates and licensing deserve independent checking. Nostalgia is very good at telling us that something mattered. It is rather less dependable at identifying which shop sold it in 1981.
Fifty Years Later, Those Suits Still Make Sense
At the series’ fiftieth anniversary in April 2025, surviving performers reunited publicly in Japan, including Naoya Makoto, Hiroshi Miyauchi, Jirō Daruma, Risa Komaki and Yukio Itō. The footage is a reminder that a very particular-looking children’s series outlasted several generations of television technology. The franchise that grew from it became far larger than the original programme could reasonably have anticipated.
I am not particularly interested in pretending that the older programme is superior in every respect to what came later. It has rough edges, long stretches of repetition and villains that are sometimes impossible to take seriously. But it also has something I increasingly value in old popular entertainment: an uncomplicated commitment to its own strange ideas. Someone drew those suits, built those machines and sent the actors out into the countryside to fight a monster with a telephone or a locomotive for a head. Everybody involved appears to have got on with the job.
Modern superhero franchises need elaborate backstories, carefully managed continuity and enough digital effects to overwhelm the screen. Star Rangers managed to establish an entire language with five costumes and five numbers. The remarkable thing is how easily it still reads. Red, blue, yellow, pink and green: the system remains almost perfectly clear.
The costumes were always going to grow old. What seems more regrettable is that the particular Philippine voices which accompanied them have become harder to hear than to remember.
Notes on the Broadcast and Archive
For the Japanese programme’s production dates, team characters and basic background, see Toei’s official Gorenger history. Accounts of the Philippine English-language broadcast and surviving dub are less settled; the lost-media archive summary provides leads rather than a definitive broadcast log. The 2025 reunion is also covered in contemporary Japanese reporting. Images in this retrospective illustrate the Japanese original and related printed material; they should not be mistaken for documented captures of the Philippine English broadcast.
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