One lost show that once took on Mighty Morphin Power Rangers has made a surprising comeback after 31 years with a new launch on streaming. Power Rangers is currently working on a new reboot for Disney+, and fans will soon be introduced to a new take on the classic franchise after 30 years. When the series was at its peak, fans at the time got to see all kinds of other shows trying to match the same kind of vibe as the idea of taking Japanese Tokusatsu shows and adding new materials got more popular in the United States.
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This left to a lot more Tokusatsu shows being adapted for a worldwide release as they tried to compete with the Power Rangers shows at the time too. Some of these takes were more successful than the others, and some unfortunately have gone under the radar thanks to the lack of future releases. One includes the essentially buried Superhuman Samurai Syber-Squad, which has made its return after 31 years with a surprise streaming release with RetroCrush.
Superhuman Samurai Syber-Squad Is Now Streaming With RetroCrush
RetroCrush has officially announced that they are now streaming Superhuman Samurai Syber-Squad, and it includes the entire 53 episode run of the original series. Adapting the Japanese series Gridman the Hyper Agent, Superhuman Samurai Syber-Squad is going to immediately feel familiar to those millennial fans keeping an eye out on Saturday mornings at the time. Developed by Tsuburaya Productions and working together with DIC Productions (the company that also released the first English version of Sailor Moon), this was an entirely different kind of show.
While it was originally picked up to be in the same vein as a show like Power Rangers, Big Bad Beetleborgs, and VR Troopers, it ended up being a lot different as a team of kids (with a young Matthew Lawrence being the stand out) being transported into a video game world and needing to fight all kinds of virus threats. These kids would don a super armor in this world to take on monsters, and was a unique show among all of the other offerings at the time. But it’s been pretty much forgotten outside of Japan.
Superhuman Samurai Syber-Squad Had a Surprise Sequel
This new streaming release of Superhuman Samurai Syber-Squad is the first major legal release for the franchise in many, many years so this is going to be the first opportunity that fans of the classic show will be able to rewatch it to see how it holds up. The show wasn’t as popular as its compatriots at its time, and probably because it ended up on syndication in other networks outside of the Power Rangers bubble on Fox Kids. The audience didn’t follow.
But the franchise did get a surprise sequel with a full anime series following up the events of the original Gridman the Hyper Agent show. It was also inspired by the English show that was stemmed from it, and SSSS.Gridman went on to be such a hit when it premiered that it got a full spinoff series and a feature film effort combining them all into one grand finale for the story. Now that the classic is available again, time to see what the buzz was about.
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