During my recent nostalgia trip, I managed to procure the entire series of Yoroiden Samurai Troopers, known better in America as Ronin Warriors.
While I had vague memories of this show, they were indeed fond ones. I remember getting up for school early just to watch this every morning before catching the bus. I also remember it being one of my favorite shows at the time it was on TV right along with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. However, while I could recall specifics of TMNT (Even before I owned all 4 released DVD’s of the original series), I could not remember a damn thing about this show other than it was 5 different colored Samurai warriors.
So upon re-watching the series (only the first 4 episodes thus far), I can easily see why I loved it. While the voice acting is fairly crappy (I have the english translated version) the overall show has aged remarkably well. Since it was a 80’s Japanese Anime, it has the look of Macross, Robotech and such.
Much like other Japanese anime of the time such as Dragonball, it is one continual story over 39 episodes as opposed to a episodic series (ala TNMT). The premise of the story is that thousands of years ago, the evil emperor Talpa attempted to conquer the Earth. Defeated, he was banished to the Nether Realm and his armor was divided into 9 separate suits. Now, he has returned to conquer Earth, having reclaimed 4 of the suits which have been given to Talpa’s warlords. The other 5 are in the possession of the Ronin Warriors. Now, all Talpa needs to conquer Earth is those 5 suits, but the Ronin Warriors have no intention of giving them up.
So far, I am really REALLY enjoying this show. The fight sequences are frequent and awesome and it has a very dark feel to it which belies its nature as a childrens series. They talk often about death and killing and even use profanity (Thus far Damn, Hell and even Shit). Obviously, I am watching an uncut version which makes me wonder how things were changed in the version shown on TV.
I fully intend to pick up the boxed set within the next few weeks and am probably going to scrounge around for some figures to go with my TMNT collection.
