With a title as ridiculous and long as this, you know you're in for something...
Greetings Ladies and Gents! It is I, The Shaman of Animation back again with another Blast From the Past. Today, we will be taking a look at the first episode of Super Robot Monkey Team Hyper Force Go!
The series was created by Ciro Nieli (who also directed a majority of the episodes and was the executive producer) in 2004 and is about a boy named Chiro who one day on the outskirts of his city discovers an abandoned giant robot that apparently no one else in the city either didn't notice or noticed and just chose to ignore it. Either way, after turning the robot on, Chiro obtained the ability to posses the mystical monkey power known as The Power Primate, and awakened the robot monkeys inside of it: Antauri, Sparx, Gibson, Nova, and Otto. After being named their leader, Chiro and the Hyper Force must now defend Shuggazoom city (I swear I'm not making that name up) from the Skeleton King. I'm taking time to explain all of this because the first episode doesn't really delve into all of this: the backstory of Chiro and how he discovered the robot monkeys is all explained in the series's theme song.
Let this be a lesson for all these upcoming Superhero movies: You wanna do an origin story? Just sum it up in a catchy theme song!
The first episode of the series is titled: 'Chiro's girl' and it kicks off with Chiro (voiced by Greg Cipes) and the rest of the Hyper Force cleaning up their super robot because you can't fight evil monsters in a dirty giant super robot. Chiro and Sparx (voiced by Corey Feldman) decide to have a little fun with their cleaning by making a competition out of it. During their jump (They clean the robot by bungee jumping by the way), Chiro is distracted by a very shiny pink heart...oh yeah, there's a pink haired girl that Chiro thinks is very cute, but seriously, how shiny is that heart? Chiro and Sparx are at least thirty feet in the air and Chiro's back is completely turned to the girl but the heart on her dress still manages to give off this reflective glimmer that catches his eye. The angling it must have taken to do that has to be ridiculous.
I digress, Chiro's so distracted by this new girl he accidentally cuts off the rope that was tied to his leg. Luckily, he was caught by the other robot monkeys and his fall was reduced to only a couple of inches.When Chiro is back on the ground, he looks for the mystery girl, only for her to be gone. I'd like to take this second to compliment the character designs of the series. It's very obvious when you look at the first scene that the series was influenced by the art style of anime. For me, it shares some familiarity to the art of Astro Boy in some regards.
Chiro, in his normal civilian attire, is looking for the mystery girl when he catches her and her pet monkey getting bullied by who I'm guessing are fellow students at whatever school Chiro goes to. After coming in for the save and getting the bullies to back off, Chiro meets the pink haired girl proper; she introduces herself as Jinmay (voiced by Ashley Johnson) and her monkey is Sakko.
One dating montage later, the monkey team is worried about where Chiro could be as he missed all the activities they had planned for that day and none of their calls go through. The team's alerted by the alarm in the Super Robot, warning them of an attack by a horde owned by The Skeleton King (Voiced by Mark Hamil). Because they can't operate the robot without the aid of Chiro, the team goes into the city to deal with the threat with good old fashioned fisticuffs. Once into the city, they meet the Skeleton King's minions along with a robot that has a screen on its midsection with the SK's face on it. A battle ensues and the monkey team fights off the first group of minions, but are quickly overpowered by the SK's robot and another wave of his minions.
Ashley Johnson voicing a character that's a love interest to a character voiced by Greg Cipes? That's NEVER happened before, or will ever happen again...
As all this is taking place, Chiro remains completely oblivious to it as he's too enthralled in his date with Jinmay. That's until Sakko yanks and bites on his face which snaps him back into reality. Seeing the carnage outside, Chiro morphs into his battle form (Coming with its own little transformation sequence) and jumps into the fray. Chiro hogs all the enemies the rest of the team was dealing with in an attempt to show off to Jinmay by using punches, kicks and a beam attack that's totally not the Kamehameha except green. I'll take this time here to talk about the fight scenes in not just these past two scenes but the one that will come at the end of the episode. Looking at them now, they're not really that impressive, granted the majority of the fights are against mooks, but even so the fights feel...sluggish? Like the animation feels limited in the fights so you see a bunch of speed lines and flashes after someone gets hit. I'm doing a horrible job describing it, I know. But you'll see it when you watch the episode.
Moving on, shortly after the fight Chiro bails on the monkeys once again to hang out with Jinmay. But the monkeys ain't having any of that, so they cut him off and have him head back to their HQ. The team scold Chiro for him being so secretive with them so he apologizes and makes it up to them...by letting them know Jinmay's on the way to their base.
Jinmay's time in the base actually gives us very important info: One, normal people can't understand what the robot monkeys are saying. The only reason Chiro can is because of his connection to The Power Primate. Two: Chiro is actually working on a translator so that people WILL be able to understand the monkeys one day.
When Jinmay leaves, Gibson (Voiced by Tom Kenny) pulls up footage on the monitor of Sakko sneaking around and stealing the files on the Super Robot's weaknesses. When Chiro confronts Jinmay on the issue, she's confused as to what he's implying. What Chiro doesn't know is that Jinmay really is unaware of the situation. When Jinmay catches Sakko having a conversation with the Skeleton King using his right eye, Sakko pins her down and ties her up. The monkey opens up the girl's chest revealing that she's a robot.
A Robot? That would explain the shiny heart on her dress...
As it turns out Jinmay was once lost in the void of space and she was discovered by the Skeleton King. Who then wiped her memory so that she could destroy Chiro. The SK and Sakko download the info on the Super robot into Jinmay and rewire her so that she herself can transform into a giant robot.
Meanwhile, Chiro is sulking over what happened with Jinmay and how he felt like he let his team down by just letting a spy in their headquarters. The monkeys reassure him that what happened wasn't his fault and they forgive him easily. Immediately after, another alarm goes off in the super robot and the team (after a fancy little sequence), enter and activate the super robot and track down the source of the alarm. The team discover Jinmay in her giant robot form and not only that, but that Sakko is piloting her.
Because Jinmay knows the weaknesses of The Super Robot, the team's in a losing battle. That's until Chiro exits the robot to talk her down. It seems to work, but Socko puts a stop to it thanks to his mechanical control over Jinmay. Nova breaks Sakko's control the best way possible: Foot Missiles. After blowing up the mini ship that served as a control room to Jinmay, the robot girl is fully back in control of her body.
While The Super Robot repairs the damage done to the city in the fight (As stated earlier, the fight isn't impressive). Jinmay realizes that her planet of origin needs her and so she must go and she flies off to find where she came from. The episode ends with the Skeleton King using an evil Jack in the box to carry Sakko away as punishment for his failure. As this is happening, he rips out the eye the monkey used to communicate with him earlier in the episode and he promises to defeat Chiro.
After watching the first episode, I think it's safe to say that Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go is a series that takes a few episodes to really hit its stride. The first episode I didn't seem to find very engaging. The story of this first episode (Possessed close one/love interest tries to find the team's witnesses and take them down) is one that's kind of been done before and personally one that I think should be done at around the third or fourth episode after the relationship between Chiro and the hyper force is better established.
But to the show's credit, by not having the first episode be an origin story, it does create interest for the viewer and learn more of the world of the series and the lore of it like more elaboration on The Power Primate and the Monkey translator, who's The Skeleton King? Where did he come from? Or for that matter, where did the robot monkeys and the super robot come from? And since people do know about Chiro and his connection with the robot monkeys, how does that affect his personal life so to say. I know I'm probably putting too much thought into a cartoon but these are some of the questions that popped in my head after watching the first episode.
As I'd like to do with a lot of animated series, I'll give props to the voice cast. Most I touched on, but others that also deserve their credit as well. You have Kari Wahlgren as the voice of Nova, Tom Kenny that was on triple duty this episode with the voice of Sakko and a miscellaneous character, and Clancy Brown as the voice of Otto, and of course Kevin Michael Richardson as Antauri. The cast is great and they all give solid performances all around.
While it isn't something that you should be rushing through to watch, with its nice visuals, enjoyable music during the action scenes and solid voice performances, SRMTHFG is a show that has promise and is one that if you stick with, I'm sure will have a satisfying payoff. After all, it lasted 52 episodes for a reason right?
Til next Time Folks, I'm The Shaman of Animation.
Take Care...
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