Carranger Episode 20 Is Super Sentai's 1,000th Episode!

It's no secret that next week's Zyuohger episode will be the big celebration of Super Sentai's 2,000th episode. I remembered Kamen Rider OOO was celebrating that episodes 27-28 are the Kamen Rider franchise' 999th-1,000th episode . What I missed or failed to notice is that Super Sentai had it's 1,000th episode released with Carranger episode 20, "Test Drive The Ultimate Famous Cars". What's interesting is that Carranger is also Super Sentai's 20th anniversary and the 1000th episode was released on the 20th episode of the 20th season.

The story of the two cars mixes with the story of the Tanabata/Qixi Festival. Depending on which version you're reading, the story may differ between the Chinese and Japanese version. The story has it that the prayers of the couples of granted by sealing both cars. As always, I felt this episode showed how Carranger made better use of fairies and cars better than Turboranger did last 1989. We're now mixing more fairies with cars in this episode.

I could share the story of the two lovers. In the Chinese version, the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl had a rather unfortunate misadventure. A talking ox told the farmer to go to this site. Well, the Cowherd saw seven sisters bathing. The seven sisters were daughters of the Jade Emperor and the Queen Mother of Heaven. That meant the seven sisters were goddesses. Cowherd married the Weaver Girl. What was three years in Earthrealm was but a short time for the Elder Gods. The Queen Mother of Heaven being the most powerful Elder Goddess found the union inconceivable. However, the realms were moved which allowed the couple to meet each other once a year. A magpie bridge is created though the two can never be together. Hence the term star-crossed lovers. 

I don't think that Yuji Kishi has had better action scenes or charisma than Kenta Satou. However, this scene is amazing. His character Kyousuke can be seen trying to control the Pegasus Thunder and he gets it. Okay, one can say that well Riki/Red Turbo fought Emperor Ragorn one-on-one and that was badass. I agree but let's not discount this scene. Seeing this death-defying stunt by Kyousuke was pretty cool in its own right.

Naoki's capture scene was another nice scene. He does everything he can to protect Dragon Cruiser from the Bowzock's intent to destroy it. Then he's rescued after he does some badass scenes in spite of being under captivity.

My wild guess is that introducing these cool new vehicles is all part of having a good gimmick for toy sales. Ohranger concluded the Takeyuki Suzuki era. Carranger was the beginning of Shigenori Takatera's entrance as a producer and some ideas from the past were made better. Since Carranger was supposedly succeeding where Turboranger failed (and I dare believe it) I guess they wanted more cool gimmicks with the addition of a vehicle change. Having VRV Robo isn't all that surprising since having a secondary combining robot has been introduced since Kakuranger.

It's a pretty good episode but I felt that it didn't really do much to celebrate a milestone. It's still a really badass episode nonetheless. We do know that anniversaries started to get bigger during Gaoranger, Boukenger, Gokaiger, and most recently Zyuohger. I guess that's why Carranger didn't do much of a huge celebration back then!