True to their corporate battlefield, the Shinesman shun traditional Power Rangers weapons like swords and lasers in favor of lethal business cards and exploding tie clips, while the team juggle the demands of career and family in between their clashes with monsters. It's all a cute sendup of tokusatsu conventions, but it has only one real joke at its core. Much of the gags surrounding it are just sly references, such as the characters having the same family names as their voice actors. Nor doe it root all that deeply into the nature of corporate wage-slavery, apart from the innate reminder that our heroes' true lives are outside of the office.
For its North American release Shinesman landed at Coastal Carolina, a dubbing studio that rarely did anything half-hearted. Their efforts sometimes went to waste on unsalvageable dross, but Shinesman’s humor was just waiting for a spirited treatment. Director Scott Houle oversaw a dub script peppered with jokes from deadpan humor to melodramatic mockeries, and the cast sells it perfectly. We’re walked through the usual cliches of the story, such as Shina meeting and falling for Matsumoto without either of them realizing their true identities, but it’s simply more appealing when punctuated with gags about giant fish and car inspections. To this day I cannot hear the color gray defamed without wanting to defend it as “a regal, manly color.”
Highly liberal dub adaptations sometimes carry an underlying contempt for the source material, such as the crass rewrites for Ghost Stories or some of the old Streamline treatments that seemingly aimed to improve the Japanese scripts. Shinesman doesn’t come off like that. The dialogue feels more like it’s enhancing the original, sharpening and polishing its sense of parody without replacing it. Inherent gags like Yamadera’s obsession with his car, Matsumoto’s overprotective stance on his little brother, or the recurring unmarketability of the Shinesman colors all come through beautifully, and the embellishments fit surprisingly well. It’s hard to choose a favorite line, though I’m partial to Pamela Weidner’s delivery of Shina proclaiming “I am NOT a BIMBO.”
Shinesman also didn’t overstay. It’s common for us to see a delightful old OVA and wish there could be more of it, but I’m not sure how long Shinesman could have kept up the pace even with Coastal Carolina handling it. It’s a very straightforward story beneath the humor, and the only narrative thread left dangling is a possible relationship between Matsumoto and Shina (who apparently doesn’t even appear in the manga). That could easily wrap up with, let’s say, a post-credits gag where Shina comes to work at the company. Perhaps that even happens in the audio drama, which I’ll have to track down one of these days.
