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Messengers from Planet C have visited France on two separate occasions, yet only briefly! Despite this, we have long maintained a fascination with not only French cinema and music but also the way they seem to curate foreign pop culture with a view to repurposing it for a domestic audience. To our knowledge, France’s association with Super Sentai began with Club Dorothée, a show that began in 1987 on weekday afternoons and weekend mornings and was hosted by the titular Dorothée, a singer and television presenter whose career began in the early 1970s. Along with co-hosts Ariane Carletti, Jacky Jakubowicz, François Corbier, and others, she succeeded in introducing French children to tokusatsu years before Power Rangers made waves English speaking territories, the French dub also later being subsumed into the Club Dorothée line-up. So popular was Dorothée, so strong was the association between her and the shows that she helped introduce, that she even appeared in a small cameo during a handful of episodes of 1988’s Chojuu Sentai Liveman, Kamen Rider Black, and Sekai Ninja Sen Jiraiya.
Not content with simply introducing children to tokusatsu, Club Dorothée’s presenters also had a prominent hand in adapting both Super Sentai and Metal Hero shows, as well as popular animated shows such as Dragon Ball, City Hunter and many others.
Yet what happened after, I hear you ask. Once Club Dorothée had closed its doors in 1997, what was left behind?
In 2000, a group of friends from university gathered together with a desire to pay homage to the television serials of their childhood. The result was Jushi Sentai France Five, later retitled Shin Kenjushi France Five, a six episode series that spanned thirteen years, not including later additions, and presented a vision of that childhood influence so charming and honest that we at Planet C cannot help but recommend it to you.
Paying homage to late Super Sentai, France Five tells the story of five warriors—Antoine Deschaumes (Red Fromage), Albert Dumas (Blue Accordéon), Jean Pétri (Yellow Baguette), Thierry Durand (Black Beaujolais), Catherine Fontaine (Pink à la Mode)—and the mysterious Silver Mousquetaire as they fight off an invasion by the evil Lexos Empire, held at bay only by the initiative of their mentor, Professor Aristide Burgonde, and the forethought of architect, Gustave Eiffel, the main responsible for Paris’s famous tower and the varied magical totems built into it to keep evil at bay.
In truth, when your correspondent first heard of the series it was in the pages of niche magazines at the time whose interests lay in documenting pop culture. France Five was considered as real, as authentic as any of the Toei productions that had thus far failed to reach us unmolested in anything more than short RealPlayer clips. I embraced France Five just as I did any of the Japanese series I was first learning about at that time and I think the legacy of this short show is one that goes beyond the sense of Parisian childhood nostalgia that may have first laid the foundations for the series.
Following the conclusion of the series, the cast of France Five remained close, building on the fictional universe they had created with supplemental materials included in recent DVD and BluRay releases. In 2023, this enthusiasm and hard work culminated in the release of the beautiful short film Message d’Outre-Espace, a story set before the formation of the team, its title a homage to the 1978 Ishinomori Shotaro helmed series, Uchu kara no Messeji: Ginga Taisen.
Of equal merit, although vastly different in tone, is the 2022 film, Fumer fait tousser, from director and musician Quentin Dupieux, the man behind the 1999 song, Flat Beat, popularised by its inclusion in a Levi’s commercial alongside the hand-puppet, Flat Eric. Fumer fait tousser is a complicated homage, somewhere between a grotesque pastiche of Club Dorothée’s roster of shows and an anthology of perverse vignettes brimming a sense of black comedy and discomfort. Within the world of Dupieux’s film, the banality of evil and the bureaucracy of the world that Tobacco Force have sworn to protect.
As colourful as it is cruel, Fumer fait tousser is a unique take on the legacy of Super Sentai and our relationship with nostalgia, an act of deconstruction in the purest sense that resonates with us here on Planet C despite our lack of understanding of the applied cultural nuance inherent within the film. Your correspondent has a fondness for adaptation, for exploring the traditions of tokusatsu through another lens. My first experience of Kamen Rider Black was via blurry low quality TV rips dubbed in Portuguese and recorded from distant broadcasts, and this formative exposure to the raw horror the medium could present, as well as the phantasy made a tremendous impact, a contrast that films like Fumer fait tousser highlight fully.
Whilst English speaking territories were overcome with excitement at the debut of Power Rangers in 1993, France had already fallen in love, the influence of tokusatsu helping shape the development of the country’s own pop culture, its tropes and traditions passing into the lexicon of modern cinema.
Friends, I do not wish to ask of you to fully commit to revisiting those older Super Sentai shows in their French dub, but if you do, I believe you will find something very special. You can also fully enjoy all of France Five and Message d’Outre-Espace on YouTube and find Fumer fait tousser on DVD and BluRay available from wherever you make your physical media purchases.
Leave us your thoughts and recollections of French tokusatsu in the comment section below!
