Chad Lee In Lightspeed Rescue: A Throwback To Hirohisa Soda's Blue Rangers Who Were Water Sportsmen?

While watching Gogo Five and some bits of Lightspeed Rescue, Chad is definitely no Americanized Nagare. Instead, he would feel like some awesome blue rangers way back in the Hirohisa Soda era. I felt like he's more like these guys instead of his Lightspeed Rescue counterpart which is cool, considering that it's better to borrow ideas from other shows, not just the Japanese counterpart.


Dynaman's Yousuke Shiima is a swimmer and surfer, the first aquatic blue ranger.


Ryuta Nanbara is a water sportsman. In the beginning of Bioman, Ryuta can be seen as a water sportsman and his intro shows he is one. Like this guy, Chad is an accomplished martial artist. Chad might be best viewed as an Americanized version of Ryuta.


Or maybe, Ken Hoshikawa. If GogoFive is the second sibling Super Sentai, Fiveman was the first. While Ken exists as a PE teacher and he's a swimmer in the opening. He's also an accomplished fighter even to go out of suit to teach children the value of perseverance. Having heard Chad took on a monster unmorphed, well that might remind some of Ken's fighting against a monster unmorphed. Maybe, we can also say Chad is the Americanized version of Ken.

My thoughts are that while Nagare is a chemist and inventor, I felt like that if Chad were one, it would not only lack originality but it might be a throwback to Billy instead. So by choosing to make him a water sportsman (something Power Rangers didn't have), I felt like it did the Soda era of Super Sentai a lot of tribute and recreated a concept that Super Sentai had but Power Rangers didn't have. After all, just think of some ideas that Power Rangers copied from the Soda era of Super Sentai while adding their own original twist for an entirely new audience.

Meanwhile, here's a really fun intro of Lightspeed Rescue using Fiveman suits. Heck, I've even joked GogoFive suits and Fiveman suits had some similarities. Chad being Five Blue here has me saying that having him less similar to his GogoFive counterpart and more similar to Soda's three blue rangers that I just mentioned.