Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go! Was Absolutely Mental... And I Loved It

Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go! Was Absolutely Mental... And I Loved It

There are some shows where you only need to see one image and suddenly you're back there.

Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go! does that to me.

Even the name is ridiculous. Try saying the full thing out loud without sounding like you're about to burst through the living room wall wearing a cape.

But that's what I loved about it.

I remember the first time I came across it, and I genuinely didn't have a clue what I was watching. There was a young lad called Chiro, five robot monkeys, a massive Super Robot and one of the creepiest villains I'd seen in a kids' cartoon.

And somehow it all just worked.

This was the Jetix era.

If you grew up with Jetix, you'll ken exactly what I mean. You didn't always sit down knowing what you were going to watch. Sometimes the telly was just on. You'd be lying on the couch, controller on the floor, probably meant to be doing something else, and suddenly a show you'd never heard of came blasting onto the screen.

That was how you found things back then.

No algorithm had decided I might enjoy Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go! because I'd watched something similar three days earlier. I just found it.

And I miss that more than I thought I would.

The actual idea behind the show sounds like something a bunch of kids would've made up in the playground. Chiro discovers a giant abandoned robot, accidentally awakens five robotic monkeys and ends up connected to the Power Primate. Before long he's leading Antauri, Sparx, Gibson, Otto and Nova against the Skeleton King and all the other horrors threatening Shuggazoom.

Robot monkeys.

A giant robot.

A magical energy called the Power Primate.

Skeleton King.

Aye. Go on then.

But beneath all the madness, there was something genuinely brilliant about the team.

Every monkey felt different. Antauri had this calm, almost spiritual presence about him. Sparx was loud and cocky. Gibson was the brains. Otto could build and fix just about anything, and Nova was the one you really didn't want to piss off.

Then there was Chiro.

He wasn't some perfect hero who knew exactly what he was doing. He was a kid who stumbled into something far bigger than himself and had to grow into the person the team needed him to be.

As a kid, you don't sit analysing character development. You just think the monkey robots are cool.

Watching it when you're older though... aye, there's more going on there.

The show could get surprisingly dark as well.

Skeleton King was genuinely unsettling. Not pretend scary where you knew everything would be fine after the next advert break. There were moments in this show that felt weird, lonely and properly eerie.

That's something I think cartoons from this era were brilliant at.

They trusted kids with atmosphere.

They weren't terrified of making you feel uncomfortable for ten minutes. The heroes could lose. Characters could be frightened. The world could feel massive and empty outside the safety of Shuggazoom City.

Then five minutes later Otto would do something daft and you'd be laughing again.

The art style was a huge part of it too. The show wore its anime influence proudly, pulling from classic Japanese animation while mixing in the sort of team dynamics you'd recognise from Power Rangers, Voltron and even Star Wars.

At the time, I didn't know any of that.

I just knew it looked cool.

That's maybe the purest way to experience a show. Before you know who created it. Before you know the animation studio. Before you've watched a forty-minute video essay explaining every influence hidden in the background.

You just sit there and enjoy the bloody thing.

And that theme tune...

SUPER ROBOT MONKEY TEAM HYPERFORCE GO!

There's no subtlety to it whatsoever.

It announces itself like the show has just kicked your front door in.

Even now, seeing the title written down puts the rhythm of it back in my head. That's the dangerous thing about old kids' TV themes. You can forget where you've put your keys five minutes ago, but your brain will happily preserve a cartoon intro from twenty years ago in perfect condition.

The strange thing is, Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go! feels forgotten now.

It had four seasons. Fifty-two episodes. It ran on Jetix here in the UK and had a proper world, a brilliant voice cast and a story that kept getting bigger as it went.

Then it just... faded.

That's the bit that gets me with these shows.

At some point, you watched your last episode and you didn't know it was your last episode.

You didn't sit there thinking, I'll never watch this the same way again.

The channel changed. You got older. Maybe Jetix disappeared from your life. Games became more interesting, then mates, work, bills and all the boring shite nobody warns you takes up most of being an adult.

The robot monkeys got left behind somewhere.

Then twenty years later you see Chiro standing beside Antauri and suddenly you remember.

You remember the Super Robot.

You remember Skeleton King.

You remember shouting the stupidly long name in your head along with the intro.

And for a wee second, you're back there.

That's why I built The Retro Database in the first place.

Shows like Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go! deserve somewhere to exist in people's memories. Not because every old cartoon was a masterpiece. Nostalgia can make us forgive some absolute rubbish.

But this one?

Nah.

This one was special.

Maybe a bit mental.

Definitely loud.

But special.

And if you've just remembered it for the first time in years...

Welcome back to Shuggazoom.