Nostalgia vs. discovery

Shout! Factory TV is a trove of kitschy delights

Since 2003, Shout! Factory has been in the business of procuring cult films and vintage television shows, endowing them with HD remasters where possible, and packaging them on DVD and Blu Ray with well-curated extras. It’s basically The Criterion Collection of cool shit. Shout! Factory TV is their free, ad-supported streaming service offering a boutique collection of nostalgic artifacts.

A section called VHS Vault—which mimics the playback of an old VCR, tracking-error graphics and all—is where I found “Never Too Young to Die,” a schlock-fest supreme that, being a lifelong KISS fan, I saw in 1986. John Stamos, not yet Charles but definitely in charge, plays a high school gymnast who joins forces with a coke-addled Vanity to avenge his father’s death and foil the nefarious plans of the hermaphroditic super-villain responsible, Velvet Von Ragnar (played with manic glee by Gene Simmons). It’s just as awesome as it sounds.

“Good Sex with Dr. Ruth Westheimer,” which ran on Lifetime in the 1980s, is—inexplicably—also here. I watched it with my parents back then because they were cool like that. Westheimer was (and is, at 89) too adorable to seem filthy. This was her Trojan horse for fundamentally changing the way America talks about sex on
television.

Yet, nostalgia has nothing on discovery, which I found out on the couch one toasty afternoon, having my chakras realigned by “Ninja Sentai Kakurangers.”

Five high school students with a sentient food truck are granted the power to transform into spandex-clad ninjas, defending Tokyo from the Yokai—evil spirits loosed from ancient Japanese history.

A mid-90s progenitor of the more widely known “Power Rangers” series in America, “Kakurangers,” despite its rigid formula—the Yokai cause weird trouble, they face off with the valiant Kakurangers, and are rudely vanquished—offers a nearly infinite (and awesome) variety of ways to terrorize kids.

The episodes are morality plays, mixing tokusatsu series like “Ultraman” with Toho kaiju beat-em-ups such as “Gamera” into a demented dream-mélange of forced perspective chaos that is a delightful product of its time.

One standout among many, “The Bakeneko’s Shop!!”: A Yokai called the Bakeneko lures two moppets with a cat’s purr and imprisons them in cages with other sobbing abductees at her secret restaurant with a plan to butcher and feed them to her phantasmagorical customers. Hilarity ensues.

If you’re craving a dose of trippy and traumatic children’s programming (who isn’t, really?), look no further.

Visit shoutfactorytv.com and poke around for some hidden gems yourself.

For more from Joe, read his review of DC’s “Wonder Woman.”