Chargeman Ken is a sci-fi anime that ran on Japanese television from April 1st 1974 - June 28th 1974 at the 5:30-5:40 pm time slot. Each episode is roughly 7 minutes long barring the opening song and closing credits.

The Story: Juralians an alien race is attempting to destroy the earth and it’s up to ken Izumi to foil their plans in his alter ego form of Chargeman Ken. No one outside his family and family robot duck thing knows the true identity of Chargeman Ken except the Juralians. I cant imagine how that could be possible outside of cartoon logic. We take a quick break from this review to play Spot The Difference If You Can. 
 
 

Some of the plots the Juralians use include such dastardly plans as, *mutating plants to kill children, ** planting a bomb in a cyborg to kill people, ***and disguising themselves as a music teacher to hypnotize Kens sister to kill him with a kitchen knife. Many a time ken kills Juralians and some there is no clear evidence that some of his victims are aliens. Does Ken care? Ahh hell no.

      This show is so bad that even for the time they got confused when recycling backgrounds. Think back to the Flintstones when they ran and the background would loop to save money, a common practice at the time. The character animation… yup you guessed it could be quite jank. There were several frames and not necessarily from the same episode where a single hair was filmed and not edited out. In fact this hair was so important that when Chargeman Ken was turned in to a musical, it was added to the promotional poster as a gag.

It has been posited by Kenny Lauderdale, an anime and lost media reviewer on youtube that chargeman ken could have been an elaborate prank (started April 1st after all) and I think he may be on to something. (For a more in depth deep dive of chargeman ken I highly recommend Kenny’s channel.)

so would I recommend this anime? Yes I would under the ‘It’s so bad it’s good’ disclaimer. The episodes are short so I think it’s perfect to torture your buddies on a weekend when the budget might be tight. Streaming on pluto tv, amazon prime, and crunchyroll for those brave enough to give it a try.

* ep 6 Uncanny! The space botanical Garden

** ep 35 Dynamite in the brain

*** ep 45 When the cuckoo clock strikes three.

and now a snippet of ep 45