YMMV / Choushinsei Flashman

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Sara being the real main character of the series is a fairly popular interpretation, given how she arguably goes through the biggest character arc and is the only one to find her family in the end.
• Anti-Climax Boss: For the big, intimidating alien overlord he's built up to be, Ra Deus goes down like any other Monster of the Week apart from needing two shots from Rolling Vulcan to take him down. This also applies to the Mess as a whole, as instead of being defeated in a big climactic battle, their downfall comes mostly due to infighting destroying their internal hierarchy and the Flashmen picking off their key members once they get isolated. The last one to go down is Lee Keflen, whose only line of defense against the Flashmen is to offer them a Deal with the Devil that gets quickly rejected.
• Awesome Music:
  • Flashman! Fighting Pose
  • Flash King's theme
• Complete Monster: Great Emperor Ra Deus is the utterly egotistical ruler of Mess who has invaded numerous planets and ground their inhabitants down for their genetic material to use to transform himself into the Ultimate Lifeform. Having gone through numerous Great Doctors, Ra Deus's most recent one, Lie Keflen, is a human whom he kidnapped as an infant and groomed into the position. Employing the Alien Hunters to gather more test subjects for Mess, among those he had kidnapped were five human children whose parents were memory-wiped to forget them. Ra Deus would later throw the Alien Hunters under the bus by having them sacrificed to power up a Beast Warrior, and fuses three that escape into a single feral being. His other minions fare little better, as Ra Deus electrocutes them whenever they displease him and has his loyal subject Kilt mutated with his Deus genetics to transform her into a mindless Beast Warrior.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Sara is the most popular character, and the only one to find her Earth Family in the final episodes.
• Epileptic Trees: The final scene of the finale, a shot of Ra Deus's broken mask before fading into some flowers, can either be interpreted as showing that the conflict is over and that nature has triumphed over the Mess's twisted experiments or a sign that Ra Deus isn't fully dead yet and may return someday.
• Evil Is Cool: Sir Cowler, on equals of being a badass mercenary and being physically played by Joji Nakata.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff:
  • VERY popular in Brazil. It also fondly remembered in some Latin American countries as Peru, where it was one of the first Super Sentai series to be shown on television outside of Japan before Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers.
  • Flashman is also universally adored in South Korea among children of the late 80's and 90's. Being released on VHS, it became one of a seldom few Japanese series of any sort to see a legitimate release in South Korea (not counting pirated VHS releases of Toku and anime as well as subsequent Mock Buster series) prior to normalization of relations with Japan and resulted in several more Super Sentai shows (and even a couple Metal Heroes) being released in a similar format. It was so popular that when Power Rangers was released in South Korea, Korean kids thought it was a rip off of Flashman. At one point, a MockBuster called "Hero Flashman" was released to cash in on the series' popularity.
• Les Yay: Sara and Lou share quite a few tender moments throughout the series.
• Magnificent Bastard: Sir Cowler is the slick and coldly professional leader of the Alien Hunters responsible for abducting the Flashmen in the past. Coming to Earth in search of strong opponents, Cowler resumes working for the Reconstructive Experiment Empire Mess so he can fight the Flashmen personally. When Ra Deus sacrifices the Alien Hunters to power up a Beast Warrior, a vengeful Cowler rebels against the Mess and kidnaps Dr. Tokimura to make him build a second Gene Synthesizer, which he uses to weaken Ra Deus before infiltrating Reconstructive Experiment Base Laboh and seemingly destroying him. After being mortally wounded in a duel with Red Flash, Cowler uses his final moments to show Sara who her real parents are before performing a Suicide Attack to cripple the Laboh.
• Nightmare Retardant: The freaky-ass Kuragen, a mutated jellyfish, is sent out each ep to enlarge the monster, and is pretty damn scary looking, emerging from a red vortex and firing a beam from its' big red eye.... and when it's done, due to there being only so much big to go around, it shrinks, into a tiny octopi-like creature, often skittering away as fast as it can go.
• Retroactive Recognition: Some viewers may recognize the Big Bad as being played by Unshō Ishizuka, in one of his earliest voice acting roles.
• Stock Footage Failure: The upgraded Rolling Vulcan ends with a shot of a monster exploding surrounded by Ranger-colored smoke bombs ... except there's a black plume instead of a green one. That's because that shot came from two previous Super Sentai Series with Black Rangers.

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