YMMV / Zone Fighter

• Badass Decay:
  • Poor, poor Gigan. He's completely stripped of his ability to fly and use his buzzsaw, and is easily shafted in a Curb-Stomp Battle.
  • Somewhat averted with Godzilla. While he serves as the Team Pet in most of his appearances, he's no less capable of kicking serious ass when he appears.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
  • Being a kids show made in Japan there are a lot, but if one takes the cake it's Zone Fighter jumping into a TV and then appearing over the city the TV was showing being attacked by a monster. Funny enough, that would be repeated some 20 years later in Kyōryū Sentai Zyuranger.
  • The entire series could count as this to the Showa Godzilla universe; while by this point Godzilla has already been established as a good guy, his human allies, the Terror Beasts, and their masters the Garoga, are never referenced by the films which followed. Granted, this is the Showa Godzilla universe, so it's likely most people just chalked the Terror Beasts up as more monsters of the week for Zone and Godzilla to put down. Since only Ghidorah would survive to be a menace again, and Ghidorah is acknowledged in the later films (and killed in Destroy All Monsters) it's possible the Terror Beasts' attacks were so short-lived most people simply forgot about them.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Just like Varan, Zone Fighter is mostly obscure even to fans but thanks to the internet some fans are shouting for DVD's of the show to be sold out of Japan and some fans are even asking to get Zone Fighter in a game.
  • Zandora, the drill headed Terror-Beast, seems to have a bit of a cult following for his incredibly strange, yet awesome design.
• Funny Moments: In the 2-part episode, Zone Fighter plays rock, paper, scissors against one of his monster foes. Absurd and silly? Sure. Funny? Definitely.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Another example that literally involves Godzilla, if there's one thing this show is famous for, it's the presence of Godzilla in some of its episodes.
• Retroactive Recognition: Kazuya Aoyama (Zone Fighter's human form Hikaru Sakimori) would have a bigger role in a later Godzilla-related work as Masahiko Shimizu from Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla.
• Moment of Awesome: Plenty of examples, but one of the highlights definitely has to be Zone Fighter battling none other than Godzilla's most powerful and infamous enemy, King Ghidorah, and actually successfully duelling him until he was forced to flee!
• Special Effect Failure: Numerous instances; one episode, for example, featured a gorilla being obviously played by a man in a cheap gorilla costume. Due to the economic depression affecting Japan at the time, the show suffered from this as much as the contemporary Godzilla movies and most other Toku of the period. However, this series marks the turning point for Toho's fortunes, as while it didn't make it to a series finale, Zone Fighter shows the beginning of the upturn in quality of the special effects used, a trend that would continue with the following Godzilla film Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla.
• Vindicated by History: Zone Fighter was brushed off by many in its day as a mediocre Ultraman clone (one of many in the 70s), hence its short lifespan. But with the rise of the internet, there has been renewed interest in the series, with some praising its usage of the family dynamic over the stock paramilitary one. After all, how many other Tokusatsu heroes can say they've teamed up with Godzilla?