Term · Anime culture
Sentai
Five colour-coded heroes, one combining robot, and a rule that the red one talks first.
In Otakana the clue reads: Colour-coded team of costumed heroes
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- 6 · Hard
Sentai is 戦隊, battle squadron, and it names a format rather than a single show. A team of young people, each assigned a colour, transform together, fight a monster of the week at human scale, and then finish the job in machines that dock into one larger robot. The formula is fixed enough that an audience can predict the act breaks, and rigid enough that any deviation reads as a statement.
Toei set it in 1975 with Himitsu Sentai Goranger and has produced a new team almost every year since, under the Super Sentai banner. Saban licensed the Japanese action footage for Mighty Morphin Power Rangers in 1993, shot American actors for the unmasked scenes, and introduced the whole structure to a generation who never saw the original.
Animation borrowed the shape rather than the suits. Magical girl teams took the colour coding and the group transformation, Voltron and its relatives took the combining robot, and comedies use the five-pose lineup as an instant visual joke. Point a camera up at five people standing in a row while something explodes behind them and the reference lands with no dialogue at all.
Spelling SENTAI
SENTAI is six letters and, unusually here, hides nothing: no long vowel is trimmed and no consonant doubles. The word ends in the AI pair, pronounced as one glide close to the English word eye, which is the same ending senpai and kawaii use. Its front half matches sensei and seinen, so the first three tiles are shared with several other answers.