News / Aug 23, 2026

Super Hero Time in 2026: The Biggest Reshuffle in Fifty Years

Super Sentai is ending and Project R.E.D. takes its half of the Sunday block. What actually changes, what stays, and what it means if you collect.

Super Hero Time is the Sunday morning block on TV Asahi where Toei's two flagship tokusatsu series air back to back. In 2026 it is being rebuilt from the ground up for the first time in its history: Super Sentai, one of its two permanent pillars, is ending, and a brand-new franchise banner is taking the slot. This is the largest structural change to Toei's Sunday morning line-up in fifty years.

What Super Hero Time actually is

Super Hero Time is not a show. It is a programming block — a paired timeslot that runs a Super Sentai episode and a Kamen Rider episode consecutively, with short linking segments where the casts of both series address the audience together. It has been the shop window for Toei's tokusatsu output for decades, and it is where the year's toy line is effectively launched every autumn.

The pairing matters commercially more than it does creatively. The two series are produced separately, with separate writers, directors and continuities. What the block gives them is a shared audience and a single, predictable weekly appointment for the children and collectors who buy the transformation items.

What is changing in 2026

Two things, and they are not the same size.

The first is that Super Sentai is ending. TV Asahi confirmed that the franchise concludes its broadcast run with No.1 Sentai Gozyuger, which began airing in February 2025 as the 50th anniversary season and wraps in early 2026. The reasons given are financial: production costs measured against merchandise, event and film revenue. Gozyuger is the 50th and final entry, closing a line that started with Himitsu Sentai Gorenger on 5 April 1975.

The second is that the vacated half of the block is not being left empty or handed to another Sentai. It goes to Project R.E.D., a new Toei tokusatsu banner, launching with Super Space Sheriff Gavan Infinity. That title revives Gavan, the 1982 character who started the Metal Hero line, and it is the first new television entry in the Metal Hero franchise in close to two decades.

Why replacing Sentai with Gavan is a genre change, not a rebrand

This is the part that gets flattened in most coverage. Super Sentai and Metal Hero are different formats, and swapping one for the other changes what the block is.

Super Sentai is an ensemble format. Five or more colour-coded heroes, a team dynamic, combining mecha, and a toy line built around a group you complete. Metal Hero is a single-hero format — an armoured officer, usually recruited into a police or paramilitary organisation, with a personal arsenal rather than a team's shared one. Gavan's 1982 template is closer to sci-fi law enforcement than to a superhero team.

Project R.E.D. is being positioned around red-suited protagonists in technological armour rather than Sentai's spandex-and-helmet look. In practice that means the Sunday block moves from "team of five plus a giant robot" toward "one armoured lead", which has real consequences for how the toy line is structured. A Sentai year sells you five figures and a combining mecha. A Metal Hero year sells you one hero's escalating equipment.

What stays the same

Kamen Rider is not going anywhere. The Rider half of the block continues, with Kamen Rider ZEZTZ concluding its run and Kamen Rider My-Th taking over from 6 September 2026. My-Th is built around East Asian zodiac mythology, following Sora Otosumi and the Zyunishi Doumei — the Twelve Zodiac Alliance — against creatures called Fukashigi.

So the block itself survives. The Sunday 9:30 a.m. habit survives. What changes is the identity of the non-Rider half.

What this means if you collect

Three practical consequences.

Sentai merchandise does not stop existing. Fifty years of toy lines remain in circulation and actively traded. What stops is new current-season Sentai product. If you collect a specific team, the secondary market is now the whole market.
Memorial and anniversary reissues become the main new-product channel for Sentai. Premium Bandai has been working steadily through 2000s-era devices — the Gaoranger Juoken and G-Phone, the Magiranger WolzaPhone — and that programme is the most reliable source of new Sentai items now that the broadcast pipeline has closed.
Current-season shelf space shifts to Project R.E.D. If you buy the year's flagship items as they release, Gavan Infinity is where that budget goes from 2026.

What it means for Power Rangers

Power Rangers has been built from licensed Super Sentai footage since 1993, when Mighty Morphin used Kyoryu Sentai Zyuranger as its source. With no new Sentai seasons after Gozyuger, that pipeline runs out of fresh suited action, mecha battles and effects footage. What replaces it — original production, a different licensing arrangement, or an extended gap — has not been settled publicly at the time of writing, and anyone telling you otherwise is speculating.

How big a deal is this, really

It is worth being precise, because the story gets overstated in both directions.

It is not the end of tokusatsu, the end of Toei's Sunday hero programming, or the end of Kamen Rider. It is not a cancellation in the sense of a show being pulled — Gozyuger was always going to end, and it ends as a completed 50th anniversary season.

It is the retirement of one of the two longest-running tokusatsu franchises in existence, and the first time in half a century that the Sunday block has needed a new second pillar. Whether Project R.E.D. can hold that slot the way Sentai did is genuinely open. Reviving a 1982 property to anchor a new universe is an ambitious bet, and the single-hero format has never carried this timeslot on its own.

The honest position is that the block continues and the shape of it has changed. How well the change lands is something the next two years answer, not the announcement.