Nobody expected a show about sentient bullet trains to work. It works because the trains aren't the story, they're the vehicle for pure, unfiltered adventure that moves at the speed of the thing itself. Kids in 1997 watched these machines transform and fight aliens alongside two humans who actually mattered, and the show never slowed down long enough to question whether any of it made sense. The formula is stupid on paper. On screen, it's exactly what Saturday morning cartoons should be.

A set of bullet trains are turned into robots, and they have to stop an alien invasion. Two human children, Tetsuyuki Shinbashi and Minayo Kanda, join the robots in the fight to hold off the invaders. The show is a long-running action adventure told in short episodes, with 156 installments in total.