Super Sentai question

[ThomastheTankEngine]

Did Super Sentai start the trend of fighting small monsters who became big monsters and then got into their vehicles & combined to form a robot to fight the big monster, or was it some other series, and if so, what year?

[Catastrophe]

I'm fairly certain that the Spiderman series did the giant robot thing in Toku first (correct me if I'm mistaken). The combining vehicles came later in sentai, and I think that Getter Robo was the pioneer of that earlier.