Power Rangers

Things that I love. Super Heroes, giant robots, martial arts movies and Saved by the Bell type shlocky teen sitcoms. So Power Rangers was a show that was almost custom made for me. Back in February I started watching the show from the first episode. Its been a wild ride of brain washings, kidnappings, and cast firings. So lets catch up first.

The show has a pretty simple premise. Five (or six) teen transform into a squad of super heroes called Power Rangers. Evil villain (usually on the moon) creates a monster to attack the earth. The monster sometimes has a gimmick that relates to a problem one of the teens is dealing with.
Big fight with the monster using martial arts and various weapons. Moon villian turns monster giant. Rangers call five robots called zords and they combine into a megazord. They then blow up the monster. Moon villain is angry and vows to get them next time. Mix and match, rinse and repeat for sixty episodes. Before I get to individual episodes. Lets cover stuff thats been watched.


Season One: The pre Green With Evil stuff is really rough. Even if you love this stuff. You can see its a work in progress. I can actually remember when I first watched an episode. It was a sneak preview after X-MEn on Saturday morning. Or in place of X-Men I can't remember. It was the Pudgy Pig episode and I can remember my reaction being "This shit will never be popular, not in a million years!!" It was a weird episode to use as a sneak preview. There was little fighting and no giant monster and no megazord. Anyway these episodes are all shoddily edited together. I know anyone reading this is scoffing at the idea "Oh but they are all shoddily edited." Trust me seeing these there is a big difference and you can see why these were never in reruns too often.

You get to Green With Evil and a lot of the same problems exist but it really clicks. You have a bunch of great looking fights in the sentai footage and you have Jason fighting Goldar in what was a really cool fight. With a villain attempting to stab somebody on a kids show. Every episode ending on a big cliff hanger.

Of course true to the shows formula at this point in time, in the last part the Green Ranger loses because its his time to lose and we have a six member team.

Now we are in the first Green Ranger run on the show. The show is put together better than the first 18 episodes and the zord fights are edited together better. One running gag is is Tommy being taken out each episode because there was not enough footage of Dragon Ranger fighting the monsters. It usually involves him being captured by putties or for whatever reason leaving his communicator in his bag. Zordan made it a wrist watch for a reason. In Island of Illusion its a funny moment when the only non evil moment he had was fighting some putties near the youth center.

But these episodes have great monster/zord fights. Sometimes taking up more than half an episode. I can watch a robot Dragon fight a giant spider/samurai/Goldar all day long.

Now they move on to the Green Candle episodes where green is killed off. Or depowered which is like being killed off in their world. These episodes have the formula figured out at this point. Til the two parter Doomsday which is the end of the Zyuranger (the original show they cannibalized the footage from.) So they contact the Japanese company Toei to make brand new episodes.

One of the first orders of business was to bring back the Green Ranger. I guess they told them to add things like making Blue smart and Green and Pink a couple. Now if you enjoy this stuff, its almost perfect. they have the formula perfected now. They get this close again a few times. But firings and changing the footage at the wrong times prevents that. But for this period its a great show. That is if you like this sort of stuff. If you don't, why have you kept reading. This run also has my all time favorite episode Mighty Morphin Mutants. Rita creates evil rangers!!!!!! This happned a bunch in the first season. The putties get morphers and turn into black booted rangers with a lobster replacing red as leader. I could watch it on loop forever. More later intertwined with Zeo stuff.