Having instead amassed a vault of useless knowledge stored in his head, Erik instead tackles your questions and tries to find the answers you care about (or a reasonable facsimile). Or, if you don't care, he'll at least try to make you laugh and forget you just wasted time you could spend doing anything else.
To Erik: Did you ever watch Power Rangers?
This question is actually pretty timely, because this year is the 20th anniversary of the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, and I'll readily admit that for the first couple of seasons I was a pretty big fan. I think I even mentioned this before in another post, actually.
Having only had brief and limited exposure to Japanese entertainment through Godzilla movies up to that point, the idea of taking some bizarre action series from Japan, inserting new actors and dubbing over new dialogue, and just seeing how b-a-n-a-n-a-s the series could get was completely mind-blowing to me.
This same phenomena would occur the first time I'd catch a badly dubbed movie on Mystery Science Theater 3000 or when Iron Chef would first come across the ocean.
Now, being thirteen, having moved a lot, and having difficulty making friends growing up left me rather introverted when it came to going out and being active, and there was one thing about this show that my newly-teenage brain seized on right away.
Okay, there were two things my teenage brain latched onto right away.
Yeah, that's right. A superhero nerd. Billy (who looked, like most of the other kids, a bit too old to be in high school) was a tinkerer, chemist, engineer, and overall big brain who didn't really fit in with the other members of the team. He was clumsier, he wasn't as good as the others at martial arts, and seemed to prefer to out-think his opponents than to simply beat them up. If he was attacked when he wasn't in costume, he was often rather panicky and defenseless and needed rescuing by his friends.
I mean, where else was I going to find gripping action stories about a super-powered nerd?
I mean besides there.
There were so many things about the series that, even then, made so little sense, but the sheer spectacle of the series was enough to keep me from questioning it. The good guys had secret identities from everybody but the actual villains who would regularly show up to harass them in their civilian lives. The "Zords" would always arrive immediately, despite the fact that I'm pretty sure nowhere in California has easy nearby access to an arctic ice shelf, a desert, an a regularly exploding volcano for them to emerge from. Rita Repulsa never started the show by simply immediately creating giant monsters and kicking over buildings, and the Power Rangers never looked at a regular-sized monster and decided that the best way to resolve it was to have a giant robot T-Rex crush it. Rita also never decided "you know, maybe I'll attack Washington, D.C. instead of Angel Grove, because seriously, the good guys are based there and the only things worth blowing up are a mall and that combination restaurant and gymnasium."
Also, I'm pretty sure that somehow the T-Rex "Zord" was the same size as the Green Ranger's "Zord," which in turn was also the same size as the regular "Megazord," so where did the mass go from when they combined?
But now I'm nitpicking.
You had an ethnically diverse cast with different hobbies and interests who came together originally as simply "teenagers with attitude," which remains the best criteria ever for deciding if someone should be a superhero, and later on became the tightest group of friends. The fact their clothing tended to match their costumes made sure that even the newest viewer would be able to follow what was going on, though the ongoing joke of "black character was the black ranger, Asian girl was the yellow ranger" wasn't, I think, intentional on the part of the show creators. At least, I hope not.
Later on, we'd get the introduction of the Green Ranger, Tommy, who had what was the most awesome thing ever in my thirteen year-old mind: a magic knife that played music and summoned a giant robot dragon.
I loved that dragon robot, though it did bother me a bit that they spent a whole lot of time building up the Red Ranger into being a solid team leader, and then regularly Tommy would just show up, summon robot, get the job done, hit on Kimberly, and then leave. Granted, the fact that he originally started out as a villain who joined the good guys made for a fascinating twist to my young mind, as I was unaware just how common an idea that would be through the years (and had been up to that point).
And, to be fair, I really can't blame him for always hitting on Kimberly.
Now, I mentioned before that after three of the original cast members left my interest faded a bit, but I still checked back in on the series now and again. Once all of the original cast was gone, though, my interest was essentially completely gone and I only tuned in now and again just to see what direction the show was headed. I pretty much completely checked out once they were regularly going to space, so I couldn't really tell you much about what's happened after that.
Now, there are two parts of the cast that I need to give their own spotlight on. The first is Thuy Trang, the Yellow Ranger. She left the show with the first group of actors to move on to other things, but her life was tragically cut short when she was involved in a car accident on September 3, 2001. She didn't originally start out as a character I was particularly fond of, but I grew to like her calm, centered mindset, the one who could always meditate or find peace, and seemed the most accepting of any other people they met. She seemed to also have the best smile on the show, and could light up a scene once she got comfortable in the role. She seemed slated to have a healthy career in Hollywood as well as in teaching martial arts, and I'm sure she's still missed by her family and friends.
The second thing I need to comment on are the characters who had the most growth and depth by the time the show ended: Bulk and Skull.
Originally the two biggest bullies of Angel Grove High School, the two went from needlessly cruel characters to bumbling oafs to good-natured doofuses to genuine good guys in their own right.
I have extremely vivid memories of one particular episode where a bad guy named "Scatterbrain" had the power to erase peoples minds. This winds up stripping the Rangers of their powers right in front of Bulk and Skull, who finally get to learn the real identities of the Rangers, a plot point that had gone on through the second season up to that point. However, the two wound up losing their memories when they, with no powers, no martial arts skills, and no real hope, managed to trick the bad guy into restoring the memories of the good guys, but lost their own short-term memories in the process.
Later on they'd become police officers, detectives, and become overall great characters, including one truly great "I am Spartacus" moment during the "In Space" season where the bad guys threaten to destroy the city unless the Rangers reveal themselves, and Bulk and Skull are the first two who step forward and claim to be Power Rangers in order to help save the city. The two also manage to rally the entire town to attack the invading forces, helping the Rangers in their battle.
Oh, and Skull was also a classically trained pianist. Food for thought.
Anyway, the series is still going strong (though I have no idea what it's called anymore), and you can actually buy toys for the new "Megazord" at McDonalds, which normally I wouldn't care at all about except that you connect animals together to make the robot, and it includes a shark for one arm and a dragon for the other.
And that's pretty darn awesome.
I watched a few of the similarly-themed shows, such as a few episodes of Big Bad Beetleborgs, VR Troopers, Mystic Knights of Tir Na Nog, and others, but strangely enough the only other one I remember catching every other episode of was Tattooed Teenage Alien Fighters From Beverly Hills, which had a set budget even worse than the original Power Rangers episodes did.
I guess having that many knock-offs while still remaining relevant twenty years later really just shows how well the show has endured and how solid the ideas behind it are. Considering all the casting changes, it's one of the few superhero-themed series where it really could be anybody under the mask, and you could just as easily come up with an explanation for why it could be someone who was black, someone who was Hispanic, or even someone with a disability, such as in a wheelchair (when not morphed) or blind or deaf. Sure, it's a bit cheesy, but when your original master villain was a woman trapped in a dumpster on the moon for ten thousand years and her immediate response is to go "time to conquer Earth," you can't really expect it to suddenly become dark and dramatic like "Power Rangers: SVU."
I could easily see the series going another ten or twenty years (with heaven knows how many new names in that time frame), and I hope it does, because it was one of the few programs that had me believing that even I could be a superhero under the right circumstances. Congratulations, Power Rangers.
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