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Post by sbtbfanatic on Jul 16, 2015 2:55:31 GMT
this is the place for anyone to come and post a review about Power Rangers.
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Post by sbtbfanatic on Jul 16, 2015 3:04:38 GMT
Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers Episode 1: Day of the Dumpster
The franchise starts as many do: with a couple of Japanese astronauts opening a space dumpster on the moon. This is why we cut funding to NASA you morons. Oh sorry, by "the moon" I mean a desert or something, that's what the moon looks like right?
I'm not quite sure why astronauts need battery packs.
We meet the Evil Space Aliens™ who were inside the dumpster. Why? Because a giant head in a glass jar put them there, and once this show hits 88 miles an hour, you're gonna see some stupid shit.
Squatt from Mighty Morphin Power Rangers
This blue ogre is Squatt, he's involved in approximately two plots this season so feel free to forget he's there.
Baboo from Mighty Morphin Power Rangers
This is Squatt's buddy Baboo, I guess he's the smarter of the two even though their characters are defined by being dumb. I always remember not liking these two as a kid but maybe with a new perspective I'll find their dumbness a lot more interesting.
Finster MMPR.
This shaved cocker spaniel is Finster. I'll get into Finster more as I do these but he's probably one of my favorite characters in the whole series. His job is to make monsters out of clay molds so he's significantly less expendable than Thing #1 and #2 up there.
Oh yeah and Goldar's there too, he's the muscle of the four and actually seems tough as nails. I guess that's not too hard when compared to the elderly artist and the bumbling dipshits he's with though.
And of course we have the leader of the group Rita Repulsa. Rita loudly exclaims she's been in that dumpster for 10,000 years. This is one of the moments where you'll see the writers of this show really have a weird sense of scale. Or it's entirely possible they realized nobody would ever pay attention to the details because nobody could possibly care about the little minutiae of a children's karate show like that.
Power Morphicon Oh
Rita explains in a bit of well aged dialogue that the astronauts that freed her are going to miss her "coming out party". Her definition and my Uncle Jerry's are very different, as she plans on destroying the nearest planet which happens to be Earth. I have a feeling the reason places like Jupiter never get invaded by aliens is because they don't have nosy dickhead astronauts waving their space pricks everywhere.
We move from the Japanese version of the Moon, to the American version of California. The place we'll be hanging out for the next 200 episodes is called Ernie's Juice Bar, sometimes referred to as the Youth Center. Inside we're introduced to a group of teenagers who are the sheer embodiment of the 90's. They're all multicultural and come together cause there's no such thing as boundaries in the 90's dude! I swear all it would take is one of the teens to be in a wheelchair and we'd have a live action Burger King Kids Club.
Kim's your typical valley girl doing gymnastics on the balance beam and saying things like "As-if" and "Whatever." Zack is in the purple shirt practicing karate with Jason in the red. I guess they're supposed to be really close friends, but the five teens are going to all be ~the bestest friends there's ever been~ in about 25 seconds so it doesn't really matter. We see Trini doing karate, which to this show's credit was prefaced by Zack and Jason doing karate. The show's not gonna have her be the only person who is already good at martial arts, but they're not gonna not have her be good at martial arts. Then our token loser walks in, Billy. Billy's always been my favorite ranger, but I'm not quite sure why. Maybe it's because he's an enormous nerd, or because he isn't good at anything, or because he writes a blog about Power Rangers.
Billy Trini Zack Kim Jason Power Rangers The best of the 90's all in one convenient package.
You might also notice the teenagers are all wearing the colors of the Power Ranger they'll become (spoilers, sorry.) Of course we could say this is destiny and their fate was set in stone when they picked their outfits this morning. However this could also be because the producers didn't care and didn't feel like spending another 50 bucks at J.C. Penny's. Possibly they wanted kids to immediately know which ranger was which so they knew which toy to demand their ugly parents go out and buy for them, but fuck all that, cause Bulk and Skull are here. Bulk and Skull Power Rangers
Bulk and Skull are some of the most amazing characters in the show because they're just one dimensional idiots all season long. A typical interaction between the two is Bulk saying something mean, and Skull repeats it and laughs. Then they immediately receive comeuppance in the form of falling down, or a mess getting made all over them, sometimes both if the director is feeling sassy. This sounds like it should be the worst thing ever, but there's something so goddamn goofy and great about how the actors play these idiots that it's captivating. What also helps is every time they show up you're treated to their wacky theme describing them better than anything else. Just listen, it's like the musical version of a fat man falling into a cake.
Bulk and Skull ask Kim and Trini if they want to go on a date, which turns into a running plot thread that these two lummoxes think the girls would be interested in taking off their purity rings for the two biggest losers in school. It's never really said which of the girls the bullies wants to date, but maybe Bulk wants them both and Skull just wants to watch. Thankfully before we get a scene of Bulk trying to Biff Tannen Trini in the back of his car, and Billy telling him to "get his damn hands off her", the girls trick Bulk and Skull into flipping themselves over onto some gym mats.
We cut to Jason teaching a karate class that Billy is trying to keep up with, but he's trying to do Street Fighter moves and can't even do a Sonic Boom. Jason takes pity on Billy having the hand eye coordination of a generic 90's nerd, and opens the floor for the standard Karate class pop quiz. Billy is selected to give the answer because they didn't want to pay an extra to read a line, and then Bulk comes in and falls down fatly.
Bulk falling down
The Power Ranger Teens all sit down and give Billy and his stupid overalls some speech about how martial arts is all a state of mind and he needs to think more positive, and I'm actually kind of impressed they set up some kind of arc for any of these characters at all. All I remember the Ranger Teens being were a bunch of goody two shoes flat lines. I love that there's an actual progression to be made for Billy that plays out over his tenure as a ranger.
Paul Schrier as Bulk Also the fat guy gets smoothie in his dumb face
The plot kicks into high gear when the teens are teleported into a magical chamber known as the Command Center by a giant floating blue head named Zordon.
Jambi as Zordon Artist's Approximation
The teens are then greeted by Zordon's panicky robot assistant named Alpha 5.
Conky from Pee Wee's Playhouse as Alpha 5 from Power Rangers. Artist's Approximation
Instead of being terrified, Jason literally folds his arms, looks up at the 10 foot tall blue head, and says "So who are you?" We don't know much about the Ranger Teens but they must have seen some shit before today. Zordon shows them what's going on using his magical Viewing Globe (Patent Pending).
Goldar flying A space witch of unspeakable horror.
Zordon explains the entire plot to the teens, with what I like to imagine is the exact same pitch Saban gave to network executives to sell this show. He then offers them super cool dinosaur powers where they'll turn into multi colored warriors and fight using gigantic machines called Zords. Zack as the Black Mastodon Ranger, Kimberly the Pink Pterodactyl, Billy the Blue Triceratops, Trini as the Yellow Saber Tooth Tiger, and Jason as the Red Tyrannosaurus Ranger and leader of the Power Rangers. Because we're dealing with the biggest bunch of pussies on the planet they turn down the offer to have super cool giant robots and go back to live a boring life of comforting Billy in the Juice Bar.
Rita's Moon Crew decide to make first contact with Earth by sending down a squadron of Putties. These are her go to minions and they remain threatening for all of 12 seconds after their introduction. The putties intercept the (Non) Ranger Teens and this is where the casting for the rangers really shines to me. They're honestly damn good at being more than a couple pretty faces who throw fake punches. They can actually move and do their martial arts nicely, so they make some kind of sense doing all the crazy junk happening in the Japanese footage. Obviously the acting isn't great but at the same time it's a kids show so who fucking cares?
We get to see each of the teens bust out some moves, including Zack doing some weird hip hop bullshit which I'm 100% positive a middle aged white man wrote. Even though the Putties are complete buffoons the teens are getting beaten to the ground, so they decide to use their magical Power Morphers to transform into Power Rangers, and a franchise was born! Power Rangers morphing Billy I think you have some dirt in your eyes.
The Rangers are teleported to the city to fight Goldar, mostly so we can ignore the Putties that had them cornered, and when the theme song starts playing you know shit's about to get realer than it's ever been before. This is the moment you know kids watching realized how awesome what they're watching really is. The rangers start mudhole stompin the assholes of about a dozen Putties and showin Rita the business.
Rita, having been shown the business, chews out Finster for following her exact orders perfectly, and Squatt and Baboo for being ineffectual comic relief. Rita, sick of everyone else's comedic foibles, decides to take matters into her own hands. She throws her magic wand at the Earth from the Moon, it creates a huge crater that releases smoke and turns Goldar into a goddamn giant. Rita Repulsa rules.
Jason offers the astute observation that "That dude's huge!", prompting the rangers to do what they do best, pose and talk smack to the 300 foot tall gladiator dog. Oh yeah and they summon some giant robots or something.
Dinozords
Their Dinozords all combine into the Megazord Tank Mode which, like most everything in Sentai shows, only exists to show off what the toys the show is selling can do. Jason activates a bunch of superfluous control panels to make the Zords change into the Megazord and as a kid I can promise you little touches like this were the coolest thing in the world.
Whatever this does it's worth it for...
Megazord from Power Rangers formation Oh my god yes. YES!
Goldar starts duking it out with Megazord and the two seem to be unevenly matched, with Goldar dishing out the beatings and Megazord barely keeping up with him. Probably because he's a fucking evil gladiator space gryphon and they're a bunch of high schoolers who just learned how to drive their new dinosaur robots. Megazord knocks Goldar right on his ass and Billy gets all whiny and nervous and says "That blow didn't even phase him!" Billy are you even paying attention to the fight? For being so smart you sure are fuckin' dumb.
Before Goldar rips 'em apart Jason, apropos of nothing, summons the Megazord's Power Sword. Goldar decides this is a good time to retreat, probably because they didn't feel like killing a major villain off in the first episode. They probably also knew if they put a monster like Mr. Ticklesneezer in episode 1 they'd get kicked off the air faster than you can say "Heil Honey I'm Home."
Mr Ticklesneezer is the devil Imperio imperio inferna fortuna crudelitas
Rita is livid that all four of her henchman proved absolutely worthless in the fight against five high schoolers. Fortunately for the Moon Crew, Rita has a headache and can't punish them right now. I want to take umbrage with one thing, Rita threw her goddamn wand 239,000 miles from Space, but she can't magic herself a fucking aspirin? Get your priorities straight lady.
The rangers celebrate their "victory" over Goldar back at the Command Center. Zordon congratulates them on their success and then lays down the three laws of being a Power Ranger. Don't use your powers for personal gain, never escalate a battle unless Rita forces you to, and keep your identity a secret. The Ranger Teens take no umbrage to these rules because they're total squares.
All the teens seem onboard with this saving the world business, but Kim says she's hesitant. This isn't because she's afraid of dying or anything, but because the helmet messes up her hair. As everyone is about to chew her out for being such a stereotype, she soothes our nerves with a grating "NOT!!!!!!" Alpha starts to have what appears to be a robot stroke, presumably because of how embarrassing that last line was, and the rangers all put their hands together, and jump in the air. It reminds me of every single kid's sports movie ever released, except with giant dinosaur robots.
Your Weekly 90's Nostalgia: Not Jokes.
Personal Thoughts:
There's something really surreal and unique about how this show is done. As you can probably guess if you've ever seen this show once in your entire life, they use Japanese footage cut together with American actors to make a new product. It's so odd to see scenes in Ernie's juice bar with a bunch of goofy 90's shenanigans cut together with a Japanese superhero show because something about it feels so viscerally off. Personally that's what enticed it to me in the first place though. It, probably unintentionally, makes you feel like Rita and her goons are completely otherworldly creatures unlike things we could even fathom.
The only one of the main five villains we see in American footage so far is Goldar. There are a lot of these moments where Rita makes a plan and it cuts to Goldar bobbing his face and sword at the camera to further explain the plot. I think this was a suit Saban made based on the Japanese stuff and it looks a little off compared to the Japanese one. The helmet has a duller color and looks a bit cheaper than the Japanese Goldar's. I take a weird interest in seeing what monster suits we got in America and which were clearly trashed by the Japanese crew because it always promotes a clever way of filming the U.S. actors interacting with the villains in Sentai stuff. I'll probably blather about that more as it becomes relevant.
Goldar Sentai Footage. Griffozar Japanese Goldar US Footage USA Also interesting (to me) is that the Megazord fight with Goldar is cut from about 4 or 5 different episodes of Zyuranger. This actually seems like quite a bit of effort considering this is supposed to just be some dumb kids show to fill time on Fox, but I think it's things like that which show there's a lot of creativity in making this show presentable to American audiences.
This pilot does a genuinely great job of setting up this goofy world. We get the heroes, the villains, the plot, the morphing abilities, Rita's ability to make monsters grow, the Dinozords and Megazord and a nice fight with the Putties and Giant Goldar just to show you the kind of action you're in for. It puts all the chips on the table to let you know they're not messing around. You get almost everything that is going to become important in Season 1 in just this episode, excluding the rangers individual weapons and a couple of characters we'll be meeting later.
Like I mentioned earlier Billy actually has his arc begun in the very first episode. You can count the character traits of the Ranger Teens on one hand, and I mean all five of em, but that doesn't mean they don't try and do something with them. This show may be cheap and cut corners, but it at least tries to have something worth tuning in for aside from karate fights and D-grade Saved By the Bell plots.
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Post by sbtbfanatic on Jul 16, 2015 3:05:12 GMT
Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers Episode 2: High Five Try and follow me here because this episode gets a little weird. We start things off pretty casually; Jason is climbing a rope hanging from the ceiling of the Juice Bar while Kim and Zack cheer him on. Trini tells him to be careful or he could hurt himself, and because he doesn't have Chuck Norris to cheer him on he's doomed to fall. This isn't just a ham fisted moral for the kids, Trini just says how much she hates heights and then high-tails it away from the rope. Billy walks in all excited about some dorky bullshit, and Zack high fives him and calls him "my main brain." The show's realism is lost when Billy doesn't flinch when a member of another race tries talking to him. Haven't these guys ever met nerds before? Just before Billy can explain his technobabble, Jason slides down the rope and lands with his legs around Billy's neck. Man you can just tell Jason's scrote is tickling the back of Billy's neck. Can you imagine being a Power Ranger and still getting teabagged by the jocks? jason and billy high five R.I.P. David Carradine Bulk comes barging in to make fun of them for falling down, because what kind of idiot falls down? Jason says Bulk couldn't make it to the top of the rope and Skull gets in his face to try and talk shit. Jason just stares him down and Skull backs off instantly. It actually made me laugh out loud and I think it's because the guy who plays Skull (Jason Narvy) is just really entertaining to watch. See for yourself. skull and jason argue high five That little lip quiver at the end makes my life better As you might be able to guess, Bulk tries to climb the rope and is unable to do anything but immediately fall down. Tragically there wasn't a pie or bowl of whipped cream underneath him to fall into, but we're only on Episode 2 so I'm sure they didn't want to play all their cards yet. Rita decides those meddling Rangers have given her one headache too many and plans to trap them in a time warp. She explicitly mentions doing the same time warp thing to Zordon and I'm honestly impressed. The writers are good enough to answer any inquisitive viewers' question about why there's a giant blue head in a jar in the 2nd episode. There's a lot of other things that we just have to accept but it's nice that they gave enough of a shit to explain one of the most glaring things right up front. Billy blathers about his new invention and nobody knows what the fuck he's talking about, Trini explains it because she and Billy just get each other. That's one of Trini's traits is that she understands Billy's techno jargon for reasons that I'm sure have nothing to with the fact she's the Asian character. Billy invented some wristwatch that can communicate with Zordon, aptly naming them Communicators. The Rangers test out their Communicators and with the click of a button they're teleported to the Command Center, probably because a high school nerd tried to make super advanced technology in his garage. The teens teleport in and Alpha greets them, calling them homeboys and homegirls and asking what brings them to the hood. Alpha 5 talks like white people on Fox News do today. Before we can move the plot along too much further, Alpha zaps himself on a control panel and runs around in sped up footage for as long as it takes to pad out the episode. Rita asks Baboo if he's finished working on her time device and I'm impressed they managed to do anything with Baboo at all. We get a few bits and pieces later of Baboo being some kind of scientist and not just a moron, but whenever he isn't given something to do he's just some jittery idiot. The time device is shaped like a little space shuttle and is said to open up a hole in time that will capture the Rangers with the aid of one of Finster's monsters. Personally I'd think you'd need just the monster or the space shuttle but I'm also not a blue space gorilla so I'll give this one to Baboo. Finster's monster today is a run of the mill skeleton named Bones. As clever as Finster is at molding clay he might not be the guy you want naming your monsters. We also get to see the really weird method of how he makes monsters. First he makes a clay mold of the monster, then he puts it inside of an oven called the Monstermatic. Then the monster is spit out fully formed in a huge cloud of smoke. It's rad as fuck and is so off the wall I love it. Finster's Monstermatic If this thing was missing even a single dial, all hell would break loose. As soon as Bones is formed he's wearing a fedora which I suspect means he's here to tell the Power Rangers about the important topic of misandry. Bones MMPR Power Rangers M'lady. We're treated to a really blatantly Japanese scene of the time device being launched and rolling down the streets of what is clearly some street in Japan. The cars are driving the wrong way, and there's no attempt to insert any footage of U.S. actors being surprised by the shuttle rolling along, so it's nothing but mediocre dubbing of Japanese extras. It's just one of those weird moments that seems to be nothing but a way to eat up time. You'll notice that a lot with this episode, I'm sure it's a coincidence. Zordon knows Rita's up to some funky junk so he sends the teens to a mountain near where the time device landed. Zordon informs them the Putties are guarding the area and they'll need to scope things out before he can analyze what Rita's plan is. While this sounds like a pretty straightforward progression, I'll explain in a little bit why this really doesn't make any difference to this episode. The Putties discover the teens, likely because they're dressed in multicolored outfits in the middle of the desert. Jason tells his crew they don't need to morph because Zordon told them not to escalate fights they don't need to. The only explanation you can give this is because Putties are already considered that pathetic in the second episode. It's pretty awesome honestly because we have Putties to contend with for a whole season and except for one specific episode they're completely useless as a threat after the first episode. Trini and Billy separate the Putties from the group and split up so that we can create a conflict in a few minutes. Seriously, they split up to divide like 3 Putties from the main group. They probably could have handled at least one of them. Trini Solid Snakes underneath some Putties that end up running off. About 4 seconds later she screams at the top of her lungs for Billy to come down off the top of a ledge. Maybe the Putties she just avoided can't hear her that good because Christ almighty does her voice carry. Trini keeps screaming at Billy that he's too high up, and a Putty starts to chase after him on the mountaintop. Billy hilariously fumbles his Power Morpher out of his hand and onto the rocks because he can't fight a single Putty on his own. Trini looks back to see if the others can help Billy instead, but the Putties that Zack, Kim, and Jason are fighting have them circled, probably because they want to see Billy splattered over the rocks. Trini is terrified to go up high but realizes she has to so she can save Billy's triflin' ass. She keeps looking down and psyching herself out because she's scared she's going to fall. It's actually pretty unnerving if you're afraid of heights, but you're not too worried because it's only episode 2 and without Billy Megazord's gonna be walkin with a limp. Trini makes it to the top and stands right in front of the ledge to provoke the Putty to come at her, only for her to sidestep and let it jump to its death. We hear a really comical sound effect when the Putty falls like he fell into a dumpster. I'm not sure if that's supposed to make us feel better or something, but for my money that's one dead Putty. What the fuck did he think would happen? The Rangers might have beaten the Putties, but Bones teleports down to Earth so he can neg all the pretty ladies at the Juice Bar, all by using his totally bitchin' hat for peacocking. Zordon alerts the Rangers and gives a run-down of what Bones can do: fire energy bolts, jump really high, and disappear. Keep track of these things, because he doesn't do any of them in the actual fight. Figures, he's a brony too. The Rangers morph and teleport to an amusement park where Bones is hangin' out. Bones spins his head and teleports the Rangers into the time warp. It's a devilish realm of no escape, which he refers to as the Friend Zone. This whole sequence seems odd because Rita talked up the time device thing so much earlier and now Bones just sends them into the warp himself. It also makes the Rangers earlier fight with the Putties and the time device getting activated really pointless, as they ended up morphing right to where Bones was after the Putties lost. It feels like two different plots stitched together to pad out time, probably because that's exactly what it was. In another dimension, with voyeuristic intention... Out of nowhere Bones summons some personal foot soldiers who literally just look like stuntmen in skeleton pajamas. It's ridiculous, it's dumb, it's silly, and it's also the best thing. For the first monster of the season Bones is leaving a pretty goofy first impression. bones foot soldiers SKELLINGTONS! Squatt and Baboo plan on blowing up the time device they spent all that time working on because that's what will trap the Rangers in the time warp? I'm not pretending to be confused or anything I legitimately don't know how this time warp shit works. It only frustrates me further because if a couple of morons like Squatt and Baboo can figure it out it can't be that complicated. Jason takes Bones by his cape and the Rangers blast him apart with their Blade Blasters weapons. They're little swords that can turns into guns, which you could probably assume. The explosion causes Bones to fall apart into a pile of...bones. The Rangers think they've got him beat but Bones begins to bring his body back together. It is in this moment I am euphoric, not because of some space witch on the moon Before Bones can finish bringing himself together, Billy snatches his head and wraps it up in his stupid cape. He tosses it off to Trini who cuts down Bones' stupid stuntmen in Halloween costumes. Trini then throws Bones' head down a giant smoky pit causing his body to explode. Just like all Pick Up Artists it turns out that Bones' one weakness was being touched by a woman. Goodnight sweet prince Rita realizes the episode still has another few minutes to fill so she summons another monster, this one named Giant. As you might be able to infer, he's particularly tall, and seems to have the power to RIP OPEN DIMENSIONS, which he uses to grab Jason. What the fuck is even happening anymore? Y'know guys I really think Rita's just wingin' it at this point. The bomb blows up the time device which hurls the Rangers out into the mountainside where Giant is squeezing a toy that's supposed to be the Red Ranger. Also if you look carefully Billy is clearly holding onto something, and if you look even closer it's the Time Device. When the hell did that happen? What? What was this episode about again? Trini was afraid of spiders or something? Billy time device Guys! I grabbed this rocket ship, it should help us OH FUCK Jason shoots the Giant in the eyes with his Blade Blaster and calls on the T-Rex Dinozord to even the odds. The other Rangers don't call on their Zords because Trini's focus episode needed another ranger to really spice it up. Before Jason jumps into his Zord he proudly exclaims "Let's kick some Giant!" It's like something you'd say as a kid to act like you were swearing but you couldn't get in trouble with your mom, only it doesn't make any sense and sounds horrible. The Giant and Tyrannosaurus duke it out and it's shot from a low angle at first, it actually looks pretty good and makes it look a bit more realistic. Then they go right back to the miniature mountains and trees and stuff. The T-Rex Dinozord kicks Giant around some more and blows him away with some smoke breath attack that dissolves Giant into dust. I keep assuming they're going to bring up another plot but I think the episode's almost over so I guess that's it. Tyrannosaurus smoke breath ground breath Rita's monsters: So deadly you can kill them by breathing on them hard enough. Back at the Juice Bar, we're introduced to Ernie, the owner of said Juice Bar. He's talking to some extra about the Power Rangers saving the town from "some zombie guy in the park." The news must be pretty quick to have seen anything of that fight considering all Bones did was ride a pony and then teleport the Rangers the second they showed up. Billy's technology has been fixed by Alpha to make it not complete garbage, and now allows them to teleport to the Command Center and contact Alpha and Zordon whenever they need to. Kim's response "This is so 90's!" leaves me with wide open eyes realizing how much time has passed, and how great Kim would be at writing Buzzfeed articles. Kim, Billy, and Jason congratulate Trini on conquering her fear of heights, which Kim expresses is "Morphenomenal."An embarrassing word that's somehow managed to catch on to a few choice nerds like yours truly. Zack sneaks up on Trini while wearing a skeleton mask and screams, causing her to climb up the rope lickety split. Her closest friends laugh at her plight as she realizes she traded in her fear of heights for a fear of people in fake looking skeleton costumes. I'd say that's a pretty good trade off. OH I GET IT NOW! THE EPISODE WAS CALLED HIGH FIVE BECAUSE FIVE TEENAGERS WERE HIGH UP! I NEVER CAUGHT THAT BEFORE! HOLY SHIT! Your Weekly 90's Nostalgia: Teleportation ( ) Personal Thoughts: This episode is unbelievably trippy. The time warp Bones sends the Rangers to is covered with this crazy multi-colored filter and has big weird green pumpkins scattered all over the place. It's so off the goddamn rails because we see the time device sitting inside the dimension but last we saw it, it was outside the mountain creating the warp. I'm not sure why they included the shuttle stuff at all if they were just going to have Bones send the Rangers into the warp himself. Then after they kill him Rita brings in the Giant out of nowhere while they try to ignore the footage of Billy holding onto the time device. It's really clumsy handling of the Sentai footage but it's also got a bit of charm and crazy fun to it. I think that's really one of the big appeals of this show is the mixing of the genres and especially taking a look at the moments where things just dissolve into total nonsense. By nonsense I really just mean the pumpkins. To make up for the lack of an official Monster of the Week last episode, we get two this time, Bones and Giant. Two of the lamest names we're gonna get all season, but just you wait till Season 2! Bones' death is one that we wouldn't see much of in this season of Power Rangers, or much at all. Usually the Rangers use their weapons in a stock footage shot to blow up the monster but Bones was defeated by a method specific to his ability to reform himself. It's really fucking cool but it also builds you up for something the show doesn't necessarily hold true to. The Rangers aren't always about finding a monster's weakness and destroying them with it, just using it to sometimes beat the monster up a little bit before finishing it off in one of about 3 different ways. Speaking of the monsters, Giant and Bones are voiced by the same guy, Tom Wyner. Maybe it was just cheaper to pay one guy while he was in studio to do grunts for two different monsters. I couldn't tell ya. Wyner does the voice of what feels like half the monsters this season, but he's also good at what he does. You might recognize him as the Teddy Bomber from Cowboy Bebop or Devimon from Digimon. Since those are the only two other shows I've ever watched I don't know what else he's been in. As I mentioned last time the Zord fight with Goldar was all put together by Saban and cut from a handful of episodes. That means that in the original Sentai, the Zord fight with T-Rex and Giant was the first Zord fight we saw. I go back and forth on this if it's a better idea to build up Megazord showing up later on or put him on the table up front to show you this show isn't messing around. I'm leaning towards the latter mostly because Sentai is a brand in Japan, kids know they'll be getting a combining robot in a few weeks of this show. Americans didn't know what this show was so they needed some of the sweet details given to them in advance, so I think it was a really solid move from Saban. What do you think?
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Post by sbtbfanatic on Jul 16, 2015 3:05:54 GMT
Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers Episode 3: Teamwork
This episode begins with a bang; we get to see where the Power Teens hang out when they aren't doing karate and drinking smoothies, Angel Grove High School! Kim and Trini are making good use of their time at school by handing out fliers in the hallway about shutting down some dumpsite that's polluting the shit out of Angel Grove. This seems like a weird thing to take place in the school, so maybe they just didn't feel like going to the Juice Bar set that day.
Oh sorry, I probably lost some of you kids back there. Pollution was this horrible thing back in the 90's that was eating away at our planet and threatening worldwide devastation. Thankfully we were able to learn our lesson and buckle down to help keep our environment healthy!
We also meet Mr. Caplan, the principle of Angel Grove High School. His entire character is that he can sometimes get mad at the students, and wears a toupee. But boy howdy if you enjoy comedy based on a character's wig falling off then please stop reading this blog and call your psychiatrist.
Zack, Jason, and Billy ask the girls what the fuck they're doing and the girls try and goad them into coming along to help them shut down the dumpsite with them. The guys already have their own things to do. One of them has to teach a karate class, one of them is president of the science club, and one of them is getting called to the command center by Alpha. Try and guess who's who! The girls just give them a passive aggressive look like they're just making shit up, even though they all have legitimate reasons to not go to some awful smelly dump site.
Kimberly and Trini Shut the FUCK up Kimberly. I know you givin me that stare I don't even have to look.
Trini gives the guys a bunch of hogwash about how they'll be able to get more accomplished if they "act like a team." Oh I get it! Because the episode is called Teamwork! I get that they have to do the mandatory "teamwork is great" episode but it seems like the message here is a lot more toothless. If the guys just said they didn't feel like showing up then there'd be more of a conflict. Instead everybody is just a squeaky clean good guy because these characters have to be shining examples of purity so kids don't do school, stay in milk, and drink their drugs.
After the guys do their BULLSHIT activities, we heard a loud belch from, who else, Bulk. He gives this smug look to the girls and drops a crunched up soda can on the ground and says she oughta pick that up instead. Bulk and Skull are joined in this episode by a girl bully who is apparently named Sharkie. Her character is a holdover from the unaired pilot but they put her in a handful of scripts and must have forgot to cut her out. I'll spare you the details and just say there's a reason nobody refers to the bullies as "Bulk, Skull and Sharkie."
No I'm sure some women did look like that in the 90's, it's fine.
Not even seconds after Bulk drops his can, some randy walks by and sees it. He picks it up really nonchalantly and tosses it in the trash right next to him. It's really fucking funny because Bulk is such a shitty ineffective bully that someone who takes an extra second out of their day can fix what he does wrong. Bulk, refusing to admit he's a terrible bully, dumps the trash all over the guy.
Trini and Kim call Bulk out on being a huge asshole, which prompts Bulk and Skull to roll some trash cans at the girls which they flip over. Of course they flipped over the cans, it was the 90's, karate could solve anything. Skull tells Kim she "finally flipped over him.", which is sort of interesting because it's one of the handful of things Skull has to his character other than repeating what Bulk says and giggling. I'd like to imagine Skull thinks his bullshit PG bullying and toadying up to Bulk is what will get Kim really moist, but he's just confused why she keeps turning him down.
Kim and Trini are attacked by the bullies, but through the use of flips make the two hug each other. Bulk and Skull scream because it was the 90's and hugging a guy was how you got AIDS back then. Through some more comic mischief the two end up stuck in some trash cans. Bulk and Skull are living proof of karma.
Bulk and Skull hug Bulk/Skull OTP
Rita starts bragging about her waste dump, which leads me to ask why the fuck is a galactic sorceress making a fucking polluted dump site? I get she wants to destroy the Earth but she isn't going to make a pollution monster or cast a pollution spell? She's just going to make a place where pollution's going to accumulate? Rita should be making some mutant deer with four arms and a leather jacket or some shit. She ain't Hoggish Greedly.
The other problem is her entire goddamn plan is to lure the girls in with Putties and kill them with a monster. So it seems like the actual pollution aspect is secondary. It's really an absurd and convoluted plan that's laughable at best and embarrassing at worst. I was forced to stop thinking about this though because Goldar started talking and his voice was even deeper than it has been so far. It sounded like they put a bottle brush down the actor's throat.
The girls show up to Rita's dump site that really just doesn't look all that bad, just kind of messy with some smoky pipes and dirty barrels laying here and there. I'm going to assume this is just the worst of 90's pollution and I'm just desensitized to what real pollution looks like. That or it's a cheap set for a 90's karate show. Nevermind all that though because Rita's plan has begun! The Putties approach the girls to fight and get their shit pushed in, what do you really expect? Rita gets excited and acts like her brilliant plan is working perfectly, meanwhile the girls are barely struggling to manhandle the Putties. Maybe a monster will be different, but Rita's really acting like those Putties are a total masterstroke.
Zack's "important business" is Alpha wanting him to teach him Hip Hop Kido. His made up dance/karate technique. Alpha acts absolutely in awe over the fact that a person is able to dance and is fascinated by Zack's movements. Alpha 5 isn't a robot, he's just a white person.
Zordon alerts the Zack and Alpha that Kim and Trini are being outnumbered by Putties. He shows the two struggling in the Viewing Globe, which is the first and only time we see the two struggling against the Putties at all. Alpha screeches and complains, it's been 3 episodes and I already hate comic relief robot more than any of the villains. Fuckin 90's. Zordon calls on Billy and Jason to come to the Command Center, and in a matter of seconds they show up, even though they were supposed to be busy. Maybe they really didn't have anything going on and just lied about having something to do so they wouldn't have to go to some shitty run down dump.
Finster is still finishing up on his Minotaur model because the man is an artist and you simply can't rush art. Finster always makes me smile because everyone else in Rita's crew is so comically goofy or evil but Finster is just a guy who loves making clay monsters. Say what you want about Goldar or Squatt, but Finster is just a simple older gentleman who enjoys constructing clay minotaurs.
Minotaur Power Rangers clay With some awesome mino-pecs.
Just before the guys can go bail Trini and Kim out, Rita sends the Minotaur down to divert their attention. They morph to fight Minotaur but get the shit kicked out of them because they're not working as a team. Also because they're fighting a buff ass Minotaur. Kim and Trini are still fending off Putties, which continue to serve as more irritating than anything else. The girls decide to use the location to their advantage and end up flipping what appears to be the last of the two Putties into some garbage cans. It's weird to me that the teens are willing to do the same thing to the putties that happened to Bulk and Skull. In fact, maybe it's the Ranger Teens who are the real bullies! Rly makes u think.
Anyways Goldar shows up with even more fucking Putties, so the girls decide to nix this garbage and morph. Also a Putty falls out of a tree.
Gravel throat Goldar starts wailing on the girls while Zordon debates showing the Rangers the secrets of the "Power Weapons." I'm not exactly a five star general, but is there really a great reason to keep all the Rangers gear from them at the beginning? Zordon has been giving generic speeches about teamwork and whatever, but it's never implied that they must work as a team before using the weapons. It just seems coincidental at best that the Power Weapons might help the Rangers out and everyone is talking about teamwork arbitrarily. Either way, Trini kicks Goldar in the throat.
Be careful that might make his voice raspy!
The guy rangers are getting walloped by Minotaur because something about teamwork. Just to kick them while they're down, Squatt and Baboo start throwing rocks at them from above. It's really a shitty day for the Power Rangers when even the awful comic relief villains are taking potshots at you. Rita decides to focus on beefing up her credible threat instead and uses her wand to make the Minotaur grow. Kim and Trini see the giant monster in the foreground, all while whoever was editing the footage clearly wasn't paying attention to the fact the Japanese actors are guiding a kid around.
They could have just cut this shot out, but they also didn't care.
The rangers call on the individual Dinozords to bring Minotaur down. Before they go after him the Pterodactyl Dinozord zaps Goldar and his Putties, because you should never escalate a battle unless Rita forces you to, or you're losing.
Pterodactyl Dinozord VS Goldar This same thing is happening in Pakistan right now.
This fight between the Dinozords and Minotaur is fantastic. We get to see the individual Dinozords' moves on him and it's great. Triceratops and Saber Tooth Tiger fire lasers out of their tails, Mastodon blows a cloud of frost that freezes his shield, Triceratops uses its horns to tie him up, then the Saber Tooth Tiger does this.
Minotaur VS Saber Tooth Tiger The Minotaur's one weakness: Throwing toys at him
T-Rex gets into a one on one fight with the Minotaur that begins with the monster punching him in the chest. As much as I wanted this to turn into a boxing match I realized how much of a disadvantage that would put Tyrannosaurus at. The Rangers combine their Zords to finish off the Minotaur once and for all....
....but then Alpha calls them back to the Command Center because "nothing they did was working." Which is mostly code for "We didn't have footage of this and we built to it for 10 minutes to eat up time."
Zordon then bestows the Power Weapons upon the Rangers. Billy gets the Power Lance, it's dual sided and fucking radical. Kim gets the Power Bow, which is like a typical bow and arrow set, except the bow acts as a blade as well. Zack gets the Power Axe, which also acts as a cannon because it's a toy, so why not? Jason gets the Power Sword, not the Megazord's Power Sword, but a scaled down one that's still sleek as fuck. Oh and Trini gets the Power Daggers, they're awful. They literally look like slightly bigger Blade Blasters, but since she's a girl she has to get the shittiest weapon.
Power Weapons, Power Daggers, Power Lance, Power Axe, Power Bow, Power Sword Don't even bother posing Trini, they're still embarrassing.
The teens morph back to fight the Minotaur and then pose with some weird clay looking versions of their weapons. That looks cool and all, but makes no sense because Zordon literally just gave them their own weapons. Another example of the writers just keeping all the Sentai shit in because they want to fill time, but at least it's pretty to look at so might as well just enjoy the ride.
The Rangers wail on Minotaur using their weapons, and Trini chucks her daggers at the thing. Which seems irresponsible because I imagine after every fight she has to go pick up her daggers after she hurls them. Or she has to politely ask the monster to give her the daggers back. Fuck that's all I ever want to see, Trini getting put in a headlock while she tries to sneak over and pick up her weapons after thoughtlessly throwing them. Someone please draw that oh my god.
Anyways, The rangers bring their weapons together to make the Power Blaster and blow Minotaur away. He got chumped pretty damn fast but that's what happens when you got toys to sell.
Mighty Morphin Power Rangers Power Blaster Be careful grabbing it though because that thing is 93% blades.
Rita and the Moon Crew are none too happy about their most recent loss, with Squatt and Baboo cowering and Goldar personally blaming Finster. It results in some really silly physical comedy that makes me laugh.
Goldar beats up Finster Goldar is holding a massive sword, and instead chooses to give Finster noogies.
The Rangers return to Angel Grove High and the trash that Bulk dumped out is still all over the floor because Saban was too cheap to hire an actor to play a janitor. Or a janitor to play a janitor. Mr. Caplan walks in and sees the teens in front of the mess. Caplan assumes they're responsible and is about to get mad, but because we need a wacky moment to end the show he gets called away via intercom. The teens clean it up in stupid awful fast motion scene because they worked as a team. See, the moral is teamwork, because their weapons came together and so did they. It's like poetry sort of....it rhymes.
Mr. Caplan comes back in and asks what happened to the mess and Jason asks what mess he was talking about, instead of just fucking saying they cleaned it up? For such innocent high schoolers they sure are lying creeps. This innocent man just wanted his fucking school clean, but walks off all flustered and goes "OHHHHH!" Like he's a 1920's police officer or something.
We end on a goofball scene of Alpha wrecking everything by dancing like a stupid asshole. God I fucking hate white people.
Your Weekly 90's Nostalgia: Pollution
Personal Thoughts:
I've got a lot to say about my personal experiences but before I get into those I wanted to mention this is the first time the show filmed U.S. stunt actors in the ranger suits to react to the Sentai footage. The actors in the suits are absolutely lethargic and it's really jarring coming off of the Japanese suit actors being really animated. They grow much better at this later on but let me show you what I mean, compare this shot to any of the other Ranger gifs I've posted above.
Power Rangers US Footage I'm still not sure the Pink Ranger suit isn't just being controlled by Jim Henson.
This episode holds a special place in my heart, because as a kid it was always my proverbial "white whale." I knew there was a Minotaur monster in the show because there was a toy of him and he was a character in the Sega Genesis fighting game. I didn't even own a Genesis as a kid, I just looked longingly at that box that maybe I could see tidbits of what I referred to as "The Minotaur Episode."
I built this episode up in my mind because the Minotaur just looked so cool, and obviously since I'd never seen him before he must be the toughest monster ever. How'd they kill the Minotaur? What kind of stuff did he do? Did the Megazord take him out? I had fantasies about finding all this out as a kid. I was outside a meeting that my dad was at and I imagined a bunch of kids were watching "The Minotaur Episode" somewhere inside the building. Sadly no kids were there and I guess nobody had a tape of Power Rangers either.
With the advent of the internet I found out some rudimentary knowledge about Minotaur. He got killed by the Power Blaster? I wonder if he put up a fight! His episode was called "Teamwork"?! I bet he beat em up really bad! If the internet knows how he was beaten they must be able to show me the episode too!
My prayers were answered when I found a VHS tape promising Episodes 3 and 4 of Power Rangers on Ebay. I promptly begged my mom to buy it. All my questions would finally be answered! 10 dollars later my tape came in the mail but the tape looked really odd. I popped it into the VCR and saw nothing but a blob of black junk all over the screen. No voices could be made out, it was like watching the tape from The Ring. Apparently this was a tape that was released in the U.K. and the seller neglected to mention it. I was crestfallen.
Around this time Fox Kids was airing old episodes of Power Rangers under the banner "One Time Only", or OTO, with the promise that old episodes would never be aired again. As a dumb kid I didn't think of this as an advertising gimmick, but a be all end all threat to my chances of ever seeing "The Minotaur Episode." I watched every chance I could to see that elusive episode, to no avail. As soon as the OTO episodes stopped airing, I felt like I'd never get to see my dream episode. The thing I'd longed for since I was old enough to desire was gone.
As time went on, the internet became much more expansive and able to answer my pleas. I used programs like Kazaa or Bearshare or whatever virus laden methods to look for a copy of The Minotaur Episode. I didn't have to try for terribly long though because it was during this period that ABC Family had begun to air a variety of Power Rangers episodes, mostly in order, with "The Minotaur Episode" the second episode they'd air! I was 11, and I was ready to experience it. The episode I'd dreamed of and thought I'd never see was going to be mine and all my questions would be answered. I watched it, all of it, how amazing was it?
Eh.... it was alright.
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Post by sbtbfanatic on Jul 16, 2015 3:06:20 GMT
Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers Episode 4: A Pressing Engagement Jason, in a move of pure hunkitude, is bench pressing inside the Juice Bar as Ernie eats a sub sandwich right above his face. It's the perfect contrast of a 90's beefcake with an enormous slob. This is like a scene out of a Jim Belushi movie. All that we're missing here is a scene where some slobbery lettuce falls right in Jason's eye and makes him drop the barbells on his throat. Just before Jason would shuffle loose this mortal coil, Jim Belurnie would look at the lettuce and go "UHHH YA GUNNA FINISH DAT?!" Jason isn't just whistlin' dixie though, he's about to break Angel Grove High School's benchpressing record of 1010. I'd like to take a minute and discuss the fact that 1000 reps is pretty fucking insane. I don't know how much weight Jason is supposed to be lifting because the camera is usually zoomed in too close to tell, but 1000 reps of ANYTHING would be suicide. I don't care if you're a T-Rex superhero, your fucking arms would have fallen off at 200 reps and that's being generous. Also Kim is wearing this. Amy Jo Johnston beautiful gymnastics Power Rangers made a man out of a lot of 7 year olds. Ernie fucks everything up because he loses count, probably because he was counting so sandwichly. He asks Jason to start over. Never mind the fact there's a crowd of people behind him who were likely paying attention. Maybe I don't know how records work but if they knew he was at 1000 couldn't they just make him do 10 more? To be fair though I haven't been inside a gym since '94 so what the fuck do I know? Rita ascertains that Jason is nothing without his friends, which I'd like to ask where the hell she got that idea? If he had dropped the bar on his own and made a mistake, then I guess you could say he's weak. The only problem Jason had was that Ernie was too busy chowin' down to count. I don't want to get too personal, but Rita you're some old Japanese space witch, I'd like to see you get your pump on. Jason's at 1009, and since this takes place after a commercial break that means he either had to start over or Ernie managed to remember whatever number he was on. I'm voting for the former. So Jason managed to do 2000 reps in the span of not just a day, but a few hours at most. I'm seriously starting to get a man crush on Jason here guys, I need help. Zack's rolling around the Juice Bar on a skateboard, likely preparing for his Brink audition in a few years. Then an off camera extra says "Hey guys, look at Kimberly." with as much enthusiasm as you could muster while getting paid SAG minimum. Kim's blowing a huge bubble gum bubble and Zack skates right into her. The pop makes Jason drop his weights right before he finishes the last rep. It almost seems like Jason would be better fighting alone than with his clumsy friends ruining everything. Hooray for teamwork! Walter Jones bails Brink Zack pizza'd when he shoulda french fried. So what he have here is a typical "Jason needs to learn how to accept help and work with his team" episode. If that's the case then why the hell was the last episode "We all need to work together!" episode if they're just going to do it again this week? Neither plot really lends itself well to teamwork at all; Trini and Kim want to close some dump and Jason doesn't want to give up. Not to mention the writers botching the execution by making it his teammates who cause his mistake and not him. I'd more expect this to be an episode where Jason starts taking steroids. Rita plans to send Goldar down with a monster of Finster's choice. Finster, ever the consummate artist, has to really think what monster would be best to use. It's little moments with Finster like this that make me really enjoy how silly the character is. Instead of just doing whatever like Squatt and Baboo, he actually takes time to think of the best monster for the job as opposed to just dishing out some piece of shit. He could send down the most violent killing machine the world's ever seen, but decides to make a buff sphinx, or a skeleton who falls apart. Finster doesn't give a shit about world domination, he just wants to make life out of clay monsters he puts inside his oven, and at the end of the day isn't that all any of us wants? Zack apologizes to Kim and Jason and buys them milkshakes, and there's absolutely no conflict because these characters are like 5 Ned Flanders. Bulk saunters up and makes fun of Jason for choking and says that the bench press record still belongs to him. Wait one motherfucking minute here. Bulk? Farkas J. Bulkmeier is the one who's got this record? The fattest guy in school? Are you shitting me? The entire joke of this guy is that he's fat but we're supposed to buy that he's an obstacle for 90's superhunk Jason in terms of strength? Bulk tries to grab Jason, and we're treated to a sexually charged scene of Jason tickling Bulk, ending in Bulk ripping his pants. We're treated to a view of Bulk's boxers which, I'm not kidding, have fucking pigs on them. I want to take a minute to say how much of a great guy Paul Schrier must be, because if I came on set and Saban tells me I'm wearing boxers with fucking pigs on them, I'd be real salty. Maybe dignity was scarce in the 90's but he should have torn up his goddamn contract right there. He should throw the pieces into Saban's face while frothing at him. You know maybe this did happen, but then Schrier immediately tripped over his shoelaces and fell into a big plate of pizza pie. Then Jason walks in and says "WHEN I SAID I WANTED EVERYTHING ON IT THIS ISN'T WHAT I MEANT!" then he high fives Zack. Pictured: An insult to a single human being's dignity captured on film for all time. Jason proudly mentions that he didn't need help fending off Bulk, and Kim asks what's wrong with getting a little help from your friends. If the show really wants to do this plot they'd need to have Jason actually needing help and turning it down; however the problem with the show's portrayal of the Ranger teens is that they're always amazing and great at everything. It's a corny stock plot that doesn't really lend itself to what they're trying to do, but thankfully Zordon gives the teens a call so we can forget about it. Zordon tells Zack Kim and Jason about Rita's new monster named King Sphinx. After the briefing, the three morph and kick some Putty ass. During the fight we see some darker colored Putties that almost look like they're made of stone. stone putty When I was a kid I was confused if these were supposed to be some kind of leader Putty or just a Putty that Finster kept in the Monstermatic too long. Doesn't really matter since they die just as easy as a normal Putty. King Sphinx shows up, blowing Kim away with his giant wings and...holy shit look at his pecs. King Sphinx wings You can tell he even does his leg days too! Look at those buff ass glutes. I'll bet King Sphinx could have won that benchpressing record. Man, that would have been a way better twist. Jason has to tangle one on one with a buff ass sphinx and only by killing him will the bench press record be bestowed upon him. A little known rule of Angel Grove High records is that you can receive them by murdering the former record holder. That or Bulk meets up with King Sphinx and they both get oiled up and have a benchpress competition. All while Skull and Goldar act as their spotters. Skull's trying to tickle King Sphinx's feet while Goldar shoves him with the broadside of his sword. Oh my God I want this to happen more than anything. Now that Sphinx has Jason all alone the two fight one on one. It doesn't seem like Jason's having a hard time at all but Alpha starts freaking out in the command center about how everything looks so hopeless, because he's horrible. All of a sudden King Sphinx teleports them both to a quarry and they hilariously roll down the hill for just a bit too long. King Sphinx VS. Red Ranger KEEP ROLLIN' ROLLIN' ROLLIN' ROLLIN' Jason continues beating on King Sphinx and really shows the flaw in Rita's plan: She didn't think Jason would fight back. Goldar jumps into the fight and blasts at Jason, who ignores Goldar completely and slashes King Sphinx. Rita decides to give her boys an advantage, again, and makes Goldar and King Sphinx grow. Gotta tell ya Rita, if all these handicaps still aren't winning your fights for you, maybe it's time to take up a new line of work. The two giants blast at Jason who neglects to summon the T-Rex, probably because he felt bad he had to morph to fight some Putties and wants to make up for it now. Kim and Zack head to Billy's garage where he and Trini are hanging out. It's good that in an episode on how important the team is we don't see 2 of the rangers until halfway through the episode. When Kim tells them Jason's been kidnapped, all Billy offers is an incredibly half hearted "Oh no." I guess after Billy got teabagged by Jason, he's been a little pissy about him and wouldn't mind if he got crushed by a giant sphinx. Zordon brings the teens to the Command Center and tells them the secret to saving Jason is in their Power Crystals, another power he neglected to inform them of. Zordon says the crystals will add power to the Dinozords and help the Rangers find each other or something. They're a pretty superfluous add-on since all they do is act as joysticks for the Zords and in this one single instance they help Jason out. I guess teamwork solved this problem I don't know, who cares? Jason uses the crystals to summon the Dinozords alongside the other Rangers, using their newfound crystal power to form the Megazord Tank Mode. Thankfully the Crystals were able to accomplish something the Rangers did effortlessly in Episode 1. Since Tank Mode is only about waist high compared to Goldar and King Sphinx, the Rangers get their asses kicked until they decide to go full on Megazord. I don't mean to be a buzzkill Zordon but these crystals don't seem to be doing shit. After forming the Megazord the Rangers just trash Goldar and Sphinx with nothing but the Megazord's fists. Then when Goldar gets to be a bit too much they do this. Megazord rams Goldar Goldar just got a Mastodon snout to the nuts. This is so ridiculous and out of place it's great. The Megazord will never do this maneuver again, and even doing it this time seems really unnecessary just to use a sneak attack on Goldar. It's actually kind of shocking how much worse Goldar is fighting the Megazord with a buddy than he was alone just a few episodes ago. King Sphinx jumps back in to fight, but keeps getting knocked flat on his ass. He does the only thing that's worked so far and tries to blow the Megazord away with his wings. For some reason that doesn't work on Megazord, who promptly summons the Power Sword, referred to as the "Mega" Power Sword in this case because the writer didn't check what they actually decided to name the weapons. The Rangers finish off King Sphinx with the Power Sword, which is awesome, because we got totally blueballed when they brought the sword out against Goldar in Episode 1 and he pussied out. Look at them use that thing... Megazord Power Sword King Sphinx Alpha cheers for the Power Rangers and tells them "One down and one to go!" It's actually pretty cool that we're having someone advocating for murdering Goldar. Obviously since he's one of Rita's top brass he's not going down that easily, but it's good to see the Rangers are seriously about to finish him off. Goldar teleports back to the Moon Base, because if he leaves Rita with Squatt as her second in command things are going south real fast. Do you need help eating something Empress Rita? Oh, I guess I'll sit this one out then. Jason's back in the Juice Bar aiming for the record one more time. Trini and Billy are there now and Ernie is thankfully absent so he doesn't ruin everything again. Jason manages to break the record and everyone applauds. I guess everything was different because Trini was counting for him and Billy was there pushing up his stupid dorky glasses. Everything is awesome! Everything is cool when you work as a team! Ernie brings in a cake and what the fuck do you think happens when there's any food in this show, ever? Seriously? You can tell Trini's scoping out those little piglets. Your Weekly 90's Nostalgia: Pig Boxers Personal Thoughts: This episode feels like a big mishmash, not just because of the reused teamwork theme from last episode, but because the footage is building up this fight with King Sphinx and Goldar so much but there really isn't much special about the fight. It's cool that Megazord is fighting two monsters instead of one, but Sphinx still goes down easy. I want to note the reason the crystals seem so pointless is because in the Sentai their entire purpose was to combine the zords. Obviously since we blew our Megazord load in the pilot they couldn't do that here, so instead they just look kinda cool and have a vague teleportation ability. This episode was sort of like "Teamwork" for me, in that I didn't have it among my recorded episodes. The only reason I didn't care nearly as much was because I had vivid memories of watching it on T.V. and knowing what happened. There would also be a flashback to this episode later in the season so if I needed to remember King Sphinx, I'd just watch that flashback scene and it'd be the same thing to me. If you were around during 1993 to see the merchandise for Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, you'll probably recognize King Sphinx. He was on a lot of coloring books and trading cards and toys. He was even one of the bosses in the Power Rangers Game Boy game. I remember him most from this "awesome" ad that came with the Power Rangers VHS tapes. www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQCuJNVBecUWell if you've looked at this review and wondered "What makes King Sphinx so special that he's all over everything?", then I'm not sure! I can't give a concrete answer but to the best of my knowledge it would probably be because in the original MMPR pilot, King Sphinx and Goldar's fight against Megazord was used instead of a solo fight with Goldar. You'll notice King Sphinx is grouped with the main antagonists in that toy ad, so I'm wondering if the rest of his exposure in other bits and pieces of Power Rangers media was just one idiot looking at the pilot and deciding to shove Sphinx onto everything. Well I'm sure wherever King Sphinx is now he's doing very well for... Beetleborgs King Sphinx head Oh So I guess we had the suit for Sphinx but didn't feel like using it. That thing must have been in bad shape. Rest In Shit King Stinks.
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Post by sbtbfanatic on Jul 16, 2015 3:06:27 GMT
Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers Episode 5: Different Drum
Kim starts this episode by teaching a group of girls at the Youth Center some aerobics lesson. For those keeping score at home, that makes three of our main characters a "something instructor." While the girls practice the 90's equivalent what old Jewish men thought hip hop was, Billy and Ernie stand in the back moving along to the generic background music Kim's playing. It's unbelievably embarrassing and makes you even more ashamed of Billy.
Billy and Ernie dancing Power Rangers I apologize in advance for the amount of gifs that are just embarrassing dance routines.
Billy, because he's a tone deaf nerd, ends up slipping onto Ernie's cart which rolls him through the dancing girls. This thing must have rocket boosters on it because it doesn't slow down once as soon as he's on it. Billy crashes into a broom closet and then the cart rushes him out the other way. That's literally impossible, did Ernie stash a giant slingshot in there? Billy you're a nerd, use your knowledge of physics to fix this.
Rita's watching the teens exercise as she discusses how much she hates music. She instantly decides she'll use music to defeat the Power Rangers....and that's her plan. It's great how quickly the episode wants to move along from the Rita stuff. In the course of two sentences she's decided on the reasoning for her plot and what it will be. There's no attempt to flesh out why she hates music or whatever, because who cares, we need to see Billy roll around on a cart for another 5 minutes.
Trini helps Bitch Boy Billy up and you can almost get a sense that Trini kinda has a thing for Billy. Trini always seems like the first to help out Billy whenever he's in a pinch and I always wondered if they were building to the two having a crush on each other. Granted my knowledge of romance solely consists of Power Rangers episodes so for all I know David Yost and Thuy Trang could just have a modest amount of chemistry together and I'm reading that as intense sexual lust. Before we get too far into this discussion I'd like to make a note of Billy's outfit.
Billy Mighty Morphin Power Rangers Billy what the fuck are you wearing? You're dressed like a Rugrat.
But Billy isn't the only one lookin' a fool today, as one of the girls in Kim's aerobics class slams into another girl when she tries to turn. She runs off in embarrassment, probably looking to find Billy and ask him how he handles his entire life. Kim shuts down the class and goes to talk to her. We learn that this girl's name is Melissa, and the problem isn't that she's tone deaf, it's that she's just plain deaf. Kim actually seems to not be a typical boring valley girl stereotype as she apologizes for not signing the dance moves for Melissa, and how she thinks Melissa is a great dancer. Of course we can't just have a nice moment in this show, so Kim points out to Melissa that even hearing people make mistakes, and we see this.
Billy dancing Power Rangers Holy shit
By the way, look at the girl in the pink behind Billy. Was that what girls wore in their 90's workouts? Holy shit. It's literally spandex with a thong over it. Man I miss the 90's.
Rita demands Finster make her a monster, but he's hard at work at creating a monster that he promises will eat cars and smell like a fish. Can't be less efficient than Bones so I'd say give that one a shot Rita. I also noticed something while he was crafting this monster that I wanted to share with you fine folks.
Finster making monster tarot It was always such a pain in the ass to max out Finster's Social Link.
Look at the little white poster Finster has next to the Monstermatic. I never noticed this until today but that is actually a Tarot Card, specifically The Devil. It's good to see that Finster is representing his pent up lust and materialism while he slaves away for his mistress. Perhaps Finster pines for Rita and that little card is there as a clue to let her know that he wants to take her by the hips and pound her with such reckless abandon that after 10,000 years she's gonna know what it REALLY means to be free.
Oh right, Rita wants a musical monster, and Finster strokes her ego by saying how clever that is. Finster then brings her back down to the Moon by saying how musical monsters aren't reliable and also total punk bitches. Rita gets mad someone is trying to talk sense into her and demands he fulfill her stupid desires or she'll turn him into some made up space animal.
Bulk and Skull wander into the Juice Bar and see Kim's girls showing off their dancing skills. Bulk calls them rapping ballerinas, which doesn't seem to mean anything other than "Bulk is dumb and hates everyone." I may just not have the bully mindset, but what's Bulk's endgame here? He's just talking shit to everyone and then falling down, what is he accomplishing other than getting messy and ripping his pants?
Zack and Jason are sitting nearby and say they'd like to see the bullies do any better. Bulk starts trying to act tough but immediately Zack defuses things by challenging him to good old fashioned 90's dance off. This means Zack gets to take a break from strengthening the bonds of friendship and ending pollution to shuck and jive with Bulk. We are then treated to a moment of unspeakable embarrassment.
Bulk Dance Battle Power Rangers White People.gif
Zack asks Bulk to try and follow him as he does a handstand on top of the Juice Bar's counter, if you don't see where this is going you need to talk with your doctor because your brain has no ability to recognize patterns. After "Bulk falls down and a mess is made on him™" you can see Skull stifling his laughter, which makes me wonder why Skull even bothers hanging around with Bulk. Skull seems like all he wants to do is giggle like a moron and ask out totally rad babes, but Bulk is such an asshole that nobody wants to associate with the two of them. Don't bother remembering this as a "character trait" because neither of these two are consistent in anything except being dicks and falling down.
Zack prompts everyone to cackle at Bulk for being so stupid and pathetic, and I'm starting to notice a pattern here. I also think this sort of thing is totally a product of the 90's, because if you tried to pitch this show today and started talking about kids who are clearly mentally unstable getting mocked by people constantly in High School, I guarantee you'd get your happy ass laughed out of the office.
Finster explains his newest creation to Rita, the Gnarly Gnome. The plan is for Gnome to use his hypnotic accordion to kidnap some of the dancer girls and hold them hostage. The Power Rangers will come do their hero thing and then get hypnotized by him. It's actually not a bad plan, but what makes them think Kim's going to realize the girls are missing? These girls don't seem to be her friends or anything, just some girls she helps work out their buns and thighs. If Kim doesn't notice the girls are missing are they just going to let Gnarly Gnome hang out with a bunch of teenage girls under his hypnotic command? I'm sure there's nothing weird ab-
Gnarly Gnome Youth Center
EW JESUS NO. He looks like a rapist pied piper. A pied piper that's trying to lay some pipe. Fuck that! No seriously I want to keep a tally on these girls because for all I know Gnome's gonna try and take one to use for himself. He's cutting Rita a "one for you, one for me" kinda deal. If these girls don't use the buddy system I guarantee you he's gonna do something heinous. I mean look at him, he looks like Jeffery Jones post-child pornography lawsuit. Jeffrey Jones
Gnarly Gnome plays his accordion as five of the girls walk outside the Juice Bar, Melissa included. Since she can't hear the accordion, Melissa is stuck trying to prevent the girls from following Gnarly Rapist, but they're too enraptured with his shitty accordion music. I'm wondering if Rita realized while watching those girls that maybe someone who couldn't hear her monster might mess up her plans a little bit. Rita never said the deaf girl alerting the Rangers was part of her plan so I don't know if this is clever or if Rita's just not paying attention to her own ridiculous half baked plans for the billionth time.
Melissa follows the hypnotized girls to a cave that Jeffery Gnomes has taken the girls to but she's blocked off by a massive rope net. I like that Gnome doesn't even seem to realize she's there while he plays his music, he's so ineffective as a monster he doesn't notice the girl who is frantically trying to assist his victims. Though I guess Melissa isn't much of a threat because she's stopped dead in her tracks by a fucking net made out of rope. It's not even tied to anything, just lift it up and go underneath it lady!
We haven't gotten to the rope lessons in dance class yet!
Melissa rushes back to the Youth Center and frantically signs to Jason and Ernie about her predicament. They look at her like she's an alien and Jason even tries talking to her. He seriously sounds like he's trying to talk to a dog the way he says stuff to her, it's incredible. Melissa realizes she's only missing one sense so she's tired of trying to sign to these fools, and just writes down her message on a piece of paper. Crisis averted, I guess we all learned an important lesson today about how being different doesn't stop you from saving your friends from being kidnapped by a sexually abusive goblin.
Gnarly Gnome plays his accordion inside the cave as Putties dance along with him and the girls dance off in the corner. Baboo is wearing an apron and chef's hat and is cooking Gnome some weird shit that he puts a bunch of bouncy balls into. Then Squatt opens up a little gift box with a bug inside of it and eats it. It's such a weird fucking scene that has nothing to do with anything. It's the editors just plopping down a scene from the Sentai in to save money, but I honestly love when they do it because it's so weird and inexplicable.
All of a sudden Gnome decides to take a nap. We didn't see him eat anything or do much besides dance around in his chair but he's also a shitty lazy monster so who cares what he does. Baboo and Squatt follow suit and fall asleep because they didn't want to do too much to help the plot. Rita sees her henchman doing nothing but wasting her time and screams at them to wake up, rightfully so because it's been about 4 minutes and they're already fucking up her already silly plan. I'm not a magical elf monster but I think rule numero uno when capturing kids is to not take some time off for a little snoozearooski.
Gnome wakes up and turns invisible. Yeah didn't you know he could do that? Finster just decided to give him that power on top of the whole music thing just for the hell of it. Isn't that a lot more useful of a power than just hypnotic accordion music? Why does he even need to kidnap the girls? Just turn him invisible and send him to the Juice Bar and you've got them. Gnarly Gnome takes his boots off and puts them back on and becomes visible again and...okay honestly don't feel lost, this scene is completely absurd and serves no point. It's totally bonkers.
Melissa shows the Ranger Teens to the cave as they send her off to hide. They morph, which might not be a great idea because Melissa is deaf not blind. She's probably going to wonder what happened to her five friends and why five superheroes showed up instead. Maybe they threatened to take away one of her other senses if she told anyone who they were. Granted the only person in Angel Grove who seems to know sign language is Kim so I guess nobody would know what the fuck Melissa was talking about even if she tried. Kim just smirks in the corner as Melissa tries pointing to her and miming the morphing gestures and everyone looks confused.
Pink Ranger grey Kim was using some cheap detergent this week.
Gnome appears to fight the rangers with a goddamn rake. He instantly gets his shit pushed in by the Rangers and their Power Weapons. He doesn't even try to use his accordion, which was the plan in the first place. Compared to the last few monsters Gnarly Gnome doesn't seem to be doing anything right except that kidnapping girls thing, and I'm pretty sure that was just for kicks. He fucked up the entire plan by having a weird party, sleeping, and turning invisible when his boss started screaming at him for screwing up so bad. I'm starting to get why Finster said this guy wasn't very reliable because he's just some old pedophile gardener they dressed up like a Viking and gave a magic accordion to.
The Rangers bring together the Power Blaster, while everyone but Jason uses a different name for their weapons because this is just a kid's show that's going to flop in a few months so who cares? Gnome gets blasted by the Blaster and then this happens.
Gnarly Gnome Power Blaster Even in death Gnarly Gnome really ROCKS. LOL
Rita then makes the rocks grow back into Gnarly Gnome. Nothing like this ever happens again when they use the Power Blaster and it's probably the fortieth thing that's happened in this episode that seems bizarre as fuck. We don't have any time to dwell on it though because the Rangers call on the Megazord. Megazord immediately takes Gnome's rake away because that asshole isn't doing any gardening on their watch.
Before the Rangers can finish him off, Gnome pulls out his accordion and starts to play his music. Maybe you should have done that a few minutes ago fatso. I'm not sure I can do the show justice as to what this music does so let me just show you.
Megazord Gnarly Gnome Power Rangers Bet you wish Zordon was in this episode to explain what was goin on huh?
As you can tell by the end of that gif, they've grown as sick of this fucking creep as I have so they bring in the Power Sword and slice him down the middle. This is the first time I've ever been so relieved that the Power Rangers have brought a monster down because that Gnome made me uncomfortable to have kids. I don't have it in me to explain to innocent doe eyed children that if you follow a man with an accordion, all he's gonna do is play you a fancy tune and then bury you so deep in the ground nobody will even remember you existed.
The Ranger Teens turn back into civilians off-screen to rescue the kidnapped girls and what's weird is one of the kidnapped girls says "The Power Rangers were great!" This implies that the Rangers saved the girls, but then somehow nonchalantly turned back into the teens and said "Hey girls we'll take ya back home!" Try and think of a way to do that without coming across unbelievably suspicious and I'll buy you a coke.
Everyone regroups at the Juice Bar and Ernie offers them all free sodas, because Melissa saved the day or whatever, also those magical superheroes kinda helped. Jason tries to sign something to Melissa but he accidentally tells her that his dog smells. This is immediately followed by a line from Jason about how sign language isn't that hard to learn. Either end on the joke or make your important didactic speech guys, it's one or the other. Zack delivers the cringeworthy line that sign language is "a whole new way of rappin." and says they can learn a whole lot from Melissa. Like what? How to not get kidnapped by goblins? Oh yeah and then we have to end with this.
Billy breakdancing
Just fuck this whole episode.
Your Weekly 90's Nostalgia: Deafness
Personal Thoughts:
I've stressed it about a hundred times already but this episode is really goddamn odd. They spend about 7 minutes dancing before we actually see the monster, only for the monster to just get beaten like a punk. They obviously have good intentions with the Melissa subplot, but it just comes across as typical heavy handed 90's "DIVERSITY IS OUT OF SIGHT!" garbage. This wasn't really unique to Power Rangers or anything, so I can't act like this one example is outrageous, just a trend of the times that was particularly embarrassing.
Gnarly Gnome has the distinction of being the first monster of the day that we see in U.S. footage. What this means is that the Gnarly Gnome costume was one of however many suits that Saban received from Toei, the folks behind Zyuranger, for them to use to film new scenes to bridge the gaps between Power Rangers stuff and Zyuranger stuff.
It's unclear exactly how many monster costumes Saban had access to, but I like to keep a mental running total. Since King Sphinx's head was in that Beetleborgs screenshot last week, we can obviously say we had his suit for use, but as I mentioned there he never got any new scenes filmed. The suit could have been in awful condition or they just had no use for it, but Gnome's appeared to be fine. Why's Kim grey up in that shot by the way? The footage for this episode got fucked up if I understand correctly. She goes from pink to grey a handful of times in this episode and instead of saying the music is making her weak or something they just ignore it, which is usually the funniest way they handle issues on this show. They even use that exact shot from above in the pilot and Pink Ranger is still pink, so I'm not sure what happened between then and when this episode was edited.
This was yet another episode I had limited access to in my childhood. The way I saw the majority of these episodes was my dad would set them up to be taped and let the VCR run before he went to work. The next day he would set the tape up to record again, only recording right after the previous episode had ended. I guess my dad just made the mistake of rewinding the tape too far because after the scene of Melissa at the cave, the episode was taped over with another episode.
I was bummed out as a kid because I really wanted to see the fight between him and the Power Rangers. All I remembered about anything after the tape stopped was Gnarly Gnome turning invisible in the cave and leaving his footprints. For some reason I always remembered a scene at the end of the episode where Gnome was still invisible inside the cave and laughing about still being alive, which obviously never happened. Chalk it up to just being a stupid kid though.
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Post by sbtbfanatic on Jul 16, 2015 3:17:04 GMT
Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers Episode 6: Food Fight
I hope you guys are hungry today because the Youth Center is having a "Cultural Food Festival." This is where the teens have big signs above a variety of ethnic foods saying things like "ASIAN." Not food from Chinese, Korean, or Japanese cultures; just ASIAN food. Hopefully Billy brought some of his patented CAUCASIAN foodstuffs.
Billy Trini Food Festival For those curious how we discussed race in the 90's, you're lookin' at it.
Ernie walks in wearing a lei and holding a couple trays of cream pies, a traditional Hawaii dish if I ever saw one. He's greeted by a pair of hula skirted ladies who talk to him like he's their daddy and they did a real good job makin' money for him. Ernie calls out for Bulk and Skull's help, not because he wants to put an apple in Bulk's mouth and roast him on a spit, but because he needs help with "these." In a bit of PG rated sexual entendre, Bulk and Skull start giving goo-goo eyes to the hula girls. Ernie gets mad and says he actually wants help with the cream pies. Sadly the boys don't realize Ernie was inviting them to fuck his hula girls, and they instead take his food away.
Prinicpal Caplan runs into the Ranger Teens holding their food for the festival and says it's shaping up to be a great success. Trini mentions how they'll be able to raise plenty of money for children's playground equipment or some other squeaky clean goody two shoes malarkey.
Jason says he hopes Rita isn't hungry for trouble with a lack of subtlety that would make Rip Taylor blush. Literally 7 seconds after he says that we cut to the Moon Palace. It's such an easy cut to move the plot along but we're 6 episodes in, you know what to expect by now.
Back at the food festival Billy helps Trini at the ASIAN table serving stir fried rice and vegetables. Zack is working at a table that sells African American food, none of which he names because the writer likely didn't feel like looking any up. Kim and Jason are at a U.S.A. table serving burgers and hot dogs and whatever else 'Muricans want to eat. I wonder if they signed up for tables that related to their ethnicity, or Caplan "conveniently" assigned them to those specific tables. Billy, Trini, and Zack are dressed the same as they always are, but Kim and Jason decided to amp things up a bit.
Amy Jo Johnson America Want some insulin with that Mr. Caplan?
Bulk and Skull look out at the tables and plan to "cream" everyone. I knew I wasn't making that up! You'll also notice our good friend Sharkie has come back to join the bullies, along with some black guy. Bulk must have taken him away from Zack's African American table, and without Sharkie I'm sure the table of Latvian cuisine is suffering.
Sharkie Bulk and Skull Power Rangers Only nameless bullies wear shades indoors.
Bulk has his ragtag gang of extras spread out with their pies and get ready to make a mess on all these stupid losers trying to make money for Little Pete's scoliosis surgery or whatever. Bulk bets Sharkie he can nail Caplan with a pie, and she nods excitedly so Saban doesn't have to pay her actress to deliver lines. Bulk hurls the pie, and what else is going to happen?
Bulk and Skull food fight Mr Caplan Wig Joke 975/1,789,530
Having Bulk's hot white cream all over his face, Skull drops the title of the episode and screams "A PRESSING ENGAGEMENT!!!" Almost every single person on this fucking set immediately goes bananas and starts hurling absolutely everything in sight. A single pie getting thrown prompts a Caligula-esque food orgy. While this was going on, I saw what may be the funniest example of a shitty take being used. Look at Jason's actor during the scene of a food fight.
Austin St John acting
Austin St. John just doesn't even care. He's reacting to this like he's been through some shit and this is nothing at all. Instead of looking at this ridiculous food fight he's having Mai Lai flashbacks. He probably figured he wouldn't be on camera for this scene and just decided not to react. It's glorious and really shows how low budget this show is. These people are so cheap I guarantee someone is scooping up that pie Bulk just threw for take 2.
Mr. Caplan retrieves his missing wig from the punch bowl it landed in, because of course it did. He tries in vain to scream and plead for these idiot high schoolers to stop throwing food around for no goddamn reason. While he does we get a bunch of shots of people indiscriminately making a mess, including the kid who's working a HOT HOT HOT Mexican food table. He's very clearly just a white guy in a sombrero and poncho because Mexicans hadn't been invented yet.
Power Rangers mexicans OH ME ON FIRE BEIN HOT HOT HOT
Rita thinks this food fight stuff is a bunch of bullshit so she decides to give humanity a real fight for its food. She demands Finster give her a "special" monster, to which he tells her everything he does is special. She just growls at him and he backs down and asks what she wants. I absolutely love the interactions these two have, because Finster is just this put upon older gentleman trying to make art, and his nagging bitch of a boss won't let him do what he wants.
Rita demands a Pudgy Pig, but Finster tells her that assembly line bullshit is worthless. Rita won't back down because she's mad about kids throwing their food at each other so Finster relents and agrees to make her a pig. I want to mention that Finster has to retrieve his model of Pudgy Pig out of a huge bin that he says consists of "not his best work." How can you not love that? This dude is so dedicated he made a Roman gladiator pig demon and decided, "This just isn't up to snuff.", and threw the fucking thing into the garbage.
Pudgy Pig Finster "Some Pig"
Pudgy Pig is created and Finster just mutters that he's doomed. It's the sixth episode and we already have a monster that is instantly considered worthless. Rita's plan is for the pig to eat absolutely everything on the planet. She sends Pudgy Pig down to Earth and he begins his mission exactly as any other space warrior would.
Pudgy Pig garbage can Nobody wants to see a 300 year old pig eating garbage
I'd like you to take a moment to imagine you're in that suit. You are getting paid to dump a garbage can full of popcorn on yourself. You're likely getting gross trashy food inside the costume and getting the most horrible stench all inside your nose. All while dressed as a giant pig. There are some things I can't even fathom getting a paycheck for and that has to be at the top of the list.
The rangers are getting fed up with this food fight bullshit and decide to step in to stop the bullies from wrecking everything for the 6th week in a row. Jason sees Bulk dicking around with a pie, so he busts out his martial arts prowess to use a string of sausage links as nunchucks. Bulk is completely floored by this Ninja Turtles 2 gag and ends up dropping the pie atop his own head.
Pudgy Pig emerges again to attack a group of teens having a picnic. The group flees at the sight of a giant rubber pig beast, and it's great seeing whoever's in this suit struggle to mime eating. The costume's arms are floppy, the mouth is just a big net of foam, and it's got a giant goddamned gladiator helmet covering it so it can barely move on the ground at all.
Pudgy Pig US Footage Either they designed that thing to have a pig butthole, or the suit's ripping when he rolls over.
When we return to the food fight there's this weird moment of Bulk spraying whipped cream everywhere, and then he stops what he's doing, looks at the camera and says "Whoops!" I don't know if that's supposed to be a joke that he "Accidentally" made a mess while doing this rampage, or if the editor was too lazy to cut it out, but judging by the earlier moment with Austin St. John I'm going to bet on the latter.
Bulk Food Fight Bulk has a moment of clarity and realizes the futility of his cruel demeanor.
It's around minute 8 of this food fight and I've had just about enough of this shit. A bunch of squares getting hit by pies? Who cares? The only time a pie hitting someone is funny is when the sap has dignity, not when Bulk and Skull get cream pied four times in a row.
Sharkie's tragic fate.
Mr. Caplan has thankfully had enough of these goddamn shenanigans and yells at everyone to knock it off. He was cowering behind tables earlier and NOW is when he's had enough? Get your fucking wig on straight Caplan we've got a giant pig to stop. Also we have to fight Pudgy Pig.
Caplan has the audacity to tell the Ranger Teens they're in charge of cleaning up the mess, even though they clearly have no mess to be found on them. I think you might blame one of the antagonistic idiots who started this thing, or possibly the lanky dork who SCREAMED FOOD FIGHT.
Since the Rangers are total scrotes they agree to clean things up without making a fuss, but before they can fix a problem they had nothing to do with, Zordon calls them to the Command Center. He explains the Pudgy Pig situation to the Rangers and it's here we're informed that Pudgy Pig, if left unchecked, will eat all the food on Earth in 48 hours. That's probably why the first thing we saw him doing was eating out of a fucking trash can. Zordon I think you might be worrying for nothing. It looks more like Finster just accidentally made a homeless man.
Just before the scene ends we get to see Alpha in a chef's hat offering help with the food festival. Maybe you don't have enough RAM to understand this Alpha but we don't want your godless robo food at our food festival, so get away from the Rangers, they have shit to do. The Rangers morph to challenge Pudgy Pig, which is easily Rita's most threatening monster yet.
Pudgy Pig rooftop Gaze upon me mortals, the ultimate evil.
The Rangers bust out the Power Weapons and promptly get beaten on by Pudgy. Likely because there's no adequate level of preparation you could make for something as ridiculous as Pudgy Pig, except maybe being bullied by Bulk. Before Trini is able to throw her daggers at him, Pig decides to meet her and Kim halfway and suck them towards him and devour their weapons. He proceeds to do the same thing with Billy and Zack's weapons, because Pudgy Pig doesn't know what food is. After eating the weapons we're also treated to a scene of Pudgy Pig's curly tail extending. You sick fuck Pudgy, this is a fight what are you getting turned on for?
Pudgy Pig tail Sigmund Freud, analyze this
Jason's sword gets swallowed blade first by this fat sack of shit, leaving the Rangers defenseless. Pudgy uses a blast of energy from his snout that unmorphs the Rangers and teleports them to the same park he was eating at earlier. I assume Pig didn't kill the Rangers because he knew no human being could live with the shame of losing to him. Zordon alerts them that Pig set his sights on their food festival because he's a strong supporter of children's playground equipment.
We're treated to a great montage of Pudgy Pig throwing food around and "eating" it. He honestly doesn't even seem all that threatening, just hungry. Pudgy walks by a plate of food under that "HOT HOT HOT" banner and hurls it aside and shouts "YUCK!" I'm sure whoever made that plate was angrily clutching his apron off screen, heartbroken that a personification of gluttony who devoured a steel blade wasn't willing to eat his shitty radishes. We do get to experience the best fucking moment of the whole episode in this segment though. When Pudgy Pig meets his match.
Bulk and Skull Pudgy Pig Pudgy's swagger at the end tho.
The Teens arrive just a little too late to stop Pudgy Pig and Trini makes a note that Pudgy Pig didn't touch any of the hot food. Even though all Pig has been doing was throwing things around, which we saw him do to the plate of spicy vegetables. For all we know Pudgy Pig is just a huge bigot and hates anything someone of Spanish ethnicity touches. Congrats on your racist pig Finster, no wonder you said it wasn't finished yet.
Rita sends Pudgy Pig to a food packing plant, where he will likely devour the paperwork the workers have to fill out, someone's hat, and throw around a couple sandwiches. The Ranger head him off and start throwing him plates of food. It'd be great if they tried to mercy kill Pudgy by overfeeding him and then putting a bullet in his head as he waddles around after losing half a hoof to diabetes, but instead Trini plants a spicy radish inside a sandwich which prompts this reaction from Pudgy Pig.
Pudgy Pig vomit Purgy Pig
Jesus Christ Pudgy Pig must have some awful acid reflux. He starts upchucking the Rangers weapons right into their hands. The Rangers happily leap and grab them, despite the fact they'd been sitting inside an obese pig's lower intestine for the last 20 minutes. After puking everything up, Pudgy is weakened and there's only one thing left to do!
Duke Phillips The Critic MAKE HIM SQUEAL!!!
The foodless Pig is blown away by the Power Blaster. I almost feel bad for Pudgy, he was eating stuff and then got attacked by a bunch of losers in colorful costumes while he was picking his teeth. He defended himself by getting rid of their weapons the only way he knew how and kept eating. Then those same damn kids threw some hot food in his mouth to make him throw up, and when he was at his weakest they murdered him. Perhaps society is morally grey with regards to violence on pigs, please think about that next time you enjoy a delicious strip of bacon. Thank you.
The Rangers go back to the Youth Center and congratulate themselves on a homicide well done, but Kim notices that there's nothing left to sell or customers left to sell to. Alpha contacts the Rangers and mentions how he's learned of the monster's weakness. TOO LITTLE TOO LATE ALPHA, YOU'RE 0 FOR 6. With nothing else to do with his trays of spicy food, Alpha teleports them to the teens as a backup for all the food that was lost, and I'm sure with three trays of stupid robot sandwiches we'll be able to get those kids a real bitchin tetherball pole.
Mr. Caplan walks in and apologizes for his tantrum earlier and blaming the Rangers. Probably because seeing a giant gladiator pig puts things into perspective for you. Since this show always has to have the Rangers accomplish whatever they set out to do, Caplan reassures them they have ALMOST enough money for the playground equipment. That food fight started about 15 minutes into the food festival, how many shitty 20 dollar buckets of slop did you sell in that short a time?
The Rangers charge Mr. Caplan for one of Alpha's stupid robot sandwiches, which is too hot for him to handle because it was made by a creature with no sense of taste or heat or comedic timing. Caplan gets a jug of water and dumps it over himself before he upchucks. Caplan says the sandwich was a little hot but not bad, and everyone cackles their balls off at how goddamn funny a man eating a hot sandwich is.
Your Weekly 90's Nostalgia: Pie Fights
Personal Thoughts:
This episode seems pretty well remembered, particularly the monster. If you talk to people who have a vague awareness of this series and ask about the monsters, you can typically get a response of "Wasn't there some pig or something?" If I had to guess why he's so well remembered, it may be because this episode was incorrectly aired 2nd in the initial run on Fox Kids. A show like Power Rangers typically could run episodes in any order, especially these early ones. The only problem was that kids were introduced to the Power Weapons before they were officially introduced in Teamwork. Does this really matter? No. It's just fun to take note of.
Pudgy Pig himself was technically the first monster we saw in U.S. footage, discounting Gnarly Gnome from last episode. His suit held up quite well, but the U.S. director didn't have great ways to make it look like the monster was actually eating anything so we just get a lot of scenes of him dumping popcorn or noodles in his permanently open mouth to simulate eating. It's just blissfully dumb 90's charm.
The U.S. suit looks a little fatter than the Japanese one and seems to have a hinge on its mouth or some such thing. If you look at the gif of Bulk feuding with Pudgy you can see the monster's mouth is stuck open really wide. I'm not sure why that is but it's entirely possible someone just broke the thing on set and nobody cared enough to fix it since shooting was almost done.
This was another episode I didn't have taped as a kid, but was able to rent from the library if I wanted to check it out so it was always there for me to see. I remember this episode pretty vividly because I had a golden sound storybook based on this episode. For those who weren't around or don't remember them, golden sound storybooks had pictures on the side of the book you could press to make noises, and those same pictures were placed throughout the book as a prompt for you to push them. As lame an idea as it was to create a "talking book", I thought it was the coolest thing at the time.
Here's a little video of someone on Youtube showing off the book. I can't attest to the quality but man I want you to see just how silly that book was.
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Post by sbtbfanatic on Jul 16, 2015 3:17:22 GMT
Mighty Morphin' Power Ranger Episode 7: Big Sisters
You know what I hate? Bratty little kids. You know what I don't like to watch? Those same brat kids getting into "mischief." As luck would have it, the entire thrust of this episode today is Kim and Trini volunteering to look after some shitty little snot nosed kid named Maria. They aren't particularly good at this volunteer job though because it's been a half hour and they still have no idea where she is. Thankfully Handsome Jason and Shirtless Zack finish their sensual sweat stained sparring session and survey the situation.
Zack and Jason hunks Alright guys let's oil these beefcakes up
Because we only have 19 minutes to explain this plot and character, we're immediately shown a small girl's hand shutting off a valve labeled "HOT WATER SHUT-OFF." All caps, no subtlety. After this a bunch of buff dudes come running out of the shower covered only in towels. The episode's only a minute in and we've already seen a gaggle of handsome muscley half naked men. So far this sounds like the best episode all season with all the sexy dudes, but it's just leading up to introduce us to stupid shitty Maria, who performs the worst fucking wiggling eyebrows ever caught on film.
Maria Power Rangers John Belushi she ain't
We cut to Rita who says she needs to get the Power Rangers, and has a perfect plan. Doesn't tie in with anything that's happened, no particular reason for her ire, she's just in the mood to kill some teenagers. That or she saw Maria being the worst child actor the 90's had to offer and decided to sterilize Earth.
Kim and Trini ask Maria why she did that, and instead of answering, we hear a grown woman's voice come out of her bratty little mouth. It's shocking that in a show where we routinely watch a Japanese space witch dubbed over in English, that it's more obvious to see a little girl's voice not sounding right. This then begs the question why they would cast a little girl who they couldn't get a passable line reading out of.
Kim says they'll understand whatever she does because "that's what friends are for." Which is probably the most damaging thing you can tell a budding sociopath like Maria. Trini's got a big stupid picnic planned that the little twerp nods happily about. Kimberly whispers to Trini about how they may be in over their heads which happily throws her earlier kindness out the window. "We'll be your friends Maria, but you keep both hands where we can see 'em because you're an untrustworthy little shit."
Rita informs the Moon Crew about some macguffins she recently discovered called the Power Eggs, which are so powerful not even Zordon can stop them. She teleports her boys down to a darkened cave where the eggs are buried, and because Squatt came along he has to inform us that he likes to eat things, and eggs are things you can eat. He tries to open the box but because he's a fat stupid hobgoblin he gets zapped on the ass by a force field around the eggs. Also, Rita suddenly remembers oh shit right only a kid can open this box, whoops. She was probably hedging her bets that box would kill him so she could be done with the most worthless member on staff.
Rita then refers to the most important man on staff, Finster. She asks for a monster that can kidnap a little girl, who's ruthless and mean. Sadly he already rented his last Gnarly Gnome model out to Roman Polanski so she decides a Chunky Chicken will have to suffice. The second week in a row that Rita used a monster that was just an obese version of a farm animal. You're really holding Finster back you know that Repulsa? After Chicken is created we're treated to a ridiculous attempt at a menacing rock version of "Old Macdonald" played underneath Rita praising her absurd chicken monster.
Chunky Chicken GIF Not afraid of him yet?! Try giving him GARDENING SHEERS!
Maria and the girls eat some lunch while Maria abruptly informs them how her dad just doesn't understand things. We're 5 minutes into this episode and we need to understand why this girl acts out, even if she never changes, so godblessit we'll shoehorn a character in there if it kills us. The girls ask her which of the boys in her class is raddest, and she says she wouldn't fuck any of those dorks with a stolen pussy. However, Maria gets some new men in her life when the Putties drop in so they can make her open a box of some eggs or whatever.
Kim and Trini are distracted by the Putties, allowing a few of them take Maria hostage and teleport her away. I'm pretty sure there isn't a box to check on the Big Sister application for "allowed child to be abducted" so Kim and Trini decide they need to get her back. I'm more curious why the fuck Chunky Chicken wasn't the one coming to get Maria, wasn't that exactly what Rita just made him to do? Why are they sending Putties to go do it instead? I've seen that fat ass rooster for about 25 seconds and he's already sub-Pudgy Pig in terms of effectiveness.
Zack, Jason, and Billy are in the Youth Center; because if they aren't at school or the Command Center, there's no other place they could be. Thankfully Zordon has recruited the only five teenagers without homes or families in Angel Grove. Zack's ordered the "Ernie Special" which is a comically large plate of ice cream and food, that only someone as huge as Ernie could see as a viable item on the menu.
Ernie special delicious food ice cream sundae Insulin needle not included
Jason starts weirdly goading Zack that he can't eat all of that, and it's almost like they're a couple who are just happily kidding around with each other. I would sincerely rather watch an episode of Zack and Jason on a friendly little date while cuckolding Billy than be shoved into a tepid attempt at padding a child actor's resume.
Kim and Trini rush in and tell the guys a bunch of Putties kidnapped the stupid girl they got assigned and they would have gone after them but they needed help. What are you talking about? Go after them? Where? They fucking teleported to God knows where and you're gonna chase after them? How? What a weird justification to get the team together. Even more superfluous is that the communicators are malfunctioning because Billy can only make half functional garbage. They can't teleport or ask Zordon where Kim and Trini's responsibility went, so Billy decides to unveil his newest invention as an alternative. It's good that the only reason Billy makes anything is to fix something else he fucked up.
Power Rangers RADBUG No, that's just what cars looked like in the 90's
In Billy's garage we're introduced to the RADBUG, which is a hideous buggy with a big ugly pipe on top of it. According to Billy it goes from 0 to 3000 in 2.8 seconds. I'm not sure if you good folks know how speed works, but have you ever seen race car drivers? Their bodies are jittering and shaking while going approximately 200 miles an hour. I'd like you to imagine you're riding in a janky beaten up buggy that goes 15 times as fast as a race car, while it flies in the sky. According to all scientific research, this would likely be the result.
The miracle car hits Ludicrous Speed and flies through the sky right into the Command Center. Alpha asks how they got there and Zordon immediately says nobody gives a shit and it's time to move the plot along. He says this Power Egg fiasco is something he's been fearing for over ten millennia. It's been ten thousand years Zordon, couldn't you hire a girl scout troop to go Easter Egg hunting? Did they just slip your mind the past few thousand years? I get the feeling these eggs really aren't as bad as you're making them out to be, and are just going to reek to high heaven if someone tries to open them after so long.
Zordon exposits some dialog about how these eggs were hidden millions of years ago by people known as the Morphing Masters. The eggs are an unlimited source of energy or something, and only a child can open them. They must be returned to the sea if the Rangers want to avoid Rita gaining infinite powers. If the lore of this series sincerely matters to you I'm sure you're at half staff right now, but this seems more like an excuse to justify the fact someone made a chicken monster costume, and the Japanese episode had a treasure chest with eggs inside it as part of the plot.
Speaking of which, with a little bit of editing we never have to actually see those eggs. The box is closed about 90 percent of the time it's on screen in the Japanese footage and there's no crucial shot of it while it's opened, why the fuck bother keeping the egg thing? Just say it's a Pandora's box or something, and only keep the shots of the closed box. We went with the pig thing last time without the episode being on a farm; I think we'll be able to handle a chicken monster regardless of whether or not his plan revolves around some eggs.
Speaking of Chicken, we see him clipping his big stupid hedge trimmers inside the cave while saying how easy it was to get the girl to open the box. This is obviously making up for not having footage of Chunky Chicken with a little girl, but it more comes across that he made her open the chest with the Power Eggs and then cut her head off during the commercial break. It seems way more sinister than a fat chicken with scissors ever should be. We get a little levity when Squatt and Baboo come in to protect the eggs from any danger, which absolutely guarantees the Rangers have won.
The Rangers travel to the scene using the RADBUG, which slowly trots along at what is possibly 20 miles an hour at best. We see Goldar join the rest of the villains to prepare for the Rangers arrival while he tells Chicken to hide Maria. We literally haven't seen Maria once since she was kidnapped which makes the whole sequence really jarring and odd. We also cut back to Rita what must be forty times to hear her gloat about how she has the eggs and how proud she is of that.
The Rangers show up in time to see no Maria, but plenty of aliens to beat the shit out of in the meantime. They morph and demand the aliens release Maria, while Goldar screams "NO!" at them from off-screen. He reacts to this kidnapping scheme the same way a child would react to being told to clean its room. The Rangers then use their Blade Blasters together in Tower Formation to blast the chest with the Power Eggs out of the Moon Crew's hands and into the ocean. Where they'll never be seen again because the writers forgot about them.
Power Rangers Tower Formation
Chunky Chicken pops up and decides he should try not waddling around like the fat sack of shit he is and fight. Since he's only a simple hyper chicken, Chunky Chicken really isn't good at all this karate business, so Trini and Kim completely blindside him, with Trini finishing the fight like so.
Yellow Ranger VS Chunky Chicken
We see Rita flying on her stupid little bike to chase after the eggs, as Alpha contacts the Rangers and tells them that Chunky Chicken has taken Maria to the old abandoned factory. We JUST saw the Rangers fighting Chunky Chicken but now all of a sudden I guess he disappeared in front of them? We then see Maria hanging by a rope while Rita watches with the Moon Crew, aside from Finster. Even though we saw her on her goddamn bike in the very last frame, and the rest of her team fighting the Rangers with Chicken. This is seriously some of the shittiest transitioning this show's ever done. We do finally get to see why Maria was cast though, so she could be used to match footage of a Japanese girl with pigtails that Chunky Chicken is holding hostage.
Chunky Chicken Maria Just keep squinting, you'll see her
The Rangers are sick of villains disappearing from right in front of them without us hearing about it, so they form the Megazord to chase Rita and her goons down. I guess Billy's ugly car couldn't get them there fast enough so they decided to use a machine that actually works. Rita starts talking a bunch of shit to the Rangers while they're in the Megazord, which is actually pretty tough considering they could just stomp her flat. She starts demanding they give her the Power Eggs even though they're out in the ocean somewhere and Billy is terrified of fish.
Rita doesn't take no for an answer and has her Chicken cut Maria's ropes. Because there's a giant robot made out of dinosaurs standing nearby, Maria isn't in much danger and is immediately caught by Megazord. Rita gets livid that everything in her day has gone to shit so she decides to cut her losses and gigantify Chunky Chicken.The Rangers put Maria in the remote controlled RADBUG, which very clearly has a stunt driver inside of it dressed in black, but whatever at least she's gone for now.
Maria RADBUG Chunky Chicken That or Billy's got the front seat real wobbly
Chicken starts fighting the Megazord using his stupid scissors and after getting punched once he's down for the count. The Rangers bring in the Power Sword and cut Chunky into nuggets, and we're left to forget one of the most uninteresting monsters all season.
Back at the Juice Bar the news is reporting on how the Rangers defeated yet another one of Rita's lethal monsters. I'm not sure when they had time to do that while they fought Chunky Chicken but I'm sure it was great. Because this episode doesn't suck enough we have to get a quick shot of a reporter interviewing snot nosed Maria who brags about how popular she is and how she's great. So is she a little bitch putting on airs or does she honestly just want some friends to talk to? Who cares we'll never see her again.
We're missing something though aren't we? Things don't feel complete quite yet. It just feels kind of off doesn't it? This episode had a lot of stuff going on but there was one little bit we didn't quite get involved in this week's plot.
Bulk Chili
Ahh, much better. Your Weekly 90's Nostalgia: An American made car.
Personal Thoughts:
Even as a kid I thought this episode was lousy. The fight with Chunky Chicken in the quarry lasted all of half a minute and I didn't feel any tension with Maria because I didn't care about her. For those who might be wondering why this episode is so hodge podge is because it's actually merged from two episodes of Zyuranger.
Those of you astute enough may notice Chunky Chicken using a different pair of scissors in the quarry fight than he uses while Maria is hanging from the rope. He's also wearing a red cap while taunting Maria, which he lacks in the earlier shots. The reason for this is because in Zyuranger he was actually two "identical" monsters. The writers probably made a safe choice in combining the monsters, but we end up losing a zord fight with one of them. It's not necessarily a ground breaking one, but it's not much worse than the shitty zord fight we got where Chunky Chicken cuts a hole in space and time and runs away.
I mentioned earlier how they had no footage of Chicken menacing Maria or anything like that. Another case where the U.S. crew just didn't have his suit to film more stuff right? Nope!
Chunky Chicken U.S. Footage
I figure Chunky's suit was in lousy condition, as King Sphinx's allegedly was. The only thing we ever saw of his costume was in promo shots for trading cards and stuff like that. This is the only good picture of that I could find but since it's just his fat face I imagine the body was probably mangled up because Toei took shitty care of their props at the time. It surprises me they didn't bother to film an insert shot of the U.S. Chicken suit glaring at Maria or something of the sort if they had it at all, but I guess the director and editor didn't give enough of a shit so what we got was this mess of an episode. In hindsight, I doubt some connecting shots of Chicken would have really helped much, because man this episode is anti-fun.
What I think summarizes this episode in a nutshell is that I had it on tape as a kid, and it was in the VCR while I was watching Cartoon Network. I saw an episode of, coincidentally enough, Cow and Chicken come on entitled "The Day I Was Born." As you can probably guess from the fact I started a blog about the series, I'm kind of a big fan of the Power Rangers franchise. However, this episode meant so little to me, that I rewound the tape to the Putty fight where Maria was kidnapped and taped over it with an episode of Cow and Chicken.
This was a cartoon I could feasibly see any other day on Cartoon Network for all I knew, Power Rangers reruns would be few and far between and may never be on again. Even as much as this show meant to me, I could give a fuck less about this episode. Chunky Chicken can suck an egg.
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Post by sbtbfanatic on Jul 16, 2015 3:18:11 GMT
Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers Episode 8: I, Eye Guy
You know who the show hasn't done much focusing on? Billy. It may not seem that way with the emphasis Eye've been putting on him and how ridiculous he looks and acts, but Billy hasn't been a central point of any of the plots so far aside from the first few minutes of the pilot. All Billy's been around to do is introduce gadgets and say big words the writers got out of the thesaurus. So an episode based around Billy should be interesting to see how they handle the character.
Power Rangers Willy Billy Eye don't know what Eye was expecting.
Oh boy, another child actor this week! To be fair though, this kid isn't even a percent as grating as Maria was because all he's asked to do is pretend to be smart instead of acting like a little brat. This pint sized version of Billy is named Willy, because the writers wanted to go to lunch early. We don't really know who Willy is other than a smart little kid who's friends with Billy. Maybe Billy couldn't make friends with anyone he wasn't in a superhero team with so he had to look for someone half his age to hang out with.
Willy's entered a junior science fair that the Ranger Teens are helping out with. Willy has created what he refers to as a game, but it's really just some glasses that put you on a virtual reality roller coaster. Since VR Troopers is another year off, he's not able to make another team of superheroes to watch, so he just makes people think they're at Busch Gardens.
Rita sees Willy's brilliant technology and demands her Moon Crew go capture him, because nothing they have is on par with a pretend roller coaster. Rita can fly in the sky on a magic bike while throwing her enchanted scepter at monsters made from clay by a leprechaun dog grow taller than skyscrapers, and she's got her panties in an uproar because a kid can make people see pretend roller coasters? Finster made a pig that could eat all of the world's food Rita, do you really think the secret to finally defeating the Power Rangers is some nerdy kid in a newsboy hat?
The Rangers escort Willy to the science fair when some Putties jump into the fray to kidnap him. I'll give Rita credit for one thing, she remembers the one thing the Putties were able to accomplish ever since she got to Earth was kidnapping a kid. It's probably in her best interest to use them to handle people that can't really fight back. Unfortunately the Ranger Teens have smartened up and circle around Willy to keep him safe. The Putties get their asses knocked flat while Willy pays no attention to the fact his five teenage friends managed to beat a bunch of space golems.
The unmorphed teens have fought Putties in front of people a few times, but it's never really clarified if anybody ever thinks the five teenagers who hang out together doing karate are at similar to the five heroes who show up and do karate. We never get a scene of them fighting the Putties and then some kid points at them and says "wait a sec are you guys..." and then they deflect it. The writing staff either never thought this would look obvious to anyone watching, or didn't feel like writing the Ranger Teens making excuses for why they have to leave abruptly every episode, but it's something that's becoming really apparent as Eye go through this. The secret identity aspect of the Power Rangers is never really fleshed out for anything more than a gag of the Rangers hiding their communicators from someone.
Rita has absolutely no reaction to the Putty failure and just requests a monster from Finster, because she knows what to expect from the Putties. Finster suggests a monster by the name of Eye Guy, because he was tired of using monsters whose names were in the "Adjective+Noun" category for the last three weeks. Eye Guy assisted the Moon Crew during their assault on a made up planet that I'm positive some nerd has written a fanfiction about. Eye Guy kidnapped smart children on this planet, and by smart children Eye mean a Japanese girl with a baseball bat.
Eye Guy Main Eye Japan Smart kids don't own sporting goods, what kind of bullshit is this?
Willy makes it to the science fair safe and sound, and it's conveniently being held inside the Juice Bar since Ernie needed some extra scratch this month. It's beautiful that this show is shot so cheap that they have four sets to use for non fight locations. I'm sure they would have held this science fair in the Command Center if they weren't able to use the Juice Bar set.
There's a really stern guy in a labcoat who announces that anyone who arrives late will be disqualified. Eye appreciate what appears to be an actual scientist being demure enough to judge a bunch of kids making solar systems out of tennis balls, especially while he suffers an affliction where his voice needs to be dubbed over. Both this guy and Willy are having their voices dubbed just like Maria, and it's something Eye absolutely don't understand. Were the actors giving such shitty performances that this was the absolute only way to make something presentable? Have you seen some of the acting on this show?
Austin St. John acting
Finster proudly presents his newest creation, Eye Guy. As he forms, we're introduced to his speech gimmick of saying some sort of eye pun every other line. "Aye aye", "Sight for sore eyes", Eye spy some Power Rangers." Sounds funny right? No? Oh well! You're stuck with him.
Eye Guy Dora Argos gif You can just feel the strings holding those eyeballs in place.
Thankfully the episode decided to spice things up a bit, because we're taking a break from eyeballs and Krelboynes to see what Bulk and Skull think about this science fair garbage. As you may suspect from two bullies who are dumb as rocks, they don't seem to take kindly to intelligence around these parts.
There's an unintentionally sad moment where Skull tries to read the flier for the science fair but stammers through it because Eye guess he can't read? This is just more great 90's insults to people who have an actual problem, but let's mock the shit out of them for being so fucking STUPID. Granted Eye wouldn't object to a very special episode of Trini having to teach Skull how to read. It's fun to see them pat themselves on the back for being so nice to a deaf girl, then going off the deep end saying how stupid Skull is because he had a shitty home life and never learned how to read.
Bulk decides to have some fun dicking with nerds, hoping someone invented a second dimension for his character to steal. He sees some dork with a spray gun and has Skull steal it. Bulk asks him to use it on something to see what it does, Skull immediately points the contraption at Bulk and sprays it on him, dissolving his pants to reveal...
Bulk pig boxers
YOU'VE GOT TO BE FUCKING KIDDING ME. Of ALL the things to make into a running joke this is what it is? The Pig Boxers? Holy fuck. Eye can't handle this.
Everyone laughs at Bulk because he's covered in pig's blood boxers. Billy just says that there's no room for people without I.Q.'s in the science fair. Bulk and Skull threaten him all while we mustn't forget Bulk has lost his pants. During this whole scene Bulk is standing around in his skivvies trying to talk tough. Jason and Zack make Bulk and Skull look like complete chumps while the bullies try and pretend they're legitimate threats.
Zack fighting Skull You guys aren't good at doing Billy and Willy's handshake.
The Ranger Teens flip Bulk and Skull onto a cart, and Kim says they'd be perfect volunteers for some girl's "Freaky Fashion Machine." The bullies get wheeled into the fashion machine, and come out looking like this.
Gender swapped Bulk and Skull Bulk and Skull Rule 63
Well clearly this machine is broken, it can't even tell the gender of the person who goes inside it. Even though it knew the exact measurements required to fit Bulk and Skull, and dressed them perfectly in 15 seconds, and did their makeup for them. Y'know what? This thing is far more miraculous than the VR garbage Willy made, and Martin's milk carton ukulele. The girl who made this is the only one worthy of the trophy and the box of Nesquick.
The stern scientist from before comes over and disqualifies Willy for causing the ruckus. Willy really didn't do anything but help wheel Bulk and Skull into the fashion machine, but we need to have a plot so Willy's disqualified and feels like a real screw up. Willy runs off but Trini's to the rescue as she begs him to wait. We see her gear up for a speech about believing in yourself but instead she just flops her arms down and petulantly whines "Don't go...." It's the same tone of voice you use when you're pissed off at someone but trying to feign sadness to make them stay. It's so weird they bothered including Willy reacting to her at all, which only calls her bluff as she has nothing else to say to him. Sorry Trini, you already have enough attributes, can't make you thoughtful too!
Willy runs off to the park, where Eye Guy and Baboo lie in wait for him. Baboo is here to perform the important task of telling Eye Guy not to mess up. Thanks Baboo, couldn't do it without you. Eye Guy detaches the giant central eye from his face, which captures Willy promising to make good use of his genius.
Willy gyroscope Yeah this is how you get intelligence using eye monsters, what did you expect?
The Ranger Teens continue their search for Willy and find his ridiculous hat. Billy mentions that Willy wouldn't go anywhere without it, mostly to avoid respect from his peers. Jason assumes Rita has something to do with this kidnapping business, and Zordon confirms their suspicions. Billy is concerned that his young friend has been kidnapped and is in a perilous situation that could endanger his life. Alpha summarizes this fear astutely by saying, and Eye quote, "Ay-Yi-Yi." Zordon informs the Rangers they need to destroy Eye Guy's "Main Eye" if they hope to defeat him.
The Rangers morph into action to save Willy, but Eye Guy is ready to fight them. His massive central eye from earlier is closed but he still puts up a damn good fight for someone who's made of one of the most sensitive organs in the human body. Jason uses his Power Sword to hack at Eye Guy who shoves him aside like a chump. Eye Guy doesn't even flinch while he's getting slashed, it's incredible. The rest of the Rangers try surrounding him, but he just blasts them with feyereballs.
Jason is sick of getting punked by a sack of medical waste and calls on the Rangers to bring in the Power Blaster to finish him off. The Rangers blow Eye Guy away into a pile of eyeballs and celebrate their victory, but something feels a little off. The eyeballs roll themselves together and reform into Eye Guy, completely unharmed. The Rangers are stunned, and Eye Guy uses the moment to blast them in the most ridiculous way possible.
Eye Guy boobs He's got natural I-Cups.
Zordon alerts the Rangers to the same thing he just told them to do and attack the main eye. Billy decides this is a good idea and goes to find the eye. Billy locates the main eye in a forest somewhere, but even a disembodied floating eye is too much for him and it blasts him right on his ass.
Billy VS Eye Guy With a cameo by that little Japanese girl!
Billy decides to stop being such an ineffective fighter, and dive bombs the eyeball with his Power Lance and stabs right into it. Just before Eye Guy can do anything he starts sparking and blowing up. It's actually a cool idea that he was that powerful and would have won if the Rangers didn't know about his weakness. Rita's pretty pissed that one of her less pathetic monsters is getting its big old eyeball titties slapped around so she uses her wand to turn him giant.
Eye Guy's main eye rejoins him just as he's growing, and the Rangers call in the Megazord to lay an ass beating on him. The Rangers bring in the Power Sword and hack at Eye Guy, but he just reforms like he did against the Power Blaster. Billy then yells that Eye Guy's main eye is open and they need to hit him now, even though his main eye has been open ever since he grew. It doesn't matter because as it turns out, the Power Sword cuts Eye Guy down to size, never to make another pun again. Eye'll miss him.
Willy's rescued and taken back to the science fair, where he sees the mean old dubbed scientist using his VR helmet with Ernie. It turns out that they totally love his radical invention, which is sure to revolutionize Chuck E. Cheeses across the nation. Dubbed Scientist walks over to Willy and says he acted too hasty in disqualifying Willy. There's no scene of anyone talking to Dubbed Scientist about how he was overreacting, so we just have to assume he spent a lot of time thinking while a massive pile of eyeballs was kidnapping children out in the mountains.
Not only is Willy forgiven for whatever he was supposed to be in trouble for, he's awarded first prize. I'm sure this is supposed to be an important moment for the kid, but Eye can't take this conversation serious when you can tell neither actor's real voice is in the scene at all. It's like the moment in 2001: A Space Odyssey where Hal reads the astronauts lips. You can tell what's being talked about, but something is viscerally off about the whole thing.
Thankfully the episode isn't done just yet, because Bulk and Skull want their clothes back, as they'd rather be draped in towels than be seen in ladies clothes. Eye guess that means they've been wandering around half naked all episode instead of just going home and getting a change of clothes. As it turns out though, the bullies' clothes shrank in the wash and everybody laughs at them. Luckily for Skull he can't read the size of his clothes so he won't know the difference.
Bulk and Skull half naked Before we go, here's a little somethin' for the chicks.
Weekly 90's Nostalgia: Virtual Reality
Personal Thoughts: This is yet another episode I didn't have a lot of experience with as a kid, and it was one I had always hoped to see on T.V. but never managed to catch. I was able to see a few clips of this episode on one of the several tapes Saban would release to promote the show, this one being nothing but clips of the monsters fighting the Power Rangers. I could tell it was a Billy focused episode based on the clips of him fighting Eye Guy, and I was pissed off I couldn't see an episode centered around my favorite Ranger, fighting one of my favorite monster designs.
I'm kind of embarrassed to admit it, but this episode brings up a very vivid memory I have of my childhood that's none too flattering. I was sitting by the T.V. waiting for Power Rangers to come on, because I had convinced myself that today would be the Eye Guy episode and I really felt like seeing it at that moment. My mom had to make a trip to the grocery store, and took me along with her while I told her we NEEDED to get home in time for Power Rangers. I had no knowledge of the time and I kept trying to make things go as fast as possible to be home at 4:00, or whatever time the show would come on.
I tried my hardest to speed everything along as fast as possible while we were in the store, didn't my mom understand I had a show about karate to watch? My little brain's concept of time was deeply flawed though, because by the time my mom got us to the car, it was 4:37, and I burst into tears. It felt like I lost the one chance to see an episode I really wanted to see all because my mom had the audacity to buy food for our family.
Keep in mind this was a conclusion I jumped to regardless of any evidence or logic. I just assumed that episode would be on that day because I was a kid and I wanted to see it. This is just another one of those memories that make me think "Man I need to call my mom and say sorry for being a child." I encourage you all to do the same.
This episode is actually a pretty enjoyable one all in all. I think they managed to balance out the ranger stuff and the science fair stuff fairly well. Neither part of the plot feels particularly overbearing or intrusive to the other, and it meshes significantly better than many of the other early Season 1 episodes. The dubbed extras are really weird and uncomfortable to watch, but as the show went on they phased most of that garbage out which is an absolute blessing.
I mentioned earlier that I really loved Eye Guy, but I never saw this episode, so how could I know about him? Well that's easy, cause he was all over the place! There was a toy made out of him, he was the 3rd boss in the Super Nintendo Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers game, and his suit was yet another one that Saban had for use. There aren't any U.S. shots of Eye Guy filmed for this episode like Gnarly Gnome or Pudgy Pig, but don't forget about him too quick, we might see him again later down the road.
Carl ATHF eyeballs With smaller breasts this time.
I don't have a source for this, but apparently Paul Schrier, who plays Bulk, went out of his way at a convention to mention how awful the Eye Guy costume stank. I just want you to imagine that any time we may see Eye Guy later down the line. Thank you.
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Post by sbtbfanatic on Jul 16, 2015 3:18:49 GMT
Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers Episode 9: For Whom the Bell Trolls
Did you remember the Ranger Teens went to school? Neither did I! The Rangers are in class and are participating in hobby week where they can explain their one characteristic to the audience. Trini is asked to present her hobby first, because she has the least character of anyone in the classroom. She wheels in a big cart of dolls which are supposed to represent countries from all over the world, but it's just one Japanese doll and a bunch of other dolls thrown in vaguely ethnic clothing. Trini presents her number one favorite doll of them all, a dressed up troll doll from Switzerland named Mr. Ticklesneezer.
Troll Power Rangers Where does Mr. Ticklesneezer fit into God's plan for us?
Yeah this ugly little nothing of a doll is the apple of Trini's eye, who wouldn't love him? Trini likes him so much because he belonged to her mother, also because he has the worst name ever written to paper. It sounds like the name of some sex act your loser friend in high school told you his cousin in Louisiana did. I'm sure "Ticklesneezer" is in between Pink Sock and Rusty Trombone on the list of sex acts that "totally happened."
I want you to stop reading right now and say the word "Ticklesneezer" out loud. If nothing happens then try looking in the mirror as you say it. Look yourself dead in the eye while the word falls from your lips. Did you feel the dignity drain from your body? Now imagine how I feel every time the characters mention that name and look through my very soul as if to tell me this is what my childhood was. A motherfucking ticklesneeze.
Bulk and Skull rightfully make gagging noises during this presentation, because they don't like anything except being stupid, beating up nerds, and falling into cakes. Trini explains some legend about Mr. Ticklesneezer capturing things in a magic bottle. I know how he feels, because my dad captures his feelings inside a magic bottle too.
Rita is watching this presentation and calls horseshit on Trini and her gaggle of dumbass dolls. When she was a little girl Rita had to learn magic spells and how to be evil, and she never got to play with dolls, so she vows to finish off Trini. From here on out we can just assume that any of Rita's evil plans simply stem from the little love she received as a child. I don't know what Goldar's excuse is though, I think he was just a latchkey kid.
The Rangers' teacher, Ms. Appleby, has had enough ticklesneezing and asks someone else to present their hobby. Jason goes next and practices some patented White Guy Karate by twirling a bo staff around. It's okay for him to bring what's ostensibly a weapon into the high school because it's the 90's. Bulk isn't impressed with his display of raw masculine physique and scoffs at Jason like it's a bunch of bullshit. Bulk being dismissive of people with sincere talents is great, because he has no reason to be such an abrasive prick, but he still hates everyone and everything.
Bulk and Skull disgusted gif My reaction to this episode.
Kim demonstrates how her hobby is gymnastics by doing a handstand on the front desk, which Ms. Appleby gives the glowing review of "That's very nice dear." Lady, that high schooler just flipped onto your desk, maybe you could act less like a Grandmother entertaining the kids at Thanksgiving. Zack goes next and he likes to...surf? I've seen this show a lot as a kid and I don't remember a single moment where Zack implies any interest in surfing, outside this one of course. All we really get on Zack's hobbies are just that he likes to dance, so I dunno where this is coming from. We also get an embarrassingly dubbed "Cowabunga!" from what is absolutely a voice actor in their early 30's not trying at all to sound like a high school student.
Billy shows off his remote controlled volcano, and it dribbles down a bunch of pink foam in what's supposed to be how lava works. This sounds pretty dull but Ms. Appleby looks at this thing like Billy's just painted the Mona Lisa.
Ms. Appleby reaction face As God as my witness this will be the only impression of Ms. Appleby I give you.
Bulk and Skull walk up to Billy and Trini and start up some G rated bullying. The two throw Trini's Ticklesneezer doll around and act a fool. Skull tosses it to Bulk, but Trini catches it, as Bulk leans over to grab it from her and accidentally activates Billy's volcano project, spraying a hot bubbly explosion all over his face.
I have to give the director credit for this moment, because every scene of Bulk getting messy so far has been telegraphed so far in advance that it takes away any excitement. There's always a really tedious cut to whatever food is about to fall on him so we know exactly what's going to happen. The mess stuff with Bulk doesn't always work because you're ten steps ahead of the characters and you just know exactly what to expect. This scene is actually able to surprise you because they just leave the volcano there and don't bother focusing on it to remind you there's still a mess to be made. It might be the only thing I like in this episode.
The scene shifts to Trini in her bedroom putting all of her dolls away, giving close attention to Ticklesneezer of course. It's the only doll that has a name, it stands to reason it gets to sleep on her night stand with its big ugly smile. This scene seems odd to me and I finally know why; this is the first time we've ever seen any of the Power Rangers at home. These characters are only ever at the Juice Bar, the Command Center, or as of 3 minutes ago, school. They don't seem to have parents or siblings or actual lives outside of their selected quirks. Honestly I think Billy just lives in his garage and sleeps in the RADBUG, all while he contemplates leaving the engine running with the garage door shut tight.
Rita sends Squatt down to grab the doll, which is the only task she's given him since they were released from a space dumpster. It's probably the only thing easy enough for him to do so she jumped at the opportunity to include him. Squatt teleports directly into Trini's room while she's asleep and I'd like you to think for a moment what that means. The villains are able to directly beam one of their own into the house of their mortal enemy while they are sleeping. They utilize this ability to take one of her dolls away from her.
Squatt uses some weird looking machine to shoot a laser at the doll. The laser turns Mr. Ticklesneezer into one of Rita's monsters so he can be used to wage psychological warfare on Trini and prevent her from fighting when pitted against her most beloved childhood friend turned into a soulless demon with a heart corrupted by black magic. Oh wait did I say he's a monster? No he's just a giant goober.
Please Power Rangers, Mr. Ticklesneezer lives in Florida, you can call me Ralph.
Rita brings Ticklesneezer back to base and just as you might assume from someone named Mr. Ticklesneezer, he's a stuttering goofy dumbass. Rita point blank asks him what it is he actually does. Maybe Rita should have done a background check on this dopey troll before using her evil magic on him. Ticklesneezer mumbles out how he collects things in his "Goodie Bottle", and I'd like to attempt my earlier experiment above with the phrase "Goodie Bottle." Please try and say that in the mirror, looking yourself in the eyes, and see how long it takes you to feel dignity again. If you're lucky, Candyman will put a hook through your spine before your feelings come back decades later. Rita's plan is to have Ticklesneezer sent to Earth where he can suck stuff up in his Goodie Bottle. There he can collect some childhood memories for her, like fathers telling their daughters they love them, and a night where you don't have to sob into your pillow.
Trini and Billy meet up at the Youth Center to retrace her steps so she can find where her doll might have gone. It's weird that not only do we not get a scene of Trini waking up to find Ticklesneezer missing, but her behavior now that he's gone seems no different than before. She's not really worried, she looks more like she has an errand to run that she kind of doesn't want to do. I'm not expecting her to be screaming her head off for her ugly doll, but I think a little bit of actual fear for her most cherished childhood toy might benefit this episode.
Ticklesneezer falls down to Earth and starts looking around for things to collect in his bottle. He sees a yellow motorcycle and decides it's the perfect item to begin his collection on Earth. Ticklesneezer collects things with his bottle by uncorking it, producing a magical mist which sucks in an object, shrinking it down and placing it inside the bottle. This is actually called "stealing" here in America Mr. Ticklesneezer. I don't know what kind of Babes in Toyland bullshit you think this is, but if you keep this up you'll get tossed into Federal Pound-Me-In-The-Ass Prison so fast they'll be playing spin the goodie bottle with you for 5 to life.
Bikers are a pretty polite bunch, I'm sure they'll let this elf monster go scot-free.
Billy and Trini drive around town trying to find Ticklesneezer, but since he's not at the Youth Center or school, they're all out of sets he could be at. Thankfully the monster Ticklesneezer has met them halfway and is standing right in front of their car. Their reaction of dull surprise prompts Ticklesneezer to suck them up, as he thinks poor acting is one of the best goodies around. Trini and Billy are stuck inside the car, sucked into Ticklesneezer's bottle, as they scream for help. Ticklesneezer says he won't hurt them, and they'll just be part of his collection forever. Honestly if I had to look that giant oaf in the eyes and listen to his goofy ass voice talking about goodies for the rest of my days, I'd pull the keys out of the ignition and slit my wrists.
We break up the tension of goodie collecting with a superfluous scene of Jason karate chopping bricks in the Juice Bar. Bulk tries to do the same thing with a cake in a scene so telegraphed the blind could see it coming. There's no joke to it, Bulk just chops a cake and he's sad that it made a mess on his hand. It's so lackluster it actually takes away how good the earlier Bulk scene was. Zordon mercifully has some news for the Rangers and teleports them to the Command Center.
Jason, Kim, and Zack are given the scoop by Zordon and Alpha. Rita's sent down Putties, Goldar, Squatt and Baboo to protect Ticklesneezer now that he's captured some Rangers. Zordon is currently mulling over replacing Billy and Trini if this is the monster that's gotten rid of them. The remaining Ranger Teens morph to some train tracks and trash the Putties in as much time as it takes to get to the end of this sentence. It's a pretty good fight but has no fighting with Ticklesneezer, because as you might be able to tell from looking at him, Ticklesneezer isn't much for fighting.
Mr. Ticklesneezer abruptly decides he wants to get away from the fight. What's the matter Ticklesneezer you fucking chicken hawk? They're fighting because of all the shit that went missing, now you accept what's happening because of this Goodie Bottle bullshit. You think you can just run away from this fight? You make me sick.
As he runs away, he very clumsily trips over a cement block and tosses his bottle into the distance where Kimberly grabs onto it. Kim fidgets with the bottle but Goldar isn't having any of that bullshit, and knocks her around with his sword. He hits her hard enough to send the bottle flying onto the train tracks, where a train is coming right at Billy and Trini because dramatic tension.
Kim is getting beaten down by Goldar and some Putties as she struggles to reach her friends before they're smashed to pieces. We cut to Ticklesneezer helplessly calling for someone to stop the train, because he's too stupid to try and get his precious bottle back for himself. Kim escapes the fight with the Putties at the last second to dive in and catch the bottle right before the train runs over it. She pops it open and releases the car from inside the bottle, letting Trini and Billy morph to fight the remaining Putties.
Ticklesneezer laments losing his bottle because he's a lazy clumsy shit. Rita shows up to tell him to stop being so ineffective and go back to doing what she said. He complains that he doesn't have his bottle so he can't do what she says. I actually have to side with Ticklesneezer here, the whole idea was to capture things so if that's what Rita wants and he can't do it, he's pretty useless. Well Rita doesn't really care, she just makes him grow anyway.
Mr Ticklesneezer gif A young Sneezer got it bad cause I'm brown.
The Rangers call on Megazord to beat up Ticklesneezer, but he pops open his bottle and captures Megazord inside of it. Remember when he was missing his bottle last paragraph? Doesn't matter anymore we have a zord fight to watch. Ticklesneezer calls Megazord the best goodie of them all, and it's really cheap at toy stores everywhere. Like all people who collect Megazords, Ticklesneezer is a stuttering weirdo who guffaws at every opportunity, while obsessing over things that don't matter and updating his blog every Tuesday.
Jason calls for the Power Sword, which knocks Ticklesneezer flat on his ass and releases Megazord from inside the bottle. Megazord grabs the bottle and spots Rita and the Moon Crew standing on a building watching the battle go down. Jason tells Rita she's going to get bottled up if she doesn't release Ticklesneezer from her evil spell. All the villains hold onto Rita's wand as she casts a spell to keep her and her boys on the ground, except for fat ol' Squatt who goes flying into the sky. Ticklesneezer stands by stammering and begging for his bottle back, while Megazord tries to suck up the Evil Space Aliens. It's actually a pretty neat moment seeing the Rangers going against Rita in such a close capacity. It's so exciting in fact that a young Japanese giant came to watch!
Sentai Mr Ticklesneezer oops If I were that kid I'd be hiding from Ticklesneezer too.
Rita blasts Megazord and teleports her gang away from the fight. After 10,000 years stuck in a dumpster Rita probably doesn't feel much like getting stuck inside another magical space jar that soon. Zordon tells the Rangers that Ticklesneezer is a good hearted doll and will return the things he's stolen if they ask him to. The Rangers tell him to knock this stupid collecting shit off and return all the things he stole. Ticklesneezer plays innocent and says he didn't mean to hurt anyone so he uncorks all of the bottles he has with things inside, even though he only had one bottle earlier.
It's great to see Ticklesneezer is so stupid that he assumes kidnapping people and saying they're his goodies means that it's okay to collect them. If you put a person inside of a bottle they still have to eat you fucking creep. This guy has the mentality of a serial killer; if the cops went into his apartment there would be nothing but the stench of rotting corpses and children's shoes scattered to and fro. Then the police would cuff him against a table lined with blow all while he sobs and says "NO YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND THEY'RE JUST MY GOODIES!"
But we can't just end there, we need something so massively dumb it couldn't be collected inside any Goodie Bottle. It turns out this whole episode was just Trini's dream! Trini wakes up and looks to see Ticklesneezer is gone! Oh but he just fell onto the floor, he was safe the whole time! Thank motherfucking God.
Here's a real question, why does any of this have to be a dream? What is happening in this episode that's any crazier than anything else that's happened in this show so far? This is the most nonsensical ending to an episode of a show about dinosaur robots and karate against space witches I've seen in my life.
Weekly 90's Nostalgia: Goodie Bottles
Personal Memories
I may have laid it on a little thick, but I don't like this episode much at all. Even as a kid I've found it really boring and not fun in the slightest. I get that the monster is docile and isn't one that the Rangers need to be fighting, but they still give him such a dumb personality that I don't care what happens with him or if Trini gets her doll back or anything at all with regards to Senor Ticklesneezer.
Obviously my memories of the show may bias me, but I recall even as a child thinking that the fact this was supposed to be a dream sequence was really weird and didn't make any sense. I read somewhere that one of the three writers on this episode wanted it to be a dream so that they didn't need to turn Ticklesneezer back or anything like that, and to give it a surprising twist ending. I was very surprised! I had no idea three writers could make something this awful.
Speaking of not wanting to turn Ticklesneezer back, why bother? They had the costume for him and used it a lot. All those scenes of him tripping and dropping his bottle, capturing the car, talking to Billy and Trini, and transforming inside of Trini's house were U.S. footage. They could have just had him shrink back down into a doll after the zord fight was over, it wouldn't make any difference.
I'm almost sad they ended up getting the costume for Ticklesneezer, a lot of the Japanese footage for him was unusable because his Japanese counterpart was hanging out with a little Japanese boy, the same one you saw above hiding behind Megazord. I can't imagine opening a crate from Japan and seeing that goofy looking troll's face staring back at you. It slowly sinks in that now you're obligated to adapt this episode just because it'd be a waste of money not to.
Speaking of Sentai suits, we get to see Squatt in U.S. footage for the first time in this episode when he teleports into Trini's room. I'm not sure if they were waiting on getting the costume from Japan and couldn't use him right away, or they just didn't feel like using him until now. For the first half of the season he'll basically be Rita's emissary for anything Earth related if they need to film new footage for it. I honestly appreciate that because it actually gives the character something to do aside from talk about how he likes to eat.
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Post by sbtbfanatic on Jul 16, 2015 3:19:26 GMT
Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers Episode 10: Happy Birthday Zack
Ten episodes, that's how long as it took for the writers of Power Rangers to resort to making an episode revolving around a character's birthday. Usually things like this come up when a show has been going on for a while and we can see what kind of experience a character will have as they grow older. In Power Rangers it's just something to shoehorn in since there's footage of Black Ranger fighting a monster alone.
The Zackless Ranger Teens are inside the Juice Bar late at night setting up a surprise party for their token black friend. If any of these kids had parents, they might inform them that hanging out with an obese man in the dead of night isn't a great idea. That same obese man is dealing with Billy's awful new invention, the Cake-O-Matic. Instead of doing whatever you'd assume it does, it sprays blue foam everywhere because Billy doesn't know what the hell he's doing.
Ernie Cake machine Cake looks delicious Billy, thanks.
Rita is watching this embarrassing display and decides to show these fools how a real birthday gets celebrated. She plans on sending a monster down instead of just waiting on Billy's inventions to kill everyone in the Youth Center. Finster assures Rita he's got just the monster to finish off "Good old Zack." This is the most malicious we've seen Finster, but it's just because he's an old fashioned guy who has a hard time dealing with Black Rangers.
When we see the teens again Kim says Trini's "Happy Birthday!" banner looks alright, and Trini really coldly tells her to get back to work. It's jarring because Kim is playfully suggesting Trini's artwork doesn't look the best, and Trini is telling her to get the fuck off her balls cause she has shit to do. We're supposed to believe these two get along with each other, mostly because they're both girls and that means they're best friends. Trini's probably just sick of hearing about how many deaf girls Kim has been able to teach how to dance lately.
Ernie takes time away from drowning in cake mix to inform the Ranger Teens about something he learned about the Power Rangers. Billy asks who the Power Rangers are, which might come across infinitely more suspicious than just saying "Oh yeah what'd you find out?" Are you really going to imply that you have no idea about the magical superheroes that are fighting bike riding witches with their dinosaur robots? There's feigning ignorance and there's being unbelievably suspect.
Ernie says he's learned the Rangers are regular humans, just like you and me, which he gathered from his sources on Infowars. Ernie goes on to say that they'll do for Angel Grove what Batman's done for Gotham City. This statement right here? This implies that Batman is not only real in the Power Rangers universe, but he's been kicking ass left and right while they've been fighting Rita. Take a moment right now to imagine the Batman/Power Rangers teamup that should be happening right now. Fuck your Dark Knight Heath Ledger garbage, I want to see Batman fighting Goldar hand to hand, while Joker melts Baboo's face off with a cyanide pie. Then Billy gets the Jason Todd Treatment.
Jason responds to Ernie's insider scoop with his own take on things, that he's learned the Power Rangers are actually space aliens. Ernie is completely floored and visibly collects himself as he treats this like a ground breaking discovery. Jason says to keep this concept under his hat, and Ernie struts off muttering about thermite paint and false flag operations.
This is an incredibly small moment, and it may sound pretty by the numbers, but it does a number of things I actually appreciate this show doing. Jason's response is playful, he isn't stammering this aliens thing out like he's afraid of getting caught, he's just casually messing around with Ernie. It's nice to see these characters acting like human beings other than "The red one who is strong." It also addresses the duality of the life they're living as heroes and teenagers, which has been limited to moments of the Rangers communicators going off and then giving some lame excuse about it being their watch. It's great to see something realistic in how these characters are portrayed.
Of course we have to follow this moment of realism up with Bulk and Skull busting in on the Youth Center because they smelled some geeks. Billy informs them that the Juice Bar is closed right now because they're busy blowing up balloons and inventing cakes. Bulk tells him to shove it up his ass, and then "threateningly" picks Billy up and sits him on the counter. This is the kind of thing you do for a baby, just with a little more force. What are you even trying to do tonight Bulk?
Bulk and Billy And you THINK about what you've done!
Skull uses his newfound ability to read to deduce the Ranger Teens are holding a "BirtHey Part". Bulk blows his nose using Trini's bland banner, and Trini gets pissed. Skull takes her by the arms and says the two of them can paint another one after they have a little fun. All while he's very slowly guiding her hands down to his waist. We're really just watching a G rated attempted rape, and it's about as slimy as they're willing to get with Bulk and Skull.
She didn't even push him, he's just that clumsy.
Rita asks Finster what monster he has planned for the birthday party, and is asked by Squatt what she has planned this time, suggesting a fruit fly with attitude. I can only read this as the writers making fun of the weird shit they're adapting. Rita requests that Finster use something particularly nasty for this birthday, and Finster tells her he knows some of the dirtiest hookers in the galaxy, but they don't do parties so he's stuck using the Nasty Knight monster.
Nasty Knight picture book He charges about the same for a hand jibber though.
The Ranger Teens continue setting up the party and Billy says the only thing left to do is make sure Zack doesn't find out what they have planned. The exact next line is Ernie running up and saying Zack just walked by his office and he might be on his way in. We've only got twenty minutes to do this shit guys, we're gonna do it quick or we're not doin' it at all. We're also left to wonder why Ernie didn't just lock the fucking Juice Bar because it's the middle of the night and he's closed. Is he just trying to get someone to try and rob the Youth Center? Does he have a gun under the counter waiting for some no goodnick to walk in and he can feel justified in ending a human life?
The Rangers fast motion clean up as Zack wanders into the closed Juice Bar. Ernie says he's catching up on some paperwork, rather he's calculating how to stay in business with how much stuff he gives the Rangers on the house. Zack says Trini's mom said they might be at the Youth Center. Way to almost blow the fucking surprise party lady, only someone who could think a doll like Mr. Ticklesneezer is an acceptable hand me down would be that incompetent. Zack leaves while wondering where his best buddies in the whole wide world could have gone, because if all five of them aren't together then something is wrong with the universe.
The Rangers aren't the only ones up late tonight, as Rita and the Moon Crew are evidently down on Earth, and Baboo and Finster are forging a sword in the moonlight. It's just another weird magical thing that you shouldn't question. Finster can make clay monsters, but when it comes to making a special magical sword, you need to go down to Earth and hammer that shit out. Rita chants a spell to awaken the monster, who comes from inside a split open tree. It's actually a really nice visual and makes Knight look pretty imposing. Though that might be because last week we had to deal with Ticklesneezer.
Nasty Knight Born The coolest things are always the most unnecessary.
The next day at school, Zack drops incredibly blatant hints about his birthday. Stuff like "Do I look any older to you?" Kim feigns ignorance about Zack's very clear statement and acts none the wiser. We go through a Three's Company-esque gag about how Kim forgot something for someone she cares about, ending with the reveal that she says it's her poodle's birthday today. Zack gets sore in the ass about the whole thing and leaves because everyone forgot poor baby's birthday.
Zack mopes off to the mountainside, even though it seems like everyone else was still in school. He pisses and moans about how everyone is too wrapped up in their own lives and how he's fed up with this world. Zack's nihilistic disgust with the selfishness of the human ego is interrupted by Rita coming onto the scene and saying she's throwing him a birthday party, and even having Squatt film it for him. The only thing I wish we got here was a line from Zack about even Rita knowing it's his birthday. It might be corny, but what show do you think this is?
Zack morphs to fight Nasty Knight and gets completely eviscerated. He tries to be snarky and talk shit but Knight isn't having any of that and just fucking wallops him. Zack says this isn't how he wanted to spend his birthday, mostly upset that Rita misunderstood what he meant when he said he wanted to have a nasty night on his birthday. As Squatt's filming the fight, his camera inexplicably just starts shaking and spits out four balls of light that explode. It has nothing to do with anything and feels like it's a shot the editor was supposed to cut but he didn't get the memo in time, so it feels like Power Rangers.
Squatt and Baboo idiots It's a struggle every week to help you guys remember these two exist.
The other four Rangers morph to the scene to protect Zack. With all five rangers in the fight you expect Nasty Knight to start showing some signs of fatigue, but the fight just keeps going in his favor. He completely trashes all five Rangers even when they team up on him and makes them look like total chumps. The Rangers reel from their ass-whoopin when they notice something is odd about their weapons.
Nasty Knight Power Weapons They're only slightly more useless than before.
Without their Power Weapons, the Rangers resort to using the Tower Formation on Nasty Knight. Instead of giving an inch he catches it with his shield and throws it the fuck back at them. It's one of the coolest things a monster has done yet. It just emphasizes how thoroughly Knight has been dicking them this entire fight and I love it.
Nasty Knight Tower Formation Nasty Knight Don't Play
Rita can't just leave well enough alone and makes Nasty Knight grow. Rita, your monster is slaughtering these kids, do you really need to make him taller to finish the job? Just let him do it on his own. Every time you've made a monster grow you've had to watch them die. You aren't thinking this through one bit lady, just put Finster in charge then maybe we can get some results.
Megazord joins the brawl and tries to take on Nasty Knight without embarrassing itself in a fight. This is utterly in vain though because nothing Megazord does works. Jason calls for the Power Sword in the hopes to have a fair fight, but Knight burns out the Power Sword just like he did the Power Weapons. It's jarring how badly the Rangers are getting beaten this episode. Usually they get a hit on the monster or look pretty impressive, but I'm not exaggerating at all when I say how badly Nasty Knight has been buttfucking them.
Zack says he's figured out what Nasty Knight's doing to trash them so embarrassingly. He gives some mumbo jumbo explanation about how Rita's monster has been reflecting their energy back at them. All they have to do to win is reflect his energy back using their own. The Megazord fires some blue eyebeams at him, charges up the Power Sword, and cuts Knight's sword in half. Nasty Knight then gets killed off by the Power Sword now that he's defenseless. The Megazord kills him so fast we aren't even treated to the theme song being played and it's surprising how much you don't notice the music being played until it's gone.
Zack and the Rangers head back to the Youth Center to celebrate a job well done, only for Zack to finally see his surprise party. He gets super excited and hugs his friends, thanking them for lying to him for the majority of his birthday so he could get his shit pushed in by a Knight. The rest of the episode is nothing but a giant birthday party montage in the Juice Bar, while Billy tries to get his stupid cake machine working and everyone else has actual fun dancing. There's so much pure cheesy 90's bliss going on that I can't pinpoint everything, just that it's absolutely worth seeing to believe.
Your Weekly 90's Nostalgia: Video Cameras
Personal Thoughts
This episode is really good. Zack feeling like his friends forgot his birthday is a relatable problem that a lot of people have likely gone through. This episode's plot probably won't make much sense to any kids though, because their birthdays are treated with reverence so that they can appreciate how exciting it is to get older. It's the writers doing something that the target audience probably won't really comprehend, but it still works on its own merits.
What I didn't realize until watching these episodes in order was how this was the first episode that really focuses on Zack by himself. He's usually just a joker who messes around and likes to dance. It's probably not a great idea to make the first episode we have with a character one where they're explicitly out of character and bummed out, but since the Ranger Teens aren't much more than general stereotypes it's not treated too importantly.
Interestingly enough, the Japanese episode of Zyuranger this episode was adapted from revolved around the birthday of a little boy. Was that something they intentionally thought about while writing this? I don't have any idea, but it's interesting to see little parallels here and there.
There's a scene with Rita flipping through a book of monsters early on in the episode. It had really nicely stylized drawings of the monsters but we only see a handful of them. Minotaur, Bones, Chunky Chicken, and a few that actually show up a little later. When I was a kid I was so giddy that maybe there was a book like that out there of monsters and designs and all this goofy shit. What sounds like a patently idiotic idea was actually put into motion, because Japan has released art books of monster designs from Sentai shows throughout the years that I've actually been really tempted to buy. Mostly because I'm bad with money.
Something I've been meaning to show off is an example of how blatant the editing is when it cuts between Japanese stuff and U.S. stuff. I've mentioned before how I like when they blend it, and this episode provided a pretty direct example that I'd say works very well.
As a viewer you can likely tell something isn't exactly right, but it's also not distracting enough to make you question what's going on. This is the sort of thing I love. They film around things they don't have access to. They didn't have the Nasty Knight suit on hand, so fuck it, they'll just film at different angles to imply he's about to attack Zack. Maybe this is something only nerdy like me would notice, but tell me what you think. Is it distracting? Is it noticeable? Would you want Nasty Knight to be your dad?
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Post by sbtbfanatic on Jul 16, 2015 3:19:47 GMT
Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers Episode 11: No Clowning Around
Power Rangers seems to have gotten my complaints from 20 years in the future about their limited use of sets, because today's episode is all shot in a completely unique location we'd never see again. The whole episode today takes place at a fair. We open on, what I assumed, were just stock footage shots of fair rides, but then in one of these shots Zack walks into frame on stilts. Even if the rest of this episode completely blows, we can at least give the show a gold star for not having a fair inside the Youth Center . Zack shows off on the stilts while he brags about how fun it is, and Billy whines at him that he needs to science his technobabble or he'll fall. Since Trini isn't with the rest of the Teens to explain what Billy is talking about, Zack falls from the stilts right into Jason's loving arms. Zack thanks his hero with a kiss on the cheek, which isn't me being a shit, it's actually what happens.
Jason and Zack Maybe I'm not reading too much into them being a couple
As the Trini-less teens walk off, a clown starts mean mugging them. Instead of being subtle about this, we have to have a horrible 90's effect of a Putties face flashing over the clown's. Another clown named Pineapple walks in and tells the Putty clown to chill his big floppy shoes, cause they'll kill the Rangers soon. With the way Zack was using those stilts you could just let the Rangers walk around the fair and do their own thing, odds are at least two of em would end up dead due to 90's comedic negligence.
Putty Clown Remember that booth in the mall that did this for you?
Oh sorry, I'm sure you're wondering where Trini is. She's hanging out with her cousin Sylvia today. In case you forget the two are cousins, don't worry, Sylvia will remind us they're cousins every single time she refers to Trini. Sylvia's most excited to see clowns, but only because she's a fictional character. Thank fucking god the 90's is over and we can stop pretending people actually give a shit about clowns.
We're formally introduced to Pineapple the Clown, who's doing some dime store trick where he juggles little toy pineapples for the Ranger Teens. Pineapple asks if anybody wants to try juggling eggs, because he's a lazy dick who doesn't feel like doing his job. Sylvia steps forward briefly and Billy awkwardly cuts in front of her to try it. Billy doesn't even notice she wants to try, he's so ready to show his friends he's not just a gigantic pussy nerd that he shoves this little girl aside and ruins the experience she could cherish the rest of her life. If all it took to ruin Rita's life was never playing with dolls, then Billy might have just made Rita 2.0.
Having seen an opportunity to be made fools of, Bulk and Skull strut onto the scene. Bulk asks what a bunch of geeks are doing at a fair, ignoring that the fair is the most appropriate place for geeks. Jason gets in their face, but before he has a chance to bite Chunky Chicken's head off Billy lets go of the eggs he's juggling, and all four of them fall on top of Bulk and Skull. It's not clear if Billy did this on accident or not, but he seems fairly proud of himself either way.
Sylvia wants to hang out with her creepy clown friend Pineapple, but Trini says he looks like a pederast so they need to get the fuck out of dodge. Pineapple confirms these suspicions by smiling at the two and promising Sylvia he'll "catch her later."
Pennywise the Clown Georgie sewer
Now we all know by now that clowns are just pedophiles with puffy pants, but Pineapple is really upping the stakes here in terms of creep. During Trini and Sylvia's conversation we keep cutting back to him leering and grinning his big greasepaint grin at the two of them. Whoever was directing this episode needed to have the guy playing Pineapple tone this shit down and act like a person. Instead he's just a mustache twirling kid diddler.
Pineapple the Clown How ya doin' little momma lemme whisper in ya ear.
Rita watches from the Moon Base as she gets a huge stiffy over how well her fake fair plan is working. When I think of dangers you can encounter at a fair, my mind goes to rides crashing or getting stabbed by one of the drifter employees; clowns that sneer at people are a ways down the list. Rita wants to know if this clown is going to fuck everything up, but Finster promises that he trained this monster himself. These are Finster's exact words, and all I want out of this episode is a montage of Pineapple the Clown boxing a side of beef while Finster eggs him on.
Oh but it isn't Pineapple the Clown, it's actually the devious Pineoctopus monster. The only other monster clown Finster proposed kept burying young boys underneath his grill but Rita put the kibosh on that. Finster promises the Pineoctopus can turn the Power Rangers into cardboard cutouts after using Sylvia as bait to lure them in. Before we continue let's make sure everyone understands what's going on here. An old white sheep man from space has created and personally trained a pineapple squid on how to turn human beings into magical cardboard cutouts while disguised as a clown at a fake fair. Yeah that's it right there, that's why I love this show.
The Ranger Teens start to form a human pyramid while Sylvia watches, but she's bored with this display of skill and talent, she wants to watch a guy with paint on his face throw things in the air. Thankfully Pineapple shows up to answer her prayers and beckon her away from her negligent cousin. His motioning looks a lot more like the way you would act towards a girl you're trying to pick up in the bar, not an 8 year old.
Pineapple the Clown
Trini runs off to look for Sylvia amidst a crowd of pudgy white extras. Pineapple takes Sylvia to some not at all disclosed area of the Fair and promises he has a new trick to show her, all while pulling out a big cloth. Before he can make her smell his special rag, Trini shows up and asks what the fuck she's thinking hanging out with this dude. Pineapple pulls her away and starts petting her head saying she's staying with him. Jesus Christ this is weird. Trini pulls her cousin away and strikes a karate pose to protect her, but Sylvia says Pineapple isn't dangerous and not to hurt her new friend. When I turned on an episode of a children's show entitled No Clowning Around, I didn't expect to get a twisted tale of Stockholm Syndrome.
Pineapple tosses some of his magic dust on Sylvia, and we finally get to see his absurd power in action.
Pineapple the Clown Sylvia cardboard
This might be a lot more shocking if we weren't told exactly what Pineapple's abilities were beforehand. Now we're able to squeeze some puns in about how "board" Sylvia was, and how Pineapple has a massive board in his clown pants. Hilarious Pineapple, stick to juggling eggs and dodging the sex offender registry. Trini looks at Sylvia attempting to act shocked about the whole thing.
This is something I've wanted to mention for a while, but of the five Ranger actors, Thuy Trang is definitely the weakest so far. Don't get me wrong, she's a fantastic martial artist and can do action scenes like nobody's business, but with the stuff she's given to do in these early episodes you don't really see much of her character or any emotion. Granted nobody is on their A game in these first few episodes, and I know I recall liking her a lot more as the series goes on. Maybe in the episode where her uncle turns into Hollow Man.
Trini grabs the cardboard Sylvia and runs around the fair looking for the rest of the Rangers. Since Trini would be in deep shit at the family reunion for just leaving Sylvia at the fair as a prize for winning a game where you throw a frog on a lily pad, she begs her friends for help. Jason has Alpha teleport to Billy's garage to help Trini figure things out, and he grabs a megaphone to warn the rest of the fair that it's actually a trap. Everyone starts scattering like bugs because they're fat white people who believe anything said loudly. In the span of 20 seconds, the entire fair is cleaned out.
Before the Rangers can celebrate, a small group of clowns begin approaching them and acting goofy. The Rangers manage to laugh at the clowns, which will go down in history as the first time a human being has found a clown amusing. One by one the clowns morph into Putties and gather around the Teens, ignoring their plea of "Don't Send in the Clowns." Pineapple shows up to lure Billy away, because this clown knows easy prey when he sees it.
What follows is easily the best Putty fight we've seen so far. It's honestly got really impressive choreography with each of the Rangers fighting Putties in select segments of the fairgrounds. What strikes me as so unique about this fight is how dynamic and visually appealing it is. Usually when we get an unmorphed Putty fight it's just in some undisclosed park or a boring mountainside. Here we get to see the Putties beaten up in unique ways with regards to the environment, and the Rangers look like they're actually seeking out advantages in their location to stop the Putties. It's seriously worth checking out even if this episode doesn't sound appealing to you.
Putty carnival ride I don't know what's funnier, the idea of them just slapping the costume on there, or a stuntman forced to be glued to that fucking thing.
The Rangers corner Pineapple the Clown and tell him it's his turn to get thrown onto a carousel or something. Instead of doing any goofy shit with his magic dust, he starts to melt into the goddamn ground, turning into the Pineoctopus. The demon fruit cackles at the Rangers while they stare at him, wondering what exactly he's supposed to be.
Pineapple the Clown A pineapple with curly fry hair?
I have to give the writers credit, if you showed me a picture of this thing from Japan and told me to give it a name, I'd be completely at a loss. Pineoctopus might actually be one of the best names they've come up with yet.
Trini and Alpha 5 try and resuscitate Sylvia from her cardboard prison, and Alpha 5 finds the miracle cure for Sylvia's condition is water. Water. That stuff that the Earth has a little bit of. Pineoctopus's evil scheme could be counteracted by a light drizzle. You need to have a solution to fix Sylvia's condition, I get it, but in a lab full of a bunch of fucking pretend science junk your only idea to solving it is "I unno let's dump a bunch of water on her." This sorta ties into something a little later in the loosest sense, but we'll get there soon.
Oh and I guess Sylvia is saved because Alpha throws a bucket of water on her, who gives a shit?
The Rangers fight against Goldar in the park while waiting for Trini, and get completely trashed by him. He's about to go in for the killing blow but Pineoctopus comes in and stops him. Pineoctopus starts sprinkling magic dust from his antenna, while Goldar, Squatt, and Baboo are in the background sneezing. Maybe this monster was supposed to have the power to give people the sniffles, but then they met a guy who could make cardboard cutouts of actors and decided it was worth the 40 bucks to hire him.
Pineoctopus mentions that the Rangers suits seem to be preventing his magic from working on them, even though every time he tries using his dust we see the Rangers desperately fleeing from it while holding their mouths. Y'know, the mouths they have on their helmets, which might also help prevent dust inhalation.
Instead of doing the thing Rita told him to do and Finster trained him to do, Pineoctopus starts throttling the Rangers and whipping them with tentacle vines. They don't seem to put up any fight whatsoever, they just hold their Blade Blasters out as he taunts them. It really looks like he's gonna make this fight a total shut-out.
Rita decides the fact her monster is absolutely kicking ass isn't enough of an advantage, so she uses her wand to make Pineoctopus grow. This is the second week in a row she's not willing to just let her monsters do their thing and gets impatient enough to speed it along. She may also want to be careful putting that Pineoctopus anywhere near the clouds considering they're filled with its deadly weakness, motherfucking H2O.
Trini runs in and tells the Rangers Sylvia is alright, they react as strongly as you would to hearing about a nice lunch your mother had yesterday. The fact that Trini's ancillary character of a cousin is no longer a giant ridiculous piece of cardboard is met with as much interest as the fact that Olive Garden had fantastic pasta at a very reasonable price. "BIG DEAL!" the Pineoctopus bellows from above.
Now before we move along with the fight I just want to inform you fine people that at one point Pineoctopus had an article on Wikipedia where it said his catchphrase was big deal. Let me inform you that as a connoisseur of the Power Rangers franchise, that I have watched this episode three times in the past week. Pineoctopus has said that phrase exactly once, which isn't a goddamn catchphrase you moron. Every time I think about the Pineoctopus (every day of my life) I think about that inane attempt at creating trivia. If the idiot who edited that is reading this review right now, I demand an apology because to this day I will never forget how fucking dumb that statement was.
So The Rangers leap into their Zords or whatever and manhandle the Pineoctopus now that he's bigger than them, but instead of forming the Megazord they use all five of the Dinozords separately to attack him. Something they should do a lot more, but we have to show off that the five toys we're selling can combine so fuck that noise.
Billy ties up the Pineoctopus with the Triceratops' Dinozord's horns, while Trini commands Zack to use his Zord's frost breath to freeze Pineoctopus over. What I think we're supposed to gather from this is that Pineoctopus has a weakness to frozen water just like his magic spells did, but we don't hear anything about this, just that Trini thinks he deserves to be frozen like Sylvia did. Regardless of what we're supposed to think, the Pineoctopus is now put on ice.
Pineoctopus frozen This is what ice looks like right?
Jason calls on the Rangers to finish off the Pineoctopus, and they do so by combining into the Megazord for no real reason other than to kill their incapacitated foe. It's a really needless sequence made to shoehorn the Megazord into an episode that was fine without it. If you recall in Episode 2, the Tyrannosaurus Dinozord used a breath attack to kill the Giant. Well in the Japanese episode that's how they killed off Pineoctopus. Instead, we have to take the long way around to see the Megazord come together, fire a laser from its forehead, and pretend we can't see the T-Rex from behind the smoke.
Megazord cranial laser gif The T-Rex is back and to the left, back and to the left, back....and to the left.
With the Pineoctopus dead we find ourselves back at the fair. What a second what? Why are we at the fair? Rita said earlier that this whole thing was a fake fair, she used those exact words to describe it. When the fuck did they find time to get employees to fill this place out. It was the 90's, people didn't need jobs that bad. I know I said how happy I was they were on a unique set for this episode, but if ever there was a fine time to regroup at the Juice Bar, now would be it. They could even just be hanging out at the empty fairgrounds, but now there's people on the rides having a great time. Whoever was writing this episode must have forgotten what they wrote the day before and just didn't bother fixing it.
We end with an actually sweet moment of Sylvia apologizing to Trini for running off, and Trini thanking her for being a great cousin. It'd be a lot more sweet if we would ever see Sylvia again, but I'm sure she'll be off in Limbo somewhere with Maria, Willy, and Sharkie. Sorry kid, didn't feel like cutting you another check!
Your Weekly 90's Nostalgia: Fairs run by pedophiles Toy Pineapples
Personal Thoughts:
This episode was released as part of a five part series of VHS tapes based around each of the five Power Rangers. As you can guess, this is obviously the episode they used to represent the Pink Ranger. Remember how much I talked about her in this episode? Good times.
Pineapple the Clown was played by an entertainer by the name of Vernon Ballesteros. It's odd that they went out of their way to hire a guy who works as a clown, and not have him do anything but laugh and jump around while ruffling a little girl's hair. Maybe they had more actual things for him to do in the original draft of the script before deciding he needed to throw more dust.
In the Zyuranger episode this is based on, the monster is also masquerading as a clown. The difference is that there's no fair or anything tying into that disguise, he's just a clown because he felt like being a clown. I sincerely doubt this is a massive coincidence, but it makes me wonder why bother using that part of the plot at all? They never use any shots of the Japanese clown, nor could they really because he was always in shots with other characters. It seems odd they would use such a nothing part of the original plot to fuel their writing of this episodes adaptation.
Speaking of the Japanese footage, the editor does something rather clever when Finster discusses using the Pineoctopus. We see scenes of the Pineoctopus standing around and gesturing to nobody in particular while using its little tentacle whip things. In the Zyuranger episode, he was fighting the unmorphed Yellow Ranger. Instead of using the fight and pretending the Japanese actor is just an alien or something, they change unusable footage into a demonstration of the monster we'll see soon. It's a nice preview and manages to keep little dorks like me interested.
The U.S. crew also had access to the Pineoctopus suit, and it appears to have held up pretty well because we actually get a couple shots of them using it. It's just the monster bobbing up and down and laughing, but it's better than nothing. The only thing I noticed while getting pictures was that for some reason the U.S. version of Pineoctopus looks less shiny and a little slimmer than the Japanese version. Look at his pine cone midsection specifically.
Japanese Footage
U.S. Footage
It's hard to see Hollyweird's influence was able to reach even pineapple monsters. I thought he was beautiful a little heavier, but the U.S. standards must have thought differently.
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Post by sbtbfanatic on Jul 16, 2015 3:20:37 GMT
Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers Episode 12: Power Ranger Punks
Today the Ranger Teens are enjoying a little R and R on the beach after an exhausting visit to a fair last week. Everyone but Kim is playing volleyball together, and if you guessed that Billy emasculates himself, then please give yourself a gold star. Kim and Zack both give him positive reinforcement, which actually comes across as sincere and sweet. Billy did kinda hit the ball, so I guess that counts for something right?
We check in on the Moon Palace where we see Baboo hard at work on giving his character a trait. Who's Baboo you ask? He's the one you forgot about because he isn't stupid enough to be Squatt or smart enough to be Finster. Baboo is tinkering with a bunch of tubes, beakers, and any other dime store science shit the prop department could afford, all to create his patented "Punk Potion."
Baboo bicycle BABOO! WHY IS MY BIKE COVERED IN FUR AND JIZM?!
Before we can get much further into the episode, the Putties abruptly show up on the beach and begin to attack. There's never any moment where Baboo or Rita or anybody says they should send the Putties down to distract the Power Rangers, so we're just left to assume they decided to show up on their own accord. Baboo is flying and squeezing drops of his Potion into some water the Teens have, but he never acknowledges the Putties at all.
Now you remember last week when I said the Putty fight was really great and had a unique atmosphere to it? Well they decided to make up for it this week with one of the absolute worst Putty fights ever. It's really choppy and ugly and you can barely see any hits connect. It's filmed in this fucking absurd style that doesn't flow at all. Why is it every time I love something on this show they have to turn around almost instantly and do it worse the next time?
putty patrollers beach Did I just have a stroke?
With the Rangers distracted by the visually wretched Putty fight, Baboo uses a pipette to drip his potion into the Rangers drinks. All the magical tricks of an evil space witch are at your disposal and you resort to space roofies. Billy and Kim rush over to the drinks as soon as the Putties are cleared out and gulp down their entire drink. The drink look to be some kind of clear soda, but knowing how square these characters are it's probably just sparkling tap water. Now get ready, because the second the last drop hits their throats, Amy Jo Johnson and David Yost decide to crank up the fucking cheese by 500%.
Billy and Kim toss the rest of the drinks to the ground, so we're spared seeing the whole crew of Rangers acting like stereotypes of people who don't exist. Kim and Billy's attitude change needs to be seen to be believed. It's cringe inducing to watch, it's so hammy, over the top, ridiculous and uncomfortable I couldn't stop grimacing. Kim just adds needless syllables to everything she says while Billy shouts at everybody. They also scream about how everything is for dorks like we're watching Ed, Edd, and Eddy. They act like a less subtle Bulk and Skull. Read that again, they took the subtlety out of Bulk and motherfucking Skull.
Rita seems quite impressed with this turn of events, because someone is finally chewing the scenery harder than she is. Baboo plays coy about how well his plan worked and Rita immediately tells him to shove it up his ape ass because Finster needs to make her a monster. It's really the perfect representation of Baboo, somebody who feels they genuinely have something to contribute and can be top of the heap if they're just given a chance, but then they get shrugged off and told to get the fuck into the background where they belong.
Finster announces his monster du jour today, the Terror Toad. He's not exactly the most creative monster Finster has come up with, as he's just a big frog with a giant stomach and a horn atop his head. However Finster promises great success with this frog because if Baboo did something right today there must be room for someone with actual talent to accomplish a task.
At Angel Grove High School, we meet up with Bulk and Skull who are furiously pounding on Bulk's locker, trying to get it to open. Before I was able to joke that there was food jamming the lock, Bulk forced it open causing a massive amount of food to spill out of it. Not food in any kind of containers, just a bunch of popcorn kernels, peanuts, and hot dog buns. We're then forced to ignore the fact that a grown man high school student is stashing theater grade popcorn in his locker when we get a peek at the new Kimberly and Billy waltzing down the steps.
Billy Kimberly punks You dropped your hairline McFly!
Punk Kim and Punk Billy quickly hassle a 30 year old extra for his lunch money, while Bulk and Skull are awestruck that there are more G rated punks around school. Punk Kim starts flirting with Skull who is taken aback by a girl talking to him. He looks at her like she's from Mars when she says they should go out on Saturday and fuck like hyenas. Skull jizzes in his boxers (covered in skulls) and stammers out an "okay."
Billy however is not asking Bulk on a date, he tells Bulk that the new duo of bullies will make Bulk look like a fucking nun compared to him. Bulk tries to talk trash to Billy, but gets smashed into his locker for his troubles. The interactions between Bulk and Skull and Kim and Billy post Punking is one of the great things in this episode. Kim and Billy overacting by themselves is insufferable, but when they play off of the bullies who do this shit every week, there's a lot more to it than them just calling the rest of the Rangers dorks.
Speaking of the rest of the Rangers, they find their friends attitude change a massive problem. How can there be bullies in the world who aren't instantly hit with messy food after beating up on nerds? Zordon and Alpha take note of the fact the Power Rangers have been infected with some kind of personality, and decides it's time to take preventative actions. Without any warning, he teleports them out of school and into the Command Center. Hey Zordon, maybe if you want your Rangers not getting their identities discovered don't zap them with magic teleport beams during 4th period.
Zordon says he's placed Kim and Billy inside of a "transparent forcefield." The two words in the English language that best demonstrate how little money a production has. Billy and Kim are unable to move past the glowing neon pipes and are forced to ham it up in an enclosed space. Kim even threatens to kick Zordon and Alpha's buns for doing this. Clearly that Punk Potion couldn't take the white out of these whitebread losers, cause holy shit she literally said "buns". Get fucked.
Zordon shows the Rangers what Baboo did to turn the Rangers from, as he puts it, "good to bad." Kim and Billy need to drink some magical singing squash to fix their over acting. Zordon tells the Rangers how he discovered this magical squash years ago when he was looking for cheap alternatives to getting high, but it's only located in dimensional rifts or some other nonsense. Punk Billy and Punk Kim seem to have no reaction while listening to a plan that will fundamentally change their behaviors, and instead tell the other Rangers to take a picture, as it will last longer.
Zordon Barza Zordon before the giant blue head days.
Before Zordon can tell the teens to go on some stupid fetch quest for a rutabaga, the Viewing Globe shows off Rita's new Terror Toad monster. Billy and Kim see Terror Toad, and they like him because he has warts or some other stupid 90's malarkey. They aren't even punks, they're just acting like Beavis and Butthead. Trini, Jason, and Zack decide they need to go fight Terror Toad alone, since Billy and Kim would be worthless in a fight while trying to bang a 6 foot frog. Thankfully since its 3 Rangers against one monster, they shouldn't have a problem.
Terror Toad yellow ranger
Oh. For nothing but a big fat frog Terror Toad cleans house with the three Power Rangers. Well two now, it looks like Trini's dead. It's actually pretty terrifying because there's no moment where Terror Toad mentions how she's trapped in his stomach or they have to act fast to save her. Nope! He just says they're next and he's going to fucking devour them. It's like they just accept Trini has been killed and they need to step up their game or they're going to die too. If you were a little fat kid in 1993, you very well could have just assumed they weren't going to have a Yellow Ranger anymore.
Alpha 5 mutters about how terrifying everything looks and how everyone is doomed. Zordon says it's time for him to earn his goddamn rent around here and sends Alpha to retrieve the singing squash. Alpha is of course shocked he's being asked to do something relevant to the plot, and teleports to a dimensional rift made of trash bags and fog machines.
The Singing Squash resides in an inter-dimensional hotbox.
Alpha grabs the squash, but before he can leave he's accosted by Putty Patrollers. Alpha decides to man the fuck up for once in his life and turns on an electric current which electrocutes the Putties when they try to grab him. Then Alpha uses the obnoxious singing squash to make the Putties retreat. Good for you Alpha, now go back to whining and complaining for the next 4 seasons.
Meanwhile, Jason and Zack aren't doing much better against Terror Toad. The two try and use their Power Weapons on him but he doesn't even flinch. After knocking the Rangers around a little more, Terror Toad devours Black Ranger with his horn. He talks about how delicious the Power Rangers are, and mentions something about getting off on this eating people business, all while Jason realizes this episode is fucking weird.
Back at the Command Center, Alpha has finished up Billy and Kim's squash tonics, and presents the Punkified Rangers with the magical elixir. Instead of offering any amount of suspicion, the two down the drinks immediately, and turn back into their old boring selves again. I've never been so happy to hear Kim ask who did her nails, but here we are. Now that Billy and Kim are free from Baboo's spell, they realize it's time to get some toad guts on their boots and morph to fight alongside Jason.
Just before Jason fills up Toad's stomach, Billy and Kim leap into action and use their Blade Blasters to hack off his horn. Thankfully, now he won't be eating any mo-
terror toad eating gif JESUS CHRIST
Kim notices a small secondary face underneath Toad's chin which she believes to be his weak spot. Billy and Kim shuffle around a little bit to try and get Toad to reveal his weakness again, but Toad is having none of it and devours Billy. Kim tries to fire off an arrow while Toad is chowing down, but Baboo shows up and shoves her down. That's the extent of Baboo as a villain. Shoving women to the ground and running away.
It also accomplishes nothing because Kim just jumps into the air and fires her arrows again, this time nailing Terror Toad right in his doublechin. Toad spits out the other four Rangers as energy balls, and they promptly beat the fuck out of him with their Power Weapons. Kim finishes Terror Toad off with a shot from her Power Bow. I'm not sure why they didn't just use the Power Blaster instead, but the shot of her firing the arrow is so goddamn good I don't care.
Terror Toad death power bow Kimberly Power Ranger Punks: Directed by Sam Raimi
The Rangers pose triumphantly, as Baboo trips over himself running away after the failure of this entire absurd plan. Baboo literally says "homina homina" as he's running, that's how ridiculous this is. Baboo can't even take one fucking episode to be a legitimate threat, he just does one moderately important task and when it blows up in his face he runs off.
We end today's romp with Bulk and Skull meeting up with the girls at the Juice Bar, Skull is dressed with a shitty looking overcoat, bowtie, and monocle in preparation for getting elbow deep in Kim. Bulk tries to add himself in for a double date with Trini, who is equally disgusted at some loser trying to pork her. She rebuts Skull's advances, even after Skull says they can go eat a nice dinner of frog's legs. Bulk sadly crumples up the one condom he stole from his older brother, hoping this would finally be the night he gets to tell Trini this punk act was all for her, and he just wanted her to notice him. She was the one he always pined for, and now that he had the strength to admit it to her, he wants to give her his undying love and passion on this beautiful evening. Then she calls him a Neanderthal and he goes back to his locker to stuff his face full of moldy popcorn.
Billy tells Bulk and Skull to leave the girls who will never fuck him alone, and Bulk chooses to prove his masculinity by playing volleyball with the guy Rangers. Unfortunately for the bullies, they last about 8 seconds of game-time before falling into the net and guaranteeing they will not be getting to 2nd base with the girls tonight. Sorry fellas!
Your Weekly 90's Nostalgia: Transparent Forcefields
Personal Thoughts:
I hate to rag on Amy Jo Johnson and David Yost in this episode. They're honestly not bad actors, they aren't always given good material to work with but they're typically able to do something with it. When you tell them to pretend to be over the top stereotypes of what a bunch of old men in a room assume bullies are? That's when you've got trouble.
This episode's plot is adapted from the Japanese plot in a manner of speaking. The whole idea of blue and pink getting turned into punks by Baboo is still there, but in the Japanese version they get turned into mafia thugs and start shooting up gangsters. Maybe Standards and Practices didn't want to have gangsters getting murdered on their Monday morning Fox Kids lineup, so they decided to scale things back a bit.
It's really nuts to think about it, that they just used the same idea from the Japanese version when absolutely nothing in the usable footage dictated it. Baboo squeezes little red droplets from the sky, Red Yellow and Black fight a frog monster, Blue and Pink show up later and the frog gets killed. You don't have to do the whole punk thing if you don't want, you can do whatever you want. Most likely they just wanted to finish writing this script and work on whatever was due the next day.
Terror Toad is one of the monster costumes it seems like Saban didn't have access too, but looking at his picture above, he doesn't seem like a particularly complicated monster to try and put together. I think if the crew really wanted to they could probably make their own shitty looking U.S. Terror Toad costume, but they managed to use the footage of him rather effectively.
For those of you curious to see Terror Toad in action, maybe don't click the videos on Youtube. I tried to not too long ago only to find the top few videos fetishizing him eating the Power Rangers. It astounds me to rifle through Deviantart and find people making fetishes out of fucking Power Rangers monsters, but that's the age we live in I guess. People on the internet whackin' it thinking about frogs eating them alive, that's what the age of technology has brought us. I think what this guy on Youtube had to say sums it all up.
I have an odd history with this episode. When I was a teenager, I was on a medication called Xanax that's used in treating anxiety. Those of you with a knowledge of prescription drugs will probably know Xanax as "Holy shit that fucks you up real bad." Well as a dumb teenager who spent time watching old VHS Power Rangers tapes, I decided I didn't need medicine to be okay, so I decided to quit cold turkey.
Mistake #1.
Well after a few days of not taking my medication, I was feeling sort of strange. I had the tape in my VCR playing Power Ranger Punks so hey, maybe I just didn't like the episode. Well I must have really not liked it, because I started feeling my chest trying to expel itself out of my body. I had a horrendous throbbing headache and was rolling around on my bed while the show kept playing. I felt like I was honestly about to go insane, it was fucking terrifying.
I wasn't moving around violently, but just trying to find some understanding of why I felt so horrible so abruptly. This was when I started dry heaving and feeling like my body might be shutting down because of whatever was happening. I felt like I was honestly moments away from becoming completely catatonic. We're talking Jack Nicholson in Cuckoo's Nest.
By this point my mom must have heard her son auditioning for the Exorcist remake in the basement and came down to see what the fuck was going on. She figured out pretty quick that I needed some kind of pill, and when I explained the situation she grabbed a Xanax and told me I needed to take it now. Since I figured taking a pill would be preferable to my body ripping itself apart like I was possessed by The Thing, I decided to oblige.
It didn't take long for everything to cool down, and my body ceased its involuntary fuckery. The most important thing to remember in this cautionary tale is during all of this happening, I was seeing this episode of Power Rangers. I had to see Kim drool out the word "geekoid" to Zordon while Billy screamed at Alpha for better service. There was a good five minutes that I was completely alone with nothing but my body betraying me, and the Terror Toad. Five minutes that felt like an absolute eternity. This experience was fucking with me so badly that I thought my life was going to end. I thought that in my final moments on this planet I would have to see this.
This would be the last thing I knew before shuffling loose this mortal coil, that the Terror Toad was hungry for Ranger meat. If there was a maker for me to meet, I would have to inform the alpha and the omega that the last moment I had on the planet was thinking about how Kim had to tough it out to beat the Terror Toad.
I am, hopefully, the one person in the world who can successfully say I suffered horrendous withdrawals while watching Terror Toad eat some Power Rangers.
Maybe that's why I don't find him as sexy, I dunno.
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Post by sbtbfanatic on Jul 16, 2015 3:21:25 GMT
Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers Episode 13: Peace Love and Woe
Immediately this episode gives me reason for concern. Everyone is setting up for a vague nondescript party inside the Youth Center and Bulk barrels in on a skateboard. Everyone dives out of his way as, what the fuck else could possibly happen, he falls face first into a cake Ernie has. Why is that so suspect? This happens in the span of two goddamn minutes, I'll even prove it with the timecode.
Bulk falls into cake Bulk Cream Pie.gif
Including the opening credits, it didn't even take this episode two minutes to go to the Bulk cake well. Does this mean the rest that follows is that bad they had to use their trump card early? As we all know in terms of writing Power Rangers scripts, Bulk falling into a cake is the equivalent of pocket aces, it pays dividends.
Rita plans to send a monster down because the Rangers won't expect it, and it'll be a piece of cake. So the absolute only reason for Rita to use a monster today is because she wanted to make a pun about a fat guy falling into a cake. We haven't been doing the show THAT long guys, if Rita's premises for sending monsters down are already this shoddy then maybe we can start writing around them.
Ernie has had enough of Bulk and Skull's shenanigans and tells them if they're not going to pay for the cake, or stop falling into every goddamn piece of food he has to sell, they will never set foot inside his Juice Bar again. Ernie must have been crunching the numbers and realized if he doesn't put his foot down now with these two he'll be bankrupt by the end of the week.
With the bullies out of everyone's hair, the rest of the Ranger Teens begin talking with Billy. They must take to ignoring him when bullies are around in the hopes that he isn't noticed and dumped into the trash. They ask Billy if he's going to the Vague Party with anyone, and to the surprise of absolutely nobody, Billy will be busy with some science nonsense tonight. Something about electrocuting your testicles while watching anime porno to simulate the feeling of being with a woman. Jason actually prods Billy a bit to ask someone in his class, all while Trini sits in the background twiddling her thumbs, with feelings she dare not speak. That or she's secretly dating Bulk and is too ashamed to tell her friends about it.
The show's in a hurry though, as Billy walks out of the Juice Bar and right into a cute girl named Marge. What's supposed to be a moment of genuine "teenage" romance blooming, is overlaid with patented "fuck-me" saxophone while Billy and Marge make goo-goo eyes at each other. Since this show operates on the simplest of arithmetic, Marge is also very intelligent and speaks fluent thesaurus, so she gives Billy a massive overall piercing erection.
Marge and Billy start talking, and connect over the fact they were both in the Accelerated Baby Genius Program. Luckily for them neither were in the Accelerated Baby Geniuses 2 Program. Marge asks Billy if he's going to the party with anyone tonight, and Billy looks at his shoes and starts mumbling about how he's busy and can't go. Marge gives him a massive smile and says she hasn't asked anyone "yet." The rest of the Rangers call Billy over and tell him it's an emergency, while pointing to their communicators.
When Billy shuffles over to the Teens, they drop the emergency angle and immediately tell him to ask Marge to the dance before he fucks this one up. Billy gets whiny that they lied about an emergency but Zack tells him this is the biggest emergency of his life.
Honestly, this little moment is fantastic, it's something that's totally believable for a bunch of teenagers to do. They have this huge important task under their belts, but they decide to use it to help convince one of their friends he needs to get some action tonight. It beats the Rangers picking up garbage at the local Terminal Illness Orphanage, and it makes them look like human beings. They fight off a bunch of Clay Moon Demons but still find time to help Billy bust a nut. We need more of this and less of the "Gee golly shucks kids at home you should live up to our impossible goody two shoes standards."
Billy says he couldn't possibly ask out a cute girl who's totally into him, and Marge abruptly says it's time for her to go. Before she goes though she asks Billy if he'd take her to the Vague Party, because she's wetter than the Mississippi and if this dork doesn't pick up on it she's gonna find someone else who will. Billy puts his hands in his overall pockets and says he'd love to take her to the party, thanking the ghost of Isaac Newton he didn't have to actually talk to a g-g-g-girl.
Billy and Marge Billy's scoping out that neck like he's a Dracula
Rita is having none of this romance bullshit though, because if Billy pops his cherry tonight she is going to have the mother of all headaches. Repulsa calls on her newest monster, Madame Woe, to intercept Billy at the park where he's going to meet Marge, and finish him off. We're introduced to Madame Woe on a secluded beach doing all sorts of wack ass magic and it's actually pretty goddamned cool.
Madame Woe Gif A Valkyrie with scoliosis, Rita's most fearsome warrior yet.
Marge waits in the park for Billy to show up, only to encounter Madame Woe instead. Woe refers to her as a Power Ranger, and teleports Marge into a small dark dimension. Here's where you can unquestionably look at Rita's schemes and realize she has no idea what she's doing. She knew Billy was going to be in the park, she knew the time he was going to be in the park, she knows the identity of all five Power Rangers and is constantly watching them help Billy get laid. She was in such a goddamn hurry to make a monster who could successfully cuckold Billy that she couldn't take the extra half a second of time to say "Oh the kid you're looking for is some dork in overalls, later Woe." Rita bitches to the camera that Madame Woe ruined her super great plan, but she's the one who didn't even tell Madame Woe the gender of the Ranger she was kidnapping.
Billy struts up to the park looking for Marge and his only opportunity to get to first base, only to find her nowhere to be found. He sees her necklace lying on the ground and thinks something fishy is going on. Apparently Billy has never experienced being ditched by a girl who says they want to date him, which I find far more suspicious.
Rita sends some Putties down to attack Billy, seeing her one chance in a millennium for them to do something right. Billy starts getting backed up against the lake by the Putties while calling Jason for help. It's surprising how long it feels like it's been and Billy still hasn't gotten the guts to at least put up a fight against a small group of Putties. Thankfully Billy's friends are able to drop what they're doing and bail him out against Rita's warbling idiots. Of course one Putty does learn a new trick to use against Kimberly.
Putty Patrol Kimberly gif Who the fuck left that there?
Zordon brings the Rangers to the Command Center to give them the scoop on Madame Woe. She has power over weather or something, all controlled with a jewel she has stuck inside her forehead. Zordon says they have to combine their powers to defeat her, which seems like it should be a common thread in this show about a team of superheroes, but it's particularly important this time. The Rangers need to combine their Power Coins together to give one Ranger the power of all five combined, and Billy volunteers to be the one who uses their powers to help save Marge. Here's all our Ranger power combined Billy, have a good time getting your glasses knocked off and then pantsed. Idiot.
The Rangers morph to fight Woe, and are immediately sucked into her dimension. While inside the dimension, Billy spies Marge and very intelligently yells out her name while running to her. Marge doesn't think it at all queer that a complete stranger knows her name or sounds exactly like that dork from the Juice Bar she wants to bang. For someone who was such a genius baby she sure is a dense adult.
The Rangers try and defeat Madame Woe, but since they're in her world she just teleports around them and whips them with her braids. Jason and Zack try using their Power Weapons, but Woe just laughs in their face and hurls them around using her hair. Billy leads the female rangers to fire on Woe with their Blade Blasters, but she just floats around in the sky cackling at them. Woe is actually giving a pretty impressive display of ass kicking because the Rangers haven't laid a hand on her yet.
Billy suggests the Rangers should try doing that thing Zordon said they needed to do in order to win. Woe blasts the Rangers even more and says they'll never be able to defeat her. After the piddling fight they've put up against her so far I'm inclined to agree. Billy lunges at Woe with his Power Lance and grapples with her, and the rest of the Rangers combine their energy with Billy allowing him to escape from Woe's dimension and into the mountains. If you aren't following all this power combining stuff don't worry, we'll never use it again. Thankfully Billy's using it to its full extent against Madame Woe!
Madame Woe Blue Ranger Ma'am please stand still I'm trying to kill you
As you might guess if you have any cognitive abilities at all, Billy tries to fight Madame Woe and gets his ass stomped. Woe blasts him with a bunch of water, strangles him with her braids, electrocutes him, really just fucks his whole day up. It's not even a fair fight. Billy gets his shit pushed in to an embarrassing degree. If this is all the power the Rangers have combined, then Zordon should just throw in the towel already. Billy gets beaten on for a solid minute and a half while Woe just laughs in his face, it's emasculating. Billy decides to stop losing the fight out of nowhere and trips Madame Woe and gets her in a full nelson. After that Billy finds the only way to defeat her is through horrible editing.
Madame Woe US Footage See if you can spot the difference!
Remember last week when I asked why they didn't try to cobble together a US Terror Toad suit? Fuck all that, never try and make a US monster costume again. They didn't even put a goddamn crown on her. She's got no hair in the back either because they didn't feel like buying more blue yarn. What is that? I'll talk about this more later, but for now Marge and the Rangers are freed from Madame Woe's dimension, and the Power Rangers team up with Billy to take on the hairless Madame Woe.
Madame Woe is livid that the Rangers got out of her dimension and screams "You escaped?" Billy follows up with, "But you won't, Madame Woe." Reading it may not do it any justice, but that line right there? Fucking fantastic. Billy, a dorky nerdlinger in overalls, just told this crazy weather valkyrie that she's about to be murdered. This is Power Rangers at its best, the little moments that bring back the "HOLY SHIT YES!" feeling you had as a kid.
The Rangers bring out the Power Blaster to blow away Madame Woe, all while Rita complains about the fact her monsters always lose. Thankfully the Rangers have saved Marge with enough time to get to the Vague Party happening at Ernie's right now! Billy gives Marge back her necklace, which she gives him a kiss for. Since this is Power Rangers, that's the equivalent of anal, so Billy is floored. Not everyone is having a great time though, because Bulk and Skull really wanted to show up to this party, and found a way around being kicked out.
Bulk and Skull disguise Sorry pal, no Ruskis allowed in the Juice Bar
Ernie sees right through that bullshit and tells Bulk if he doesn't pay him for that cake he's getting taken to civil court. Bulk decides to finally be responsible for one fucking thing in his entire life that he did wrong, and consults "the bank." This of course refers to the money that Bulk keeps in between his toes because he's a 90's bully stereotype and he's out of his goddamn mind. Ernie gets a single whiff of the money and passes out on top of the new cake he's bought.
The ending resolves with a completely ridiculous scene of a bunch of awkward extra dancing, as Ernie wakes up and dances with them. It's completely surreal and even has Bulk and Skull looking at everyone dancing as if they were tripping on LSD. Maybe they were, that's how Ernie got the new cake so cheap. Oh well, at least Billy got a handy under the table tonight.
Your Weekly 90's Nostalgia: Toe Money
Personal Thoughts:
This episode is actually a lot more fun than I remembered it being. It moves along at a really fast pace and doesn't care about dwelling on things. The Rangers combine their powers so Billy can escape and that's immediately done with. It seems like a really cool fighting tactic but it amounts to nothing and may as well not have happened since they never use it again.
Billy falls in love with Marge about 3 seconds after bumping into her, which comes about 2 seconds after saying he has nobody to take to the dance. The show sometimes suffers from pacing things quickly like this, but it's all stuff that you anticipate happening so the show doesn't waste time on it, I appreciate that. It keeps things moving along in a fun way.
Madame Woe is the first female monster we'll get to see, and is actually voiced by Alex Borstein, the voice of Lois on Family Guy. Alex will do a scarce number of roles on the early years of Power Rangers, but it's good to see someone from this show going on to get a great deal of success from such humble beginnings.
For all you interested folks out there, Madame Woe's death may look a little different from other Power Blaster deaths! The beam is a little different, but that's because in Zyuranger Madame Woe was finished off by a currently unintroduced weapon combination called the Ranger Slingers. This was one of only two uses the weapon combo had, and was cut so the show could put this episode earlier into the season. Even if you're paying close attention there's little noticeable difference, so I'd say they made the right call.
Ranger Slingers gif Thunder Slingers Don't wait to see this in Power Rangers, you'll be disappointed.
You want to know what they made the wrong call with? That fucking U.S. Madame Woe costume. If they knew they had to change the scene and didn't have the Japanese costume all they would have to do is cut to Billy firing his Blade Blaster at her crystal and have the shot of Woe reeling from it. Instead they give us a bald Madame Woe with no helmet and felt eyes.
They had to reshoot the scene because the Japanese episode had a little girl putting a gem on Woe's forehead, and that's perfectly fair; but if you know you don't have the costume and think that thing is going to pass, then take the extra 10 minutes to find a helmet to put on it or something.They took the time to rebuild Madame Woe's head to the best of their ability when it probably would have taken less effort to just figure a way around the footage. It's such a weird and jarring cut that still stands out to me as something they could have fixed with a little out of the box thinking.
Or maybe it doesn't matter at all since this is a kid's show and who could possibly care? I still like the episode a lot so it's hardly a complete mood killer. Just something I wanted to share.
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Post by sbtbfanatic on Jul 16, 2015 3:51:50 GMT
Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers Episode 14: Foul Play in the Sky
Based on everything I've written so far, try telling me something about Kimberly aside from how she was your first love. She's cute and she does gymnastics and she likes shopping. Were you able to come up with much more? She taught a deaf girl how to dance, she doesn't like pollution, a potion turned her into Biff Tannen, and she helped a little girl get kidnapped. Those aren't character traits though, just things they had her do. She, like the rest of the characters, are supposed to be stereotypes and fit in a mold. None of the episodes really lend themselves to fitting those characters into a mold though and just become rather interchangeable. Today all we're focusing on is Kim going on a plane ride. If you just swapped her and Zack it wouldn't make any difference at all.
Kim gives Trini a call on a payphone to tell her how excited she is to go flying with her Uncle. For some reason Kimberly is ecstatic about going flying in an airplane, even though the big point of this show is how these teenagers all ride Dinozords, and hers is the only one that flies. Wouldn't an airplane be a bit of a downgrade from that? Kim's Uncle Steve comes up and tells her he just got a letter and wonders who it's from, also that it's about time to go flying.
We transition to the Juice Bar where Zack's helping Jason work out, and nothing even related to Trini talking on the phone with Kim can be seen anywhere. We'll cover exactly why later, but for now just pretend she's off camera.
Zack gets an eyeful of the girl of his dreams Angela. What the fuck? I thought Zack and Jason were an item, who's this trollop? This show is ruining my OTP here something fierce and I will not stand for it. The only saving grace is that thankfully Angela is also black, because in the 90's interracial dating was illegal. There are magical wizards with talking robots who give teenagers dinosaur robots to fight demon space witches and servants of chaos made by a Satan worshiping sheep; but the second Kim asks Tyrese to the dance that's when this show is getting the plug pulled. Zack moves in on Angela and asks if she wants to chill with the Zack man, and she tells him to get fucked. Jason feels for his beloved though, and can't bear to see him in pain.
Jason Juice Bar gif Who wouldn't want to rest in those beefy arms?
There isn't a particularly good reason for Angela to not like Zack, she just seems to have no interest in him. We don't get a moment of her telling him he's too full of himself which appears to be the issue. It's mostly just that this is a kid's karate show so relationships have to be one-sided so we can make jokes about how bad someone is at flirting.
Zack Angela If you're colorblind this image will look much less ridiculous to you.
Rita is observing the Rangers, because she has absolutely nothing else to do but brainstorm ways to fuck with some teenagers. However she wasn't watching Zack while plotting to make a monster to cockblock him. Instead Rita is planning on drugging Kim's Uncle so that he crashes the plane with her in it. Repulsa seems to have taken the training wheels off because she's going whole hog into killing one of these kids. She's going to Buddy Holly that whole goddamn plane before she has to deal with one more headache. Rita asks Goldar to send down the Snizard monster as soon as Kim is out of commission.
...Oh right Goldar! The guy who's ostensibly Rita's second in command? The guy who we last saw sneezing because of Pineoctopus and his magic fairy dust? Yeah he's the guy helping make plans now. Goldar becomes significantly more important later on but it's interesting how little attention they paid to him early on in the series. Usually if he wasn't going down to fight they wouldn't even show him in the background. It's not worth holding this against Power Rangers though, it's just a show trying to find its footing with regards to a golden dog man.
Back at the plane where Uncle Steve's left his can of soda sitting on the wing, it's Squatt of all people who teleports down to put a sleeping potion inside of Steve's drink. This is the 2nd time in the last 3 weeks that the villain's plot has revolved around slipping space drugs into someone's drink. Maybe space these episodes out a little better guys. Squatt miraculously manages to not fuck up his insanely simple task, and vanishes back to the Moon Palace to receive his customary pat on the head.
Fear not though, because we're in no short supply of idiots this week. Bulk and Skull are sitting on a bench while watching planes fly by like they're observing a miracle of technology invented before their very eyes. Bulk spies Kimberly about to board a plane, and takes Skull as they chase after her. Kim reacts the same way you would if you saw these two goobers chasing after you.
Literally every face she makes is perfect.
The two beg to ride the plane with her, because Bulk and Skull just REALLY want to ride in one of them air-o-planes they've seen in the moving pic-a-tures. They also know that if they make a move on Kim inside the plane she won't be able to say no, because of the implication. Kim tries to make a point about the plane not having enough room, but cuts herself off before she destroys the last shred of Bulk's waning self esteem. Uncle Steve misses every single hint Kim is dropping and says her "friends" can come along if they want, and the bullies get in the backseat of the plane to take solace in ruining Kimberly's exciting day.
The plane takes off while Bulk and Skull are crammed into the backseat and clearly terrified of the fact they're off the ground. Bulk actually has a pretty good line when Skull asks if he's afraid of flying, "No, but I'm afraid of crashing." It's not hilarious on paper, but Paul Schrier's delivery on this material is really good. It's a testament to why people remember these two despite the crazy fantasy elements surrounding them.
Kim tries to forget about the party crashers and instead looks at the beautiful scenery stock footage of the four locations the Ranger Teens love hanging out at. She even passes by the mountainside where she and the Teens first morphed. She doesn't have much time to reminisce though, because Uncle Steve is starting to feel the effect of Squatt's Moon Roofie. Bulk and Skull hear that their pilot is feeling a little dizzy, and scream their heads off as the plane starts to teeter and fall out of the air.
Finster hears that the plan is working perfectly, and happily cranks a Snizard out of the Monstermatic. We get a bunch of exposition on how Snizard can summon cobras that will suck the energy out of the Power Rangers, but it all comes from Goldar this time around because we need to build him up as an actual character instead of a lumbering idiot like most of Rita's crew.
Snizard US Footage Snizard also volunteers at the local puppet show.
Bulk and Skull freak the fuck out while the plane goes down and Kim screams at them to shut up because she's trying to solve this problem. The bullies conveniently faint, allowing Kim to ask Zordon what the hell she's supposed to do if she wants to get out of this alive. Zordon and Alpha get into contact with Kim and honestly Amy Jo Johnson's acting is pretty good. You can tell how petrified she is and it's nice to see after seeing how hammy she and David Yost were a few weeks back as punks. Alpha brings up an extremely logical point and tells Kim to just morph out of the plane.
You see that? Right there? That's a really excellent point. It's great that they bothered to even address that Kim is able to do that. Obviously Kim isn't going to ditch her uncle or the two morons to save her own skin, but it's fantastic the show actually addresses the easiest way she could resolve her problem. It's logic this show doesn't need at all, but they're respecting the audience by doing so.
Rita sends the Snizard down to attack Angel Grove while Zordon realizes she's trying to pull some wicked shit. Alpha says he'll stop being a stammering ninny and instruct Kim how to land the plane. What follows is a really awkward cut outside the Command Center, and all of a sudden we just see the other four Ranger Teens inside the Command Center looking at nothing in particular on the ground. Don't worry about that for now though, because the Rangers have a Snizard to fight.
Before we get into the fight itself, I'd be remiss to not mention Snizard is voiced by one Bryan Cranston. Last week we had Alex Borestein doing a voice before she found her fortune and now we have a guy who's one of the biggest names in Hollywood voicing a lizard monster. Never stop dreaming kids. I also spent several hours trying to think of some good jokes based on Mr. Cranston's roles on T.V. and was able to come up with a few zingers!
The Rangers try and beat down Snizard but he absolutely demolishes all four of them. They try to shoot at the "Zapper Apple" he has atop his head, but he reflects their energy back at them and ties them up with snake ropes he shoots out of his throat. This is the 5th week in a row the Rangers have been completely blindsided by a monster, and it's fantastic.
Snizard gif Don't even pretend Billy.
Kim calms herself down and begins to get control of the plane with Alpha's instructions. The episode manages to be pretty tense here. We cut to the Rangers being completely ineffective against the Snizard a few times, while Kim is stuck in the air trying her best not to become the new Amelia Earhart. Bulk and Skull wake up from their bout of Convenient Fainting Syndrome to see Kim flying the plane. After a nice meaty double take, the two scream and pass out again. An intentionally funny moment? You spoil me Power Rangers.
Zordon informs Alpha that the Rangers need Kim's Power Bow to finish off Rita's monster. Alpha must divert his attention to Kim, and not the other four who are doomed to become snake chow. It's good they let us know that Kim is necessary to beat this monster, but this would have been more effective to learn earlier on. Without being told that she's necessary to beat Snizard until now it just looks like Alpha wants to save Kim so she can go get covered in snakes and die with the rest of her team.
Alpha starts backsassing Zordon, which we really ought to see a lot more of. He gripes that he needs four arms to take care of all the shit going on today. It's a moment that turns Alpha 5 into less of a spazzy annoying robot into a frustrated machine who can't keep up with all these crazy space alien shenanigans. We're really overdue for a scene of Alpha just chewing Zordon out and telling him to stop barking orders with his big blue jowls.
Alpha keeps Kim calmed down and tells her she can do anything she sets her mind to, and because believing in yourself creates miracles or something, she lands on the runway. Uncle Steve wakes up and helps her stop the plane, all while a control tower buzzes and asks what the fuck this plane is doing without alerting them to an emergency. Thanks Kim, you just got you uncle's pilot license revoked.
Kim runs off as fast as she can and morphs to fight Snizard. She teleports in at the absolute last second before Snizard can kill the other four Rangers with an arrow from his snake bow. She knocks the arrow out of his hands, and Snizard summons the Putty Patrol to take Kimberly down. Kim however has a difficult time with them!
Pink Ranger Putties
Kim frees her friends from the Snizard's snake ropes and fires her Power Bow at the apple on top of his head. With a single arrow, Kim blasts Snizard's Zapper Apple and he explodes. It's incredibly anticlimactic and makes Snizard look like a gigantic chump. No Power Blaster, no Zord fight, no nothing. Just a nice arrow to the apples. Rest in shit Snizard.
Kimberly Snizard What are you looking tense for Billy you didn't do anything.
There's a silly little wrap up in the Juice Bar where Kim impresses a total hunk of a boy about her flying prowess, while Zack and Jason are disgusted at heterosexual displays of affection. Also Zack totally ruins his chances with Angela again by bumping into her, causing her to spill a tray of milkshakes all over Bulk and Skull just as they walk in. The episode ends with us all laughing at the two bullies, but we're left to wonder if maybe Kimberly was meant to crash that plane. Perhaps she actually thwarted death's design, and all four of the passengers in that plane were meant to be smeared all over a mountain. Until we see Skull decapitated by a train running over a piece of sheet metal, we'll never know for sure.
Your Weekly 90's Nostalgia: Payphones
Personal Thoughts:
Yet another episode I have vivid memories of seeing half of. I had the first half of this episode on tape and was super excited to see what would happen when the Rangers would fight the Snizard. Unfortunately after the bullies scream and freak out about Kim flying the plane my copy of the episode would cut out and I would lose the back half of this episode. Which is a shame because Kim killing all those Putties is one of the best scenes I've seen all season.
Speaking of this episode on tape, I mentioned that the VHS tapes that focused on one of the Power Rangers had "No Clowning Around" as the Pink Ranger tape, in spite of her not doing anything of note in that episode. Why wouldn't they make this episode the Pink Ranger episode? Also in case anyone was wondering, let me list off the five VHS episodes and the character they ostensibly represented.
Day of the Dumpster: Red Ranger High Five: Yellow Ranger Food Fight: Blue Ranger Happy Birthday Zack: Black Ranger No Clowning Around: Pink Ranger
I promised you good people I'd explain what the deal is with the episode having weird moments with regards to the Kim flying the plane subplot and here we are! A lot of this is stuff I've gleaned from various sources but the long and short of it is that this episode had a filmed plot that went completely unused. Kim was originally supposed to pass out due to some magic something or other from Rita and Alpha would help her overcome it.
The scene in the Command Center is awkwardly framed because they're attempting to mask the fact that there's a couch inside of it with Kim resting on it. They do a reasonable job of it but occasionally you can still see a big vague shape in the Command Center. Trini also points directly at where Kim should be laying when she tells Alpha to take care of Kim so everything feels slightly off about the whole scene. Take a look between Trini and Jason in this gif and you'll see what I'm talking about.
So why reshoot this? The only solid reasoning I've seen is to turn Kim less into a damsel in distress archetype which I think makes sense to a certain degree. It's not certain exactly what the original script would have had Kim doing while passed out on the couch, but presumably Alpha would find some cure to magic her awake. Which does make her look like less of a hero and more of a bland character who can't do anything herself. Kim avoiding a plane crash is a much more interesting sequence of events than her taking a snooze in the Command Center anyway, so I'd say they made a significantly better choice with this plot.
This episode also has Bulk and Skull acting significantly more comedic than they have been in the series so far. I don't want to give too much away about the important character arc these two go through, but they lighten up their bully horseshit later on in the season and this is the first glimpse of it.
You guys know by now how much I love the monsters, so let's talk about Snizard! He's a really damn cool monster that has a lot of style to him. Cranston doing his voice helps give him a lot of flare as well. Saban also got good use out of the Snizard costume even though all we see of him in U.S. footage is a brief scene of him "emerging" from the Monstermatic. Keep him in your back pocket though because we're not done yet with the Sniz. Just Fondue.
I mentioned earlier that there was no Power Blaster used on Snizard, but in the source footage that was how they finished him off. In the Sentai, the arrow only broke Snizard's apple. As we saw a few weeks ago Kim was able to kill Terror Toad by herself as well, so it's interesting they gave her so much importance. Especially in such a short time frame.
By the way, do you remember when this show had Zord fights? We haven't had the Rangers fight a giant monster in 3 weeks now. Maybe they should have spaced these episodes out a little differently if they wanted to sell the fuck out of those toys. Of course this show is now a gigantic cultural mainstay and I'm some dork muttering about it on the internet, so I'd call it a draw for Bandai and I.
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