Power Rangers as a whole

Now I know that Power Rangers is not that high priority on a lot of people's thoughts...for a lot of reasons. The Sentais are usually better and everything else but...this is for PR only.

Honestly I made this thread because I was wondering something. Me and a friend are talking about Operation Overdrive, which he's never seen and he's asking for me to explain what went wrong and why it's considered to be so bad. Anyone got their own arguments on why it's bad?

Too many villains for one. None of them are engaging or interesting. Heck, the fact that they are at each other's neck so often makes it seem like they are even less a threat.

It has a terrible theme song. Also, unlikeable and inconsistent characters.

edited 16th Apr '13 11:18:43 AM by ThatOtherGriffin

I watched the first five seasons consistently, then dropped off once they went into space. I don't remember the reasons behind why I stopped watching it, but after I stopped, I didn't really go back. I remember watching the Psycho Rangers arc of one of the seasons (I think it was either Power Rangers In Space or Power Rangers Lost Galaxy) and was actually fairly impressed, but that's about all I watched of it. After that, I just didn't pick it back up. But to be fair, I don't watch television much anymore. The last live action television show I made any effort to follow was Heroes, and even that was an exception.

That said, I thoroughly enjoyed the show when I watched it, and recently rewatched several episodes. I enjoyed them when I rewatched them, too, but probably for different reasons than when I first watched them. After all, I'm pretty sure I didn't find them hilarious the first time (well, Bulk and Skull, but they were Bulk and Skull).

Netflix has all seasons so thats nice

So my opinion? I'm surprised by that PR seems to lack fanbase in TV tropes since there are rather few forum threads for it that are used nowadays.

But yeah, RPM is rather awesome, first three seasons(of the original show, ya know the only one which does have multiple seasons) are mostly kind of boring with few exceptions. It does at time get better but they do have a lot of problems. It is kind of pain to watch them all through since there are so many of them so I watched few episodes of different ones, mainly the ones that aren't sequels to each other :P

Samurai is kind of bad and seems to suffer from over using puns and oneliners early on and from value dissonance resulting from translating directly from Japanese, Jungle Fury seems good so far but it apparently gets hit by writer strike later on, I don't remember much about Dino Force from back long time ago when I watched it on tv but I remember enjoying it, Mystic Force is kind of lame from few episodes I remember watching from tv, I don't have strong opinion on SDP, Lightspeed Rescue or Timeforce yet. Or the wildforce and other shows I forgot to mention.

Okay, so about first three seasons... First one is enjoyable and funny because of stock footage stuff, but it suffers from pacing. I mean, season doesn't have real season end, closest would have been "Doomsday" but it was rather awkwardly decided that show would continue. Lokar/Dao Satan guy just disappears without even explanation since they didn't show him exploding... Second season is okay I guess but there are a lot of lame moments. And Zed isn't that impressive really. I mean he gets better after marrying Rita and thats saying something about his impressiveness :P Also kind of lame how they brought up new puddies(why are they called puddies anyway?). Should have just used costumes from another show or something, z puddies where just puddies with z on chest.

Okay so third season does have improvements on some parts and Master Vile is amusing, but... Well, it feels wasted. I mean, they get Ninja powers but not Kakuranger costumes, which later get used by alien rangers. But they are ninja sentai so it would have been better if they had had their costumes replaced by ninja ones when they got ninja powers :P Like I said, it feels wasted especially since they don't even appear that much nor do alien rangers have character.

edited 16th Apr '13 9:52:22 PM by SpookyMask

They're known as Putties and presumably it's because Finster (the blue guy who made the monsters) made them out of well...putty.

While we're on the subject, anyone mind explaining to me exactly how the Power Rangers-Sentai relationship currently works?

Are power rangers currently coming up with completely original storylines? Are the giant robot and giant monster footage lifted from Sentai or is it purely the script that is taken and then entirely re-filmed?

I was watching Power Rangers Samurai the other day (Which is currently airing, or is it re-airing?) and in a scene next to a creek while the rangers were transformed and then knocked back to un-transformed the shooting location must have changed at least three times in as many shots.

Actually I haven't watched power rangers since IN SPACE!! so I'm mostly just curious.

I notice that if anything they've upped the camp ratio.

Up to Power Rangers Lost Galaxy there was almost no real connection between the two franchises besides the footage, Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue was the first to emulate the sentai very closely in story, themes and character arcs. Nowadays it is a bit of a hot button topic on how closely the rangers should emulate sentai, as some of the more popular seasons were considered better than the sentai counterpart (In Space, Lost Galaxy, RPM). And some of the more derided seasons came from emulating the sentai counterpart too much (Turbo, Wild Force, Operation Overdrive).

^^^But that was clay! Unless that is word for clay.

^^It seems to depend. Some seasons are more or less direct adaptions with some things obviously changed, most of those seasons though mainly take the main plot/plot summary and diverge from that point onwards and others have their own plot but use sentai footage/costumes.

For example, RPM is adapted from Go-Onger but... Well, RPM is post robot virus apocalypse while Go-Onger is comedy with enemies being bureaucrats from "Machine Dimension" who want to pollute the earth.

^From what I've seen from Linkara's retrospective, turbo seemed to have a lot more problems than that. Unless all of those were caused by adaption?

edited 17th Apr '13 2:52:21 AM by SpookyMask

It is another word for clay. They just chose the word that would alliterate the best.

Well, technically saying they could have just used original name "Golem" since that is basically what they are, but that wouldn't fit their tradition they started on that day which involved giving each mook types silly names

I'm kind of weirded out by that Tenga Warriors are original stuff for Power Rangers yet they are so clearly tengus... SO why the heck they are called tengas?

And wait, are they recycled from that crappy movie? So why did they recycle mooks from movie and change u from a? .-. That is weird on many levels

edited 17th Apr '13 5:28:40 AM by SpookyMask

I think it was a royalties issue. As absurd as it sounds I heard once that if they used "Tengu Warriors" they would have to pay royalties to the movie writers every time they used them.

Well, I'm sure a lot of Sentai foot soldiers had silly names as well, just in Japanese.

Eh, you can compare. Its bit hard to say, but I have to say that nothing is sillier than moogers and loogies, not even putties.

Of course not every PR mook has silly names, just some of them :p I have no idea if Japanese names for them sound silly in Japanese. I mean, if you can't speak English then how you can say whether "loogie" sounds silly?

Anyway, I still say that Zed putties were rather lame for original stuff. I mean, Zed could have gotten more menacing mooks than putties with z on them. I have no strong opinion on Tenga though i sort of agree with Linkara on them, but they were still better than putties.

I'm kind of sad just about that we will never see what would have been PR's take on these and these guys since they were skipped over by Zed putties and tenga.

Some are net improvements. Kunekune Compared to Quantrons

Kunekunes do make apprearance as Craterites aka training program enemies. Anyhoo, yeah, In Space's foot soldiers were cooler though I guess Kunekunes had that funny "Combine into giant one" thing so thats plus for them.

Anyhoo, ya know what is real pity about the fact that Zyuranger was first series adapted to PR? this guy can't ever appear as it wouldn't make fully sense as western audience wouldn't recognize some of things part of that :P

Turbo's issues all stem from what to do about the Carranger footage, at that point in the series they still relied on a lot of the stock footage and you can't just ignore getting cooked into a pizza. Carranger had the benefit of nearly two decades of Sentai to make fun of themselves, while Power Rangers wasn't comfortable enough to parody their own conventions yet (Ninja Storm was probably the first to feel comfortable doing that). Remember Zeo was considered a huge step towards establishing Power Rangers as a Series Franchise and not a serial, Turbo should have been the next step beyond that (replacing the entire cast) but the Mood Whiplash hurt.

I personally watched the show fairly regularly but was losing interest during Turbo, but I was impressed enough with the final episodes to get to In Space and I really enjoyed it. I watched about 3/4 of Lost Galaxy, almost none of Lightspeed Rescue but was again impressed with Time Force. Since then I haven't watched more than a couple episodes of any given series, but I enjoyed Linkara's retrospects.

edited 17th Apr '13 3:25:06 PM by KJMackley

Too bad it would have been really obvious if they used an older show for action footage, otherwise they could have skipped Carranger altogether.

Not so apparently, they have to use the next Sentei footage in line.

Yeaaaaaaaaah, and from what I've understand, writers did have problem of deciding whether Turbo would be darker or lighter so I wouldn't blame everything on stock footage but also on indecision of writers :P

I'm not saying Carrangers was bad, from what I understand it was hugely popular in Japan because it knew exactly what it was doing. It's only that Power Rangers had no idea what to do with it, how do you go from ancient magic to a mystic crystal to freaking cars. Some writers wanted to embrace it while others wanted something more in line with Zeo and downplay the silly moments as much as possible, however you slice it the writing was bound by the stock footage.

Even when they tried to be serious it was hard to reconcile the fact the Rangers had go-karts instead of motorcycles and, of course, the pizza episode.

In Space and Lost Galaxy ended up using the bare minimum of stock footage because of their incompatible premises, but at least it made sense.

I thought the concept of Operation Overdrive was neat. I thought the Theme Song was fine. However... that's where it ends. The execution was mostly terrible. Not even the old rangers two-parter saved it. Albeit, it was a cool two-parter.

My favorite is Lost Galaxy. I thought it had some of the best characters and the villains had excellent acting. Rangers weren't nearly as good, though. Deviot is awesome~

I thought Treekena and father were pretty boring actually. I thought Ecliptor and the Psycho Rangers were really cool.

Trakeena wasn't that bad. Very manipulative and full of character.

Scorpius was a little bland, but I like that he wasn't heartless. Obviously evil, but there's no telling if the Rangers would've had to destroy him outside of Deviot's influence.

Can somebody give me some behind the scenes information on what happened between Zeo and Turbo's filming? In the end of Zeo Bulk and Skull are going to France and Rita and Zedd are ready for their comeback. I've heard conflicting accounts of it though and some of the explanations don't make sense. If Bulk and Skull's actors were being sent off to star in their spinoff then why did they do the monkey subplot after they decided to keep them for the movie? Why did they set up the Rita and Zedd return subplot if they knew they were going to base the villain on the Carranger's villains? I've never heard a good explanation, does anybody have any info?