Seems more like realism to me. In real life, when things blow up or buildings collapse or whatever, there's a lot of dust and smoke that make it hard to see things.
Well, Ninja Steel's been airing new episodes again the past couple of weeks. Red Ranger Brody's long-lost brother Aidan has reappeared, and today's episode did plenty to telegraph the ending revelation that he's actually evil and working with the villains. I hope it turns out he's not a shapeshifter or under a spell or something, but was actually raised to be evil like Astronema/Karone. That could lead somewhere interesting, although the actor hardly seems competent to handle any significant amount of drama. There were some cute bits of wordplay in this week's battle against a teapot monster -- my favorite was "You'll pay a steep price for that!" But after having my appetite for puns whetted, I was really disappointed when the Rangers unleashed a combined tornado/lightning attack on the monster and nobody said anything about a tempest in a teapot. And that, when the monster was gigantified, she didn't say something like "I'm not a little teapot anymore!" That's two obvious ones they missed! Meanwhile, I still find it amusing that Chrysti Ane is visibly more muscular than her Pink Ranger suit double. I don't think we've ever seen a Ranger get less buff after morphing, although we have seen several female Rangers get less curvaceous in the process.
Yeah, I think I saw a shot of that costume in a promo. That's the weirdest Ranger costume I've ever seen, not counting pseudo-Ranger allies like the Magna Defender. It looks like a baby Megazord. And what has heavy armor like that got to do with ninjas anyway? Ninjas were lower-class spies and assassins. Not only would they have been inconspicuous and hidden, but they couldn't have afforded elaborate suits of armor anyway. I mean, sure, these "ninjas" have virtually nothing in common with the historical shinobi, but at least up to now they've had some connection to the legends and tropes associated with ninjas. I don't know what this armor is supposed to be.
It's actually a sentient lion/fortress motif/ possible kakuranger homage with being a castle? I hope they adapt the "Ultraman" type homage where Aka Ninja turned giant
Well, today's episode was a bit silly in some ways, and the final battle with one of the main villains felt surprisingly cursory, but it took an interesting turn at the end, with the surprise revelation that Levi has been Brody's lost brother all along without remembering it, and the clever way that was revealed through the song. I'd actually assumed that Levi would turn out to be Aidan from the moment he was introduced, but I fell for the fakeout with the other "Aidan." I'm glad he turned out to be an impostor, since the actor was terrible. Although it might've been nice to see another "evil sibling" storyline in the vein of Astronema and Tenaya-7 (though hopefully not just the exact same thing a third time). I'm increasingly finding the Megazord battles silly and pointless and zoning out when they happen. I wonder, am I finally getting tired of the formula, or are they not very well-done this year? I think in general, the past few years, they've felt the need to pile on so many new Zords and combinations and gimmicks one after the other that it gets tedious. New mecha and combinations used to happen infrequently enough that it was an event when it happened. Now, it's just this week's new toy commercial.
Meanwhile, I finally saw the recent Power Rangers movie today. It wasn't bad, I guess. It had kind of a nice story of five misfit strangers becoming friends, with their developing powers as a metaphor for their interpersonal bonds, although there were one or two missteps (like Kimberly casually showing Jason the photo she realized she'd been wrong to casually show to people). The cast was pretty good, and I wouldn't mind seeing them in a sequel. But overall I found it a bit too cynical. It was a big jarring to see the team leader's big heroic speech start with a declaration of how much he hated the mudhole of a town he was rallying his friends to defend. And this version of Zordon is kind of a selfish jerk, not respecting the team and only grudgingly doing the right thing in the end. As silly and clumsily depicted as the original Zordon was, I kind of came to respect him over the years as a supportive and benevolent mentor figure, so this version was disappointing. I think I might've liked the movie a bit better if it had followed the lead of the TV franchise and just created a new set of characters, rather than assigning MMPR names to almost entirely different characters. That way the comparisons wouldn't have been hanging over the characters like they did with Zordon. They wouldn't have had to change much in the film's story -- just use different proper names, change Alpha into something a bit different (Zordon as a deceased Red Ranger's consciousness stored in a computer is different enough from the original to be okay), and leave out the few dialogue nods to the original like "Make my monster grow." (The biggest dialogue lift was Zordon's three rules for Rangerhood, which didn't really have any more relevance to the movie than they did to the series, so it's odd that they were included at all.) The costumes and Zords would've had to be redesigned with a different theme, but that's fine, since I could hardly tell what kind of creatures the Zords were supposed to be anyway. By the way, it was a bit clumsy for the prologue set in the remote past to be described as the "Cenozoic Era." The Cenozoic Era encompasses everything from the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs to this very moment. We're in the Cenozoic Era. I guess maybe they were trying to gloss over the fact that two of the "Dino Zords" are actually based on mammals from the fairly recent past, the Mastodon and Sabertooth Tiger. (And only the Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops are actually based on dinosaurs. Pterodactyls were pterosaurs, a related but different order, and lived more than 80 million years earlier.) But it's pretty clumsy to preface a "distant past" sequence with a heading that applies just as well to the present day.
Keep in mind that from Zordon's POV, he was a normal Ranger Commander just 1 day ago and then when he's "woken up" he's now a consciousness trapped in his ship having to be a Mentor figure. That kind of shock would make anyone kind of a jerk.
Except the training took 11 days, according to dialogue, and he remained a jerk the whole time. And no, it wouldn't make anyone act that way, just the average person. Good leaders would be exceptional people who could put those petty impulses aside in order to support those they led. Besides, I wasn't talking about whether it was possible to explain the character's behavior. I've been a professional writer for two decades, I'm more than capable of working out character motivations on my own. My point was about how completely different he was from the Zordon we knew -- how nearly all the characters were so completely different that it didn't really serve much purpose to reuse the same names for them.
This week's Ninja Steel, "The Royal Rival," was kind of interesting. Princess Viera of "the Lion Galaxy" and her champion show up to battle the Rangers to prove her strength, but Sarah saves Viera's life and she comes to realize the Rangers are the good guys and chooses to help them. She appears in the armor that I know from above photos is going to become the Red Ranger's Battlizer-style power-up, and travels in that big lion-temple Zord thingy that's been in the titles lately (which in the Sentai is a spirit that normally exists in human form and turns into the mecha when needed). I was surprised the episode ended without Brody getting that new armor, but evidently it's a 2-parter. That's okay, because I always love a Sarah focus episode. And it's nice to see an adversary won over instead of just blown up. I wish the comedy elements on the show weren't so overplayed and dumb, though. Victor and Monty have none of the charm of Bulk and Skull, and their comedy bits tend to be too cartoonish. Also ,the actress playing Viera, Ruby Love, is rather unimpressive.
I can't wait for this episode to get subbed Shishi red Orion debut and Shishi Red Orion's theme was done by Hideyuki Takahashi! Also the singer of Go-busters two themes
I just discovered that ShoutFactory now has both Kakuranger and Ohranger streaming for free: http://www.shoutfactorytv.com/series/ninja-sentai-kakuranger http://www.shoutfactorytv.com/series/chouriki-sentai-ohranger I've always been curious about Kakuranger, since it was nominally the basis of MMPR season 3, but MMPR used very little of its content except in Alien Rangers at the end, and mixed things around enormously (e.g. reversing the order in which the two main types of Zord were introduced). So I wanted to see what the original was like. And so far, two episodes in, I have to say it's one of the freakiest things I've ever seen. It's very much going for comedy, even to the degree of being narrated by a performer of a particular Japanese style of comedy, rakugo, which is basically a guy kneeling on a stage and telling funny stories (so I guess you could call it sit-down comedy). It's like it's going overboard to base everything in Japanese culture to compensate for the Chinese focus of the previous year's Dairanger. You've got the ninja lore and mythology as the main basis, you've got the narration based on a Japanese comedy style, you've got the Youkai monsters based on traditional Japanese demons (complete with the rakugoka narrator giving mini-lectures about their origins), and the Kakurangers even drive around in a catbus a la My Neighbor Totoro (although not quite so animated, in either sense). Yet at the same time, it uses Batman '66-style written sound effects in the action scenes, in the Roman alphabet. So far I'm not sure the weirdness factor alone, and my curiosity about what Power Rangers left out, will be enough to keep me watching. So far the monsters have gotten more character development than the heroes. Anyone know if it gets better? And is Ohranger worthwhile?
I've Ohranger wanted to be dark but the 95 Japanese tunnel attacks changed all that. http://powerrangers.wikia.com/wiki/Chouriki_Sentai_Ohranger As for the weirdness. That's just to be expected from Japan. It never truly dies down. Carranger was a straight up sentai parody. -The ranger's being baked in a Pizza. -Baseball monster The list goes on Megaranger? Well it has the occasional weird episode
I don't need the personalities to be dark, I just want them to be well-drawn and interesting. GoBusters was a lot of fun, but its characters had substance and interesting dramatic arcs. There was a good mix of drama and humor there. So far, four episodes in for me, Kakuranger is just pure goofiness and the Rangers are virtual ciphers. And the Announcer is pretty annoying. Plus it looks like we won't start to see any major, ongoing lead villains for another 10-20 episodes (the bases for Rito Revolto and Master Vile). At this point, my curiosity about the original versions of the monsters and Zords and such from MMPR S3/Alien Rangers is close to being outweighed by my apathy for this show.
I think Kakuranger gets significantly better but it never became a favourite for me although I love the designs. Ohranger ... meh. It also has great designs but that's it as far as I'm concerned. Carranger is awesome, a must see afaik although it's not a parody! It's comedic and self aware but ot parody, it's still very much a proper sentai. Megaranger is one of my faves from the 90s, I loved the characters and the mecha were awesome. Going back to a transforming non combining main robo was great. Gingaman was also very good and Gogo Five is fantastic, Timeranger too of course. The next sentais shout will release are going to be awesome, I hope we get bith Gogo and Time in 2018. Gingaman was announced for early 2018 so there might be room for two more releases.
The trademark for the next super sentai has dropped online http://tokuinsider.blogspot.com/2017/09/2018-sentai-patoranger-vs-lupanranger.html Cop team VS thief team?
I wonder if "Patoranger" is a play on "Patrol." In Japanese phonetics that would become patororu, most likely. Which would a bit redundant, because one of the definitions of "ranger" is a guard or officer who patrols a region. Although in the case of Sentai, maybe the US Army definition of "ranger" as a soldier trained in surprise raids in small groups would be more apt. And I'm amused by the idea of a Ranger team named after Lupin the Third. I wonder if they'll be pastiches of the actual personalities of Lupin, Fujiko, etc. If these are trademarks for a single series rather than two consecutive series, it would be an interesting change to have Rangers vs. Rangers instead of Rangers vs. monsters. Though I'm not sure how you'd have giant robot battles in that premise.
I could see the team being comprised of 3 VS 3. Three member teams tend to follow big anniversary seasons like Hurricanger or Go-busters.