Power Rangers

Discussion in 'Science Fiction & Fantasy' started by SG-17, Aug 7, 2010.

  1. Christopher

    Christopher Writer Admiral

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    Yeah, that makes sense. And maybe there's a third faction of monsters that's a rival to both teams of Rangers, and eventually the two teams unite against their common foe. Although they'd need some explanation for why the cops and crooks are using the same tech. Well, maybe the crooks stole it.
     
  2. Samurai8472

    Samurai8472 Admiral Admiral

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    The toys will work that way for sure

    Good guys get a super formation in the mid teens. The Lupin ranger's steal the component so they can get a super formation too.

    Also I doubt we'd get a Five member team VS Five members so soon after Kyuranger debuted with 9 rangers. That's just too much too soon

    3 on 3 is more manageable. Not mention filming ground battles will be less chaotic.




    Heck Kyuranger had a in story reason for just five members at a time. Too many ranger's on the field would deplete their powers

    The Kyulette is used in the show by Shou Ronpou to determine which 5 will head off on a mission.

    Spin it and five kyutama pop out

    [​IMG]




     
  3. Mark_Nguyen

    Mark_Nguyen Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    I thought they mentioned tongue-in-cheek that they also couldn't afford to have everyone in every scene of every episode. :P

    To answer Chris' question above, in Japanese the word "patrol" is indeed used with the diminutive "pat" in real police work. A police car is often called a "patocar", for example. In Dekanger (PR: SPD), the Dekarobo / Zords are called PatoStriker, PatoArmor, etc. And for older anime fans like me, the excellent comedy-drama series "Patlabor" follows the misadventures of the Tokyo giant robot police department, where the robots are called "labors" for their primary use as construction tools.

    As for Lupin, the Japanese *do* have a pronounced interest in French historical culture, and the original Arsene Lupin stories are part of that. But yes, the various Lupin III franchise entries are entrenched in the collective consciousness. A recent bad guy in a tokusatsu movie (can't remember which one - ToQger? Kamen Rider Ghost?) was a thief named Lupin, so there's a potential tie-in there.

    [EDIT: It was the villainous Kamen Rider Lupin from the KR Drive / Gaim crossover film.]

    I've been enjoying Kyuranger a lot. It's so fun to have a team like this, so large and so very sci-fi-esque. By the same token I've started and am very much enjoying Kamen Rider Build, whose main character is a genius physicist who built his own suit. For SCIENCE! And fighting mechanized bad guys.

    Mark
     
  4. Christopher

    Christopher Writer Admiral

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    Oh, so that's what that title means. Thanks.
     
  5. Christopher

    Christopher Writer Admiral

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    I tried a bit more Kakuranger, and it only seems to be getting weirder. But it occurs to me that the team catchphrase they utter after doing their team posing thing, "Hiding among the people and punishing the evil," would be more convincing if they hadn't all just loudly announced their real names along with their Ranger designations. That's not the sort of thing I'd think was conducive to hiding.

    Not that hiding would do them much good, since they seem to have an unerring talent for accidentally stumbling across the Yokai of the week or vice-versa. It's weird to have a season where there's no single evil mastermind directing the monsters (at least not yet) and the plots all seem to arise from random encounters.
     
  6. Christopher

    Christopher Writer Admiral

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    I'm up to a point in Kakuranger where it seems like they're addressing the problems with the early part of the season. There's now a big bad leading the Youkai -- Young Noble Junior, whose monster form is the costume used for Rito Revolto in Power Rangers season 3 but who couldn't be more different in personality -- and the stories are getting a lot more dramatic and intense, with lots of hammy melodramatic acting. Although they still have a sense of humor -- I just saw one where they did this whole pastiche of an ultra-dramatic movie scene of the wounded hero saying his farewells to his weeping lady as he nobly marches off to what will likely be his final battle... and then after he left, he frowned and said, "I wonder if I made that a bit too dramatic."
     
  7. Samurai8472

    Samurai8472 Admiral Admiral

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    Zeo Megazord formation footage updated with Ohranger dvd quality footage.



    Shame it couldn't look like this in 1995.

    There's a discussion about "grainy footage" on rangerboard

    https://www.rangerboard.com/showthread.php?t=181456


     
  8. Christopher

    Christopher Writer Admiral

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    I kinda miss the grainy footage. It made it easy to tell the original Sentai footage apart from the American-made footage. These days it's harder to know when I'm watching American or Japanese footage.

    Today's Halloween episode of Ninja Steel was a case in point (and seriously, why are both Nickelodeon and Disney XD showing their Halloween episodes on the first weekend of October?). It seemed like it was going to be your usual Power Rangers thing where the holiday episodes are clip shows, with the setup of the Rangers being stuck in one room and forced to re-fight their old enemies, but it turned out that it was all new material as far as this show is concerned. Some of it was obviously from Ninninger, probably extra action footage that they didn't get around to using in the original episodes featuring those monsters, but there were a few scenes where it was hard to tell. Anyway, I hope it's the beginning of a trend away from the usual tiresome clip shows.


    Meanwhile, Kakuranger has gotten a lot more interesting, with some pretty intense stuff going on storywise, though there's still not much character development for the Kakurangers other than Tsurihime and Jiraiya, and the latter was mainly in the 2-parter about his old mentor turning out to be evil. By the way, I didn't realize until later that Jiraiya was played by American actor Kane Kosugi, and his mentor/nemesis was played by his father Sho Kosugi. I know Sho Kosugi from various US productions, but I know Kane mainly from Godzilla: Final Wars.

    Anyway, there's some stuff in Kakuranger that really hasn't aged or crossed the cultural divide well. There's a lot of somewhat misogynistic sexual humor. There's one episode where the monster takes the form of a very busty woman, and it turns out the key to neutralizing her power to turn all food and drink into sand is to slice open her breasts so the magic sand will spill out and leave her flat-chested. And then there's the episode where the comedy announcer from the first half-season returns as the host of a news documentary about the Kakurangers. In one scene he tries to "comically" molest Tsurihiume in her sleep, and in another he voyeurizes the Kunoichi team while they go swimming. Yeegh.
     
  9. Skipper

    Skipper Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    There are still a lot of misogynism in Japanese culture. Probably their attitude towards women is similar to the rest of the Western World in the 50's, but without of that era's restraints in using crass humor. Really, try to find a female character older than 30 in an anime in a power position that isn't an Insufferable B**ch(because, you know, a good woman has to leave her job before the age of 30 to dedicate to the home and family).

    I had to leave a couple of anime that I liked because of their treatment of female characters. I tried to discuss about this in a couple of anime forums and the response of the other posters was like "Why are you judging another culture with your Western bias!?!", like I was criticizing the fact that they are using chopsticks instead of western cutlery, and not that they are treating a half of the population as inferior human beings.

    (The anime were Bakuman and Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans)

    Eta: I'm glad I'm not the only one to think so:
    Sexism in Bakuman
    Sexism in Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans (I admit that here my position on the subject is not so popular...)
     
    Last edited: Oct 8, 2017
  10. Christopher

    Christopher Writer Admiral

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    Oh, I'm certainly aware that Japanese media tend to be somewhat backward in gender attitudes by American standards, and I have seen similar things in other Sentai shows like Dairanger, but it's still off-putting to see, and unexpectedly blatant for a kids' show.
     
  11. Christopher

    Christopher Writer Admiral

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    This week's Ninja Steel was okay -- I appreciate the attempt to generate a conflict among the Rangers that wasn't entirely created by the monster-of-the-week, just capitalized on by it. But in this day and age, I was annoyed by a school-election episode where the candidates -- both series leads that we're supposed to find heroic and admirable -- campaigned pretty much exclusively through empty showmanship, blatantly bribing the voters with food and prizes, and vague platitudes, rather than actually having positions on the issues or anything.


    Well, I finished Kakuranger. I wouldn't call it one of the best Sentai seasons I've seen overall, but it turned out mostly okay aside from its weak start. It got pretty philosophical at the end there -- the ultimate foe is the embodiment of human hate and we all must lock him away in our hearts, etc. Which would've been conveyed better if the Kakurangers had somehow rallied the public to stand with them and drawn on their positive energy or something like that, instead of just doing it themselves.

    Since Kakuranger improved after its weak beginning, I decided to go back and give Zyuranger another try. As it turned out, I previously gave up on the show just a couple of episodes before the Burai/DragonRanger arc began. That's a pretty impressive story, putting Geki in a pretty complicated place emotionally, but I think it was resolved a bit too easily, with Burai switching too abruptly from "Ha-ha-ha! I will slay my hated brother and conquer the world!" to "I love my brother and will give what remains of my life to fight evil." Okay, I can buy that he realized he'd misjudged Geki and misdirected his anger, but there's that whole pesky aspiring-world-conqueror thing that kind of got swept under the rug. Although I guess having only 30 hours left to live outside of a magic room would kind of put a damper on any long-term plans for world conquest.

    I am enjoying Soga Machiko's performance as Bandora. She really throws herself into it and makes Bandora seem like a villain who really enjoys being evil. It's much the same quality that Hilary Shepard-Turner brought to Divatox in Power Rangers Turbo/in Space. I guess it didn't come through in MMPR because Barbara Goodson's dubbing made Rita Repulsa seem more irritable and bitter. I mean, as written, Bandora is full of hate and bitterness, but in performance, she and her clan come off as an upbeat, bickering but close-knit sitcom family that's rather fun to watch.

    I was amused that Zyuranger did a ninja-themed episode, maybe kind of a trial run for Kakuranger -- except the Zyurangers seemed to be better at being ninjas than the Kakurangers were! Or at least more authentic, in that their tactics were more about espionage, misdirection, and deceit, whereas Kakuranger went for more full-on supernatural illusion powers. And the "Dora Ninja" monster in that episode had a sickle-and-chain weapon that I gather is a more genuine shinobi weapon than fantasy-ninja things like shuriken (since real shinobi tended to hide in plain sight as farmers or laborers and needed weapons that could pass for tools).
     
  12. Christopher

    Christopher Writer Admiral

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    I've finished Zyuranger now. I actually ended up rather enjoying it, on the whole. Not all the Zyurangers themselves were all that effective. Geki and Goushi were good, but Dan and Boi were kind of interchangeable, and though Mei was pretty, she came off as a bit vacuous and weak. But there were some good moments of storytelling, and the Bandora Gang was a lot of fun. I'm happy with how things worked out for them. (Although I was kind of hoping that when Kai rejected Bandora, she would team up with the Zyurangers to bring down Dai Satan.) I think my favorite villain was Pleprechaun/Puripurikan. I love it that he wasn't particularly trying to do evil, he was just dedicated to his art of making monsters and took pride in his work.


    I was going to move on to Ohranger, which is the fourth and final series currently available on ShoutFactory's site, but for some reason, a few of the episodes seem to be unavailable, including episode 2. And I can't find them anywhere else, at least nowhere I trust to be safe and reputable. I even tried checking the library to see if they had the DVDs, but no luck. I checked the statewide interlibrary loan system, and they only have Zyu, Dai, Kaku, and Carranger. How ironic that not one library in the entire state of Ohio has Ohranger.
     
  13. Christopher

    Christopher Writer Admiral

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    Anyone else still participating in this thread? Today's Ninja Steel was quite lame. So Redbot has been posting a blog making himself the hero, everybody's somehow fallen for it despite nobody ever having seen him with the Power Rangers, and somehow, a book publisher signs him, turns his blog posts into a book, gets it printed and distributed, and holds a debut event, all in the course of what appears to be a single day? And somehow the publisher didn't even bother to ask whether the accounts on the blog were accurate before spending a ton of money to put them in a book sold as nonfiction? Never mind that he's a sentient robot being revealed to the world for the first time, yet nobody seems to care much about that?

    I'm growing increasingly tired of this season, which is turning out to be one of the dumber ones. It's going too much for cartoonish comedy and superficial characterization.


    Though in the other direction, I've found that ShoutFactory's site isn't missing Ohranger episodes after all; some of them are just slow to load. So I've begun watching that. So far, at 7 episodes in, it's playing things pretty seriously and intensely, although the villains are incongruously comical. But it hasn't given much development to the Ohrangers yet. I gather it's going to get lighter as it goes along, since it was retooled in reaction to some real-life tragedies. That would make it kind of an inversion of Zyuranger and Kakuranger, which started out silly and got more solemn. I just hope there's some character development along the way.

    At least I finally understand what the unifying theme of the giant robots is. On Power Rangers Zeo, they never really explained what a phoenix, a sphinx, a bull, and two weird wheeled column thingies had to do with each other. In Ohranger, they're based on the monuments of an ancient Pangaean civilization that was supposedly the forerunner of all other civilizations, so the defining theme is ancient statues and symbols, and the two wheeled column thingies are based on Easter Island moa statues and clay dogu sculptures from prehistoric Japan. Although the phoenix and bull are rather tenuously linked to that theme.
     
  14. May 20

    May 20 Consumer of cookies and milk Premium Member

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    Well, I'm still reading this thread. I don't post much, but I like to read what you have to say. My son and I are watching Ninja Steel as it airs. And, yeah, it's definitely *not* one of the better seasons.The morality tales this season have been very on the nose. The comic relief hasn't been either comic-y or relieving. And today's CGI with the train rescue was horrid. But I like Brody and Levi and the other Rangers, more than half of the time. I really could do without Redbot.

    Mostly, I like that my son wants to share the experience with me. For that alone, I'll continue watching.
     
  15. Christopher

    Christopher Writer Admiral

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    As with the original MMPR, at this point I'm mainly just watching Ninja Steel because the female Rangers are so gorgeous.
     
  16. May 20

    May 20 Consumer of cookies and milk Premium Member

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    LOL

    Hmm...maybe that is why my son is still watching, too. :eek: :p
     
  17. JirinPanthosa

    JirinPanthosa Admiral Admiral

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    As a person who watched the first episode live when I was in fifth grade, got really into it for a year or two, then prompty outgrew it, I have to say.

    How the **** is Power Rangers still going? Who the **** expected this show to have Dr Who longevity?
     
  18. Christopher

    Christopher Writer Admiral

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    Mar 15, 2001
    1: It's cheap. It's made by taking stock action/FX footage and costumes from the Japanese Super Sentai franchise and shooting new footage around it, so it costs a lot less to make than a wholly original half-hour show, and that makes it easier for it to turn a profit and stay in production. Basically the whole Power Rangers franchise is one ongoing clip show. Also, starting over with a new cast of young, no-name actors every season keeps costs down, because actors get raises for every consecutive season they remain on a show.

    2. It sells toys. Both Super Sentai and Power Rangers exist to sell Bandai toys, and as long as the toy sales are profitable, the shows remain on the air. It's usually toy sales that determine whether a kids' show survives or not, regardless of the quality of the shows themselves. A great show that doesn't sell toys will get cancelled, and a dumb show that sells lots of toys will keep going forever.


    Keep in mind that when Power Rangers began, Super Sentai had already been running pretty much continuously for 18 years.
     
  19. Samurai8472

    Samurai8472 Admiral Admiral

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  20. Christopher

    Christopher Writer Admiral

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    I'll have to miss it, because that's exactly when I'm going to be a guest at the Books By the Banks book fair in downtown Cincinnati. Besides, I'm still fairly early in Ohranger and I prefer to watch one series at a time.