And they burned through the initial episode order of 40 episodes in three months, that's hardly better than the current model.
It's better because we got a lot more material in those three months.
Dino Charge premiered over six months ago, and we've gotten only
eight episodes. That's ridiculous.
I only started noticing this (I haven't been a dedicated watcher since Saban resumed control) with Megaforce, when they kept showing the same episode of RoboKnight getting kidnapped every few weeks for months.
Like, the few times that I decided to tune in, it was the exact same episode with the exact same cage, and it ended up being a major turnoff for me.
Yes, 40 episodes a year is nice, but for Megaforce, it was 22 weekly episodes a year, in a dual-split season (so 11 episodes, then a huge gap, then 11 more). Then they did 20 episodes for Super Megaforce. So 40 episodes a year is nice, but they really did 20+ episodes a year, 2 years straight. That's worse than weekly; if averaged out, that's 1 episode every 2.5 weeks. That kind of gap in TV can be deadly. It really does feel like a cheat, especially given that it's a half hour show whose major production advantage is that it reuses footage.
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Anyway, I need to catch up on Ninninger as I'm a few weeks behind, but one thing that struck me early on is how this team just isn't nearly as refined as the other ninja teams, which is great. Yes, it was a theme with Hurricanger, but Ninninger is nowhere near as slick or skilled; sure, they're flashier and definitely have more techniques, but they'll get hit by attacks that should be easily dodged, they'll make mistakes on the field, they'll mess up, and occasionally even forget some of their powers. Hurricanger on paper had the same thing going on, but they were still incredibly efficient and were still superhuman even if unmorphed (which Ninja Storm adapted to good effect, imo).
So the major theme of Ninninger is that they're students still trying to improve themselves, but it's being handled much more deliberately than their predecessors, and that's something I appreciate in the show. Hurricanger is one of my all time favorite Sentai shows, but paying so much to that show has made me grow to like Ninninger's differences.
