Power Rangers Zeo

Super Sentai Equivalent: Choriki Sentai Ohranger (Powerful Team O Ranger)

Having finally found the scattered fragments of the Zeo Crystal, the Power Rangers are restored to their proper ages, granted new powers, and can begin to repair their destroyed Command Center. However they also face a new threat... the evil Machine Empire has come and driven away Lord Zedd and Rita from the moon in order to take over the Earth themselves!

Zeo was a sort of return to form for Power Rangers... which is mostly just to say that it didn't suck like Alien Rangers. Power Rangers was never exactly high art and neither was Zeo.

Granted, there were a few interesting ideas, but most of them were squandered. One notable example is when Machine King Mondo falls in battle, allowing the generic Monster of the Week - an evil robot called Louie Kaboom - to usurp his throne. Seeing the disposable henchman actually get something for himself was a neat concept and could have shown a deeper side to the usually one-note monsters. Unfortunately Louie WAS just a boring, one-note monster and was quickly killed off anyway.

Still, it's not like the original series was ever above that. The major flaw this has over the original is the villains. The Machine Empire just aren't that interesting. The don't have any of the sense of humor that made Rita Repulsa and Lord Zedd fun. In fact that only have one actual joke - Machine King Mondo dotes on his incompetent son Prince Sprocket and blames his actually competent underlings Klank and Orbus whenever Sprocket's schemes inevitably blow up in his face. Yawn.

On the other hand, they also don't have any of the seriousness or threatening intensity of later villains. Despite being built up as terrifying enemies who could make Rita and Zedd flee the moon in fear for their lives, the Machine Empire still fail instantly at everything they try to do and never come across as legitimately frightening.

In all, they're just sort of there. They're written just well enough to get the job done but not well enough to actually stand out... sort of like this season as a whole, really.

KR Rating: [3] MEDIOCRE

Mighty Morphin' Alien Rangers

Following the end of the original series, the Power Rangers are all transformed into children by Rita's dad and their power coins are destroyed, leaving them all that way seemingly permanently. Obviously, this wasn't going to stick. Eventually they went and found the Zeo Crystal, a magic rock with the ability to restore their proper ages and their powers, and that led into Power Rangers Zeo.

In the meantime, though, we got Mighty Morphin' Alien Rangers. Realizing that Earth is vulnerable without Rangers to protect it, Zordon calls on his friends from the planet Aquitar to defend the Earth while the kid rangers search for the pieces of the Zeo Crystal.

This is where the whole thing falls apart. The idea of other planets each having their own sets of Rangers was pretty cool, but... the Aquitian Rangers themselves just aren't good characters. They're twitchy and overly formal. Their struggles to survive in their new environment were really more tedious than interesting. Worst of all, only two of them even have any real characterization at all. Delphine the White Alien Ranger gets a lot of screen time as their leader, and Cestro the Blue Alien Ranger spends a lot of time working on tech with Billy. The rest of the Alien Rangers just sort of... well, they have to be there to pilot the zords, I guess.

Also, the actual Power Rangers, aside from Billy, are all still kids so everything they do is done with the child actors, who... do I even need to say anymore? I can count on one hand the number of shows I know of where child actors did a really good job - mostly because the list consists of Avatar: The Last Airbender and nothing else.

Fortunately this season didn't last very long. There's only 10 episodes before the Aquitian Rangers go back home and we move on to Power Rangers Zeo.

Unfortunately, that's about 10 episodes too many for what is quite possibly the WORST that Power Rangers has to offer.

KR Rating: [1] HORRIBLE

Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers (The Show)

It was the early 90's, the era of totally radical attitudes and bright colors. Also apparently another moon landing. Yes, astronauts on the moon find and open up a "space dumpster," unwittingly releasing the long-imprisoned supervillain Rita Repulsa (later joined by Lord Zedd), who decides her first act upon release will be to conquer the nearby planet Earth. The only hope of stopping her is good space wizard Zordon, who summons five teenagers with attitude to don the brightly colored uniforms and vaguely dinosaur-themed weapons of the Power Rangers!

I probably don't need to say a whole lot about this show. (I will anyway, of course, because my first language has always been and will always be filibuster.) If you're the kind of person who cares about Power Rangers, then you already know about it. Hell, you probably know at least a little even if you don't care at all.

What you might not know is that Power Rangers is the "fortified wine" of television. That is, they took an existing product, mixed it with some stuff of their own, and presented it as a new thing. In this case the base was Japanese action series Kyroryu Sentai Zyuranger (Dinosaur Team Beast Ranger), part of the long-running Super Sentai franchise. Saban Entertainment used battle footage from Zyuranger, and later on Gosei Sentai Dairanger (Five Stars Team Great Ranger) and Ninja Sentai Kakuranger (Ninja Team Hidden Ranger), added new story scenes featuring American actors, and released it to western audiences. The result was a hit show despite its flaws, and the beginning of one of the longest running franchises on television, celebrating its 25th anniversary this year.

I'll be going over all of the Rangers series to date here. No, not all at once as that would get boring for both of us, but I will keep up with it over time. So, on to our review.

So, the question on everyone's mind... is the nostalgia here deserved? Well, I would argue that nostalgia is never deserved or undeserved it simply exists on its own... but that aside, is the show good? I would say yes and no.

On the one hand, the show gave us some classic episodes and storylines. The most notable example of this is, of course, the story of Green Ranger Tommy Oliver, who started out as the most threatening and successful villain on the show, turned to the side of good, and eventually became a permanent part of the team as the heroic White Ranger. You might have heard of him as the most popular Power Rangers character ever and probably the longest running, not only following the other old school rangers into Zeo and Turbo, but also reappearing as a recurring character in Dino Thunder.

On the other hand, episodes and storylines like that were the minority. Most of them are really just "okay" at best. The show definitely tended towards the BAD side of campy in most cases. Evil tubes of lipstick and rapping pumpkins were common enemies. The "teenagers with attitude" were actually overly idealized with basically no flaws or attitude at all. (They also weren't played by teenagers, but you probably could have guessed that.)

It also suffers pretty serious decay later on, with eventually the two most threatening villain lackeys - Rito Revolto and Goldar - becoming absolute jokes who were regularly defeated by unarmed 10 year olds. And no, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying I want to watch Rito and Goldar chop up a busload of little kids any more than the show's producers want to show that. Obviously. I just also don't want to watch the villains who I'm supposed to find intimidating get humiliated by tweens with water balloons. Yes, that happened. So... I don't know, maybe just don't write yourself into that corner to begin with? It's not hard, you just have to care about what you're doing.

And yes, I get that the show was aimed at kids and was meant to be funny, but that's no excuse. There's a difference between making your show accessible to everyone and just insulting the audience's intelligence. There's also a difference between telling jokes and BEING a joke.

So overall, it's kind of hard to give this show a single rating. Power Rangers was a roller coaster of quality. The good episodes were really good and would warrant an easy 4, while the bad episodes oscillate between a soft 2, a hard 0, and a middle finger before being tossed in the trash. Overall, I'd give it...


MEDIOCRE

While the show was mostly mediocre on screen, when it was off the screen... it was a hot @#%$ing mess. It was run by greedy dick Haim Saban, whose basic plan was just to make the cheapest show possible with a scheme that only beats out Vince Perri's Action 52 scheme by virtue of the fact that Saban's Get Rich Quick Plan actually worked.

Aside from the cheapness of just re-using scenes someone else shot, the actors were treated like slaves. Amy Jo Johnson (Kimberly, the Pink Ranger) has called it the lowest point of her entire career. Austin St. John (Jason, the Red Ranger) stated in interviews that he would have made more money working fast food. David Yost (Billy, the Blue Ranger) was so mistreated by his co-workers that he nearly walked off the show multiple times because the constant anti-gay bullying he suffered made him want to kill himself.

It's ironic that, in spite of how troubled the production was, this is also the most lighthearted and idealistic series of the entire franchise. The heroes have zero flaws, society is perfect (or at least has problems that are easily solvable), the only true evil out there comes from obviously bad space demons... I guess the ultimate lesson we can learn from this is that, just like the rich philanthropist who runs a secret sweatshop (ie. Haim Saban himself) anyone who puts that much effort into being so obsessively nice is DEFINITELY hiding something.