Long ago, the Beast War occurred on Earth. Mighty transforming robots known as Maximals battled against the evil Predacons to harvest the planet's energon... okay, yes, I'm getting tired of this gag too. It has a passing similarity to something else, let's move on.
Long ago, the Beast War was fought among the animal spirits, between those who followed Dai Shi in his belief that humans had no place on Earth, and the Order of the Claw, also known as Pai Zhuq (pronounced "pie shwa"). The Pai Zhuq masters prevailed and sealed Dai Shi away inside a magic box. There he remained for 10,000 years, until some jerk named Jarrod came along and donked it all up. Freaking Jarrod, am I right?
Anyway, with Dai Shi free and the Pai Zhuq master Mao slain in the battle, the three remaining students will travel to... some city the name of which we never learn. There, at Jungle Karma Pizza, they will find the last Pai Zhuq master, kind-of-a-dick New Age slacker bro R.J. With his help and their totally lame sunglasses, they will become... Jungle Fury Power Rangers!
In terms of story, Jungle Fury starts off pretty strong, actually. The heroes are likeable (even R.J., in spite of his being kind-of-a-dick) and with good personality. The villains have a level of complexity approaching In Space and Lost Galaxy. The show was able to teach the occasional moral lesson without coming across as (too) contrived or condescending. The writing was tight and focused. It was going somewhere.
...and then the Writers' Guild Strike of 2007 to 2008 happened, and all of that went away. The story fell dead in the water. It became stagnant and mired in plot holes and out-of-character moments. They even attempted to introduce a new character during this time, the Rhino Ranger, and he ended up being a black hole of plot almost on tier with S.P.D.'s Omega Ranger... almost.
Fortunately, at least, the strike did end in time for the last few episodes to not totally suck.
The series also managed to have some pretty cool ideas, like the animal spirits being means to an end that were neither good nor evil and could be used by both the heroes and villains. I also felt that this series formed an interesting counterpoint to Wild Force, with Wild Force's Orgs representing industry and pollution, while the Dai Shi and his minions represent uncontrolled nature. I would have loved to see a crossover between the two series exploring this, but that doesn't happen. Actually, Jungle Fury is the first series of Power Rangers since the Zordon era to not have any crossover elements with any other series. Even Mystic Force had a guest appearance from S.P.D.'s Piggy!
They also took some more risks with the source material, creating their own Rangers for the first time since Lightspeed Rescue. It is slightly undercut by the fact that they - by their own admission - only did it to have some more toys to sell, and the three Spirit Rangers have very little to do in the show... but it's still pretty cool.
In all, Jungle Fury is a good series that might have even been great if not for the writers' strike. I honestly feel like I owe Bruce Kalish an apology. Nothing I said about Kalish or the shows he executive produced is necessarily untrue, but I just don't feel like it's fair to put it all on him. Disney gave him an absolute mess and told him to fix it, then gave him basically zero resources with which to do so, and in spite of that he still managed to turn out two passable series (S.P.D. and Operation Overdrive), one good series (Jungle Fury), and one of my top 5 favorite series to date (Mystic Force).
At the time of my writing this, my reviews for the Kalish series actually still haven't gone up (at the moment the latest review I have up is for Lightspeed Rescue) but I'm not going to rewrite them. Like I said, nothing I said in them is really untrue, and also I feel it's important to write about them as I thought of them at the time.
GOOD
| PROS: | CONS: |
| + A solid start and finish. Really, very good writing and characters for at least half the series | - The Writers' Guild Strike screwed up everything in between. |
| + Had some really cool ideas. | - Having cool ideas means nothing if you don't explore them. |
