Super Sentai Equivalent: Tokusou Sentai Dekaranger (Special Investigations Team Detective Ranger, "deka" is a Japanization of "dick", the slang term for detective)
It's the not-too-distant future, Next Sunday A.D. The battle against illegal immigration has finally been lost and Earth has become a planet-wide sanctuary city for aliens who've basically just gone ahead and taken our own homeworld away from us. Earth for Earthlings, I say! Send the aliens back to Alpha Centauri!
But the future isn't all liberal Democrat fantasies. Evil Emperor Gruumm has come along with his vicious and quasi-loyal minions to conquer Earth for himself! The only hope of stopping him is Space Patrol Delta and their elite team of A Squad Power Rangers! ...who immediately go MIA in their first battle. So now it's time for the S.P.D. B Squad to step up and take the fight back to Emperor Gruumm!
As usual, I'll start with the good. S.P.D. does a lot to set up the future world established in Time Force. Space Patrol Delta, with their "take the villains in alive" policies, and their teams of Power Rangers feel like a worthy predecessor to the Time Force Patrol, and a successor to Lightspeed.
Also, the series starts off pretty strong, actually doing something new to the franchise. The first ten or so episodes play like a police procedural, with each episode involving the team investigating to track down alien criminals.
Unfortunately, that disappears pretty quick. As with Turbo and Time Force before it, the series totally wastes its premise. For the vast majority of the series it's just bog-standard Rangers Save The Day action, and unlike those other two series you can't blame Dekaranger for this one.
With Wild Force and Ninja Storm Disney stumbled their way into the franchise, struggling to figure out what to do with it. Dino Thunder proved that they could do it right and if they built on that it would be really great. Then this series... this series is where they gave up.
Disney brought in a new executive producer, Bruce Kalish, to take the franchise in a new direction. That direction: cheaper and faster. The writers were pushed to stop writing their own stories and start just adapting Super Sentai stories. The general thought process among the production crew, according to Kalish himself, was "why bother, it's just Power Rangers."
Worst of all, they shifted away from practical effects and choreographed martial arts, and came to rely heavily on wire-fu and the infamous "kalishplosions." What is a kalishplosion? Imagine, if you will, that you're an evil space monster. You want to kill the guy in front of you, so you shoot at him... but for some reason all you can manage to hit is the dirt, ten feet in front of him. For some reason, this causes a gigantic 50-foot fireball to erupt a good thirty feet BEHIND him.
That's a kalishplosion, named after the aforementioned Bruce Kalish. To be fair, Kalish didn't actually create this effect; nonsense explosions had been a thing from the beginning, and this particular variant was invented by Mark Harris for Ninja Storm. S.P.D. is where they really came into prominence, though, as dictated by Disney, allegedly as part of the company's frankly ridiculous anti-violence policy. Do you think putting the explosion 10 feet behind a character makes the fact that they got shot with an assault rifle no longer violent? If so, you might be an idiot!
I guess I also have to talk about the characters. If the effects are where the whole thing fell apart, the characters are where the pieces crumbled into ash and blew away in the wind. The Rangers are unlikable and whiny little snots. Look, I get it. They're teenagers with attitude, that's the entire point. I can't expect them to totally have their act together. The point is to watch them grow and mature, and yeah, they do get less insufferable by the end. Still, these kids are buttheads even by this franchise's standards, and it's especially weird since they're meant to be military cadets but I find it very hard to believe they could have made it through boot camp without washing out.
At least their commander, Anubis "Doggie" Cruger (guess what kind of alien he is!) is pretty cool, both as the commander and as the Shadow Ranger. And I guess the villains... well, they get the job done. They're not as bad as Divatox or King Mondo, but they're not great either.
The worst, however, is the Omega Ranger. How bad is he? Well, his civilian persona is a CGI energy ball because the producers didn't feel like hiring another actor. Alright, I'll admit that could have been cool, but they totally squandered it. They gave the character a bunch of "things." He's an energy being! But he used to be human! Also he's from the future! But just having a bunch of weird things doesn't automatically make a character interesting, especially when the list of things he DOESN'T have includes a personality, character development, a backstory... His backstory is literally just "I'm an energy being from the future who used to be human." We don't even know how or why he became an energy being. Freaking YAWN.
Oh well, at least it's bookended by a solid start and a decent finish.
BAD
| PROS: | CONS: |
| + Takes good steps in setting up the future world of Time Force. | - The Rangers are unlikable and whiny. |
| + The first ten or so episodes are good, running like a police procedural. | - The Omega Ranger squandered a neat idea. |
| - An overreliance on CGI, wire-fu, and kalishplosions. |
No comments:
Post a Comment