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Ethan: Minna-san yokoso, welcome to your favorite cross-cultural deep dive analysis and recap podcast covering Super Sentai and Power Rangers, Kenkyuu Sentai Podcast Rangers. My name is Ethan; I use he/him pronouns, and with me is my usual co-host Andrew.
Andrew: Hey everybody, my name is Andrew. I also use he/him pronouns.
Ethan: Also joining us today, as I’m editing the script, is Nelson, our producer.
Nelson: Hey, I’m Nelson. You guys know me, you know what’s up.
Ethan: You know Nelson’s deal.
Nelson: You know my deal. I’m just, you know, I’m here. I’m here and I’m happy to be here.
Andrew: Nelson, what is “king of sports pro wrestling?”
Nelson: Oh, that is New Japan Pro Wrestling.
Andrew: Oh. I can’t see the other side.
Nelson: International Wrestling Grand Prix. King of Sports, greatest wrestling on the planet.
Andrew: Can we start a show about that?
Ethan: It’s massively, massively popular right now.
Nelson: Oh, no, we- there’s so much. There’s too much. There’s too much history.
Andrew: That makes me sad, because I love pro wrestling.
Nelson: No, it’s great and I mean…
Andrew: Could we just start with the like, 1992 debacle over the WCW belt?
Nelson: Oh, when Ric Flair left and they had to…
Andrew: No, when when Ric Flair lost the belt in Japan and then lied about it.
Nelson: Oh, yeah, I thought you were talking about when he left.
Andrew: So it’s the lead up to all of that. But no, Flair lost the belt in a mat- anyway. Yeah, it’s the worst. It’s the worst.
Nelson: There’s a lot of debacles of belts and Ric Flair in 1992. There’s a lot of debacles of Ric Flair in general.
Andrew: What a dude.
Nelson: But that’s a whole other can of worms. If you ever want to see Ric Flair on a daily basis, go to Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He goes to the same bar like every day.
Andrew: I bet he does.
Ethan: That’s so strange.
Nelson: You got a hair on your shoulder.
Andrew: Thank you, Nelson.
Ethan: I have several hairs on my shoulders, but they’re under my shirt so you can’t see them.
Andrew: Okay.
Nelson: What a comedian.
Ethan: Today we’re discussing Kyoryu Sentai Zyuranger episode 11 “Goshujin-sama! (My Master!)” and Power Rangers, season 1, episode 11 “No Clowning Around.” Before we get into the recap, though, I wanted to return briefly to episode 8 of Zyuranger, “Kyofu! Shunkan’ui!” In our coverage of that episode, I called attention to the timeline discrepancies regarding Dora Circe’s previous misadventures in Greece, which did not exist in the time of the ancient tribes. While I was watching episodes and working on scripts last night and this morning, I was watching our video cut of our episode 8, and I noticed that Goushi mentions that Dora Circe was active in Greece 2000 years ago, which does make a lot more sense than 170 million, but it does raise some other questions: Has Barza have been chronicling monster incidents for the entire time the Zyurangers have been asleep? Were there more monsters than just Dora Circe wandering the earth in that time? And did Goushi wake up and immediately memorize the entire Dino Denki? I just feel like this raises more questions. It answers the one question of “How do they have a record of Greece from 170 million years ago?” It wasn’t from 170 million years ago, and obviously I can see Barza keeping that chronicle.
Andrew: Sure.
Ethan: But I do have other questions.
Andrew: So while we’re doing continuity fixes, I also have a problem I noticed while I was watching episode 2.
Nelson: Episode 2. Of the podcast?
Andrew: Of the podcast, and the show. And this is something we’ve discussed a couple of times.
Ethan: Sentai or Rangers?
Andrew: Rangers. This is something that we’ve discussed a couple of times in the show. When we first started this, we watched “Food Fight.”
Ethan: Out of order, yeah.
Andrew: Out of order, and I was going through the show in my media library. I ripped some DVDs into Plex and “Food Fight” shows up as episode 2, and I was noticing this as I was getting ready to watch these episodes, and… it really pissed me off. It made me very angry. I did some digging and… so, we have already established that “Food Fight” was the second VHS released. Episode 1 and 2 were released on one tape, “Food Fight” was the second tape to be released.
Nelson: So technically it’s episode 3.
Andrew: Right. You would expect it to be episode 3, right. But “Food Fight” was actually broadcast second. They skipped episode 2 and broadcast “Food Fight.”
Ethan: Well, they would have skipped 2 through 5, right?
Andrew: Right, right, right, yeah. It’s episode 6. They just threw episode 6 into the broadcast schedule early. Apparently they were redubbing some audio for episode 2 and “Food Fight” was finished, so they just threw it in.
Ethan: This makes perfect sense to me.
Nelson: What a mess.
Ethan: This fits with our with our perception of the initial Power Rangers production as like, extremely hectic.
Andrew: Yeah. I will say having revisited some of those earlier episodes–I’ve been going back and watching our show as I’m going back and revisiting those earlier episodes again–the show has gotten so much better.
Ethan: Oh, yeah.
Andrew: And I think that today’s Power Rangers episode is a great example of how much better the show has gotten. I hated this episode. But I think it’s a great example of how much better the show has gotten.
Ethan: Really bad on multiple levels, but like in terms of production quality, significantly higher. We’ve watched three episodes for today’s recording session, and I don’t remember which one was in it, but you mentioned in a recent episode how well they were matching Rita’s dialogue to her speaking motions…
Andrew: Yeah, yeah, there are a couple of really good moments in this one.
Ethan: There’s some good ones. Like, they are they are working within the bounds of the material available to them. They’re doing a good job.
Andrew: They finally figured it out.
Nelson: It only took them about ten episodes to get there, which, you know, it’s about the same here.
Ethan: Well, I mean, like we talked about, this is like a-
Andrew: Brand new territory.
Ethan: This was not simply dubbing something, which had been going on for, I mean-
Andrew: Decades.
Ethan: Decades at this point, even 50 years. This is a different sort of a thing.
Andrew: Okay, I guess that’s enough ado.
Ethan: I guess that’s enough ado. Without further ado, let’s get into the recap.
[“Kyoryu Sentai… Zyuranger!!”]
Ethan: “Goshujin-sama!” was written by Sugimura Noboru and Araki Kenichi, two names we’ve seen before, and directed by Watanabe Katsuya, which is a name we haven’t seen before.
Andrew: So Noboru has directed a lot of- or he has written a lot of these, right?
Ethan: He’s the chief writer on Sentai, like the Sentai franchise, for decades. Yeah, I looked into him briefly because I considered, and I might still do, a research topic on him specifically, but he is like the head writer for the studio. The episode opens with Totpat doing some fishing from the Bandra Palace on the moon. Please do not concern yourself with the orbital mechanics involved. Totpat dredges up a magic lamp containing a genie, or Jinn as he’s called in this episode. He looks a little bit like if Anubis was the god of weird parties. Totpat and Bookback send a challenge letter to the Zyurangers, thinking that Jinn is their new trump card, but in the tussle between the Rangers and Jinn, the magic lamp gets blown away and found by a group of kids. The kids meet up at their extremely safe and OSHA-approved hideout in an abandoned warehouse.
Nelson: I was digging the vibe of that, because it-
Ethan: Oh, no, I would have been all over that place if I was 10.
Nelson: Yeah, like as a kid? Like-
Ethan: Rusty nails? Tetanus? I don’t know what that is.
Nelson: The most sketchy places.
Ethan: Oh, yeah, it’s like, on the on the wharf, like, there’s boats going past, and the river’s just right there.
Nelson: Yeah, I mean, sometimes I’ll like, go on these hikes, like, taking my dogs for walks and like, I’ll find these little spots, like, in the woods.
Ethan: Oh, yeah, just like, abandoned houses and all kind of stuff.
Nelson: Yeah, high school me would have loved smoking weed back here.
Ethan: Jinn almost immediately starts granting their wishes for Ferraris, all-you-can-eat chicken, and manga. They also play video games and have a dance party. I can’t find a single fault with this. I mean, the Ferrari doesn’t make sense, really, because it’s like you don’t even know how to drive. It’s not just that you can’t legally, but you don’t even know how.
Nelson: Okay, how he’s getting future wealth.
Ethan: That’s true.
Andrew: But I gotta be honest, if I was 10 years old and was- I would have absolutely been wishing for that. Give me a Lamborghini, give me some fried chicken. I’m all about it.
Ethan: Oh, yeah the Ferrari is the only one I have even a mild quibble with. The rest of this just is awesome.
Andrew: Did you not know any car kids when you were a kid?
Nelson: Car kids?
Andrew: Car kids. Kids that were obsessed with cars.
Ethan: I mean, I had Hot Wheels, like…
Nelson: ‘Cause I’m thinking like, car guys. Like guys, you know, put all their money into like, a beat-up Toyota, but like a seven-year-old?
Andrew: I mean, so my cousin, he’ll be on this show at some point probably-
Ethan: Lawson?
Andrew: Yeah, Lawson. Anyway, my cousin has been obsessed with cars his whole life. When he was a kid, he absolutely would have wished for some kind of fancy car.
Ethan: Yeah, sure. It’s just funny that it’s a whole Ferrari, but it’s just in this abandoned shack of a warehouse. Yeah, it’s not doing anything or going anywhere; he just thinks it’s cool to look at and sit in the seat. Which I can’t argue with! The kid with the fried chicken is just having a blast. He’s like, transcending.
Nelson: See, they flew too close to the Sun. Literally, when the little girl wished to be able to fly. Which I thought was cool, that the Jinn gave her a magic carpet.
Ethan: Yeah, I made a note that the magic carpet like, practical effect is like, perfect.
Nelson: Yeah, it’s really good.
Ethan: I mean, it just lifts up off the ground. You can’t see any of the guidelines, and it just flies, and it’s so cool. As Nelson mentions, one girl goes for a magic carpet ride, and while she’s out and about, she’s spotted by both the Zyurangers and Bandora’s minions, and both forces converge on the kids’ hideout. The Rangers and the minions fight over the lamp until Bandora herself appears, rather magnificently, and destroys the lamp, making Jinn both powerless and homeless. However, Jinn is fairly certain that Bandora will construct a new lamp, and he will be forced to inhabit it and do her bidding. The Zyurangers and the children resolve to find all the pieces of Jinn’s original lamp so that this does not come to pass, but they are not successful before Bandora returns to earth with an evil red lamp and Jinn takes on a giant monstrous form. The Rangers summon Daizyujin, but only Geki and Goushi remain to fight Jinn. The other three Rangers leave to continue searching for the missing pieces of Jinn’s lamp. Just before Dora Jinn goes in for a killing blow, the children find the last piece of Jinn’s original lamp and he returns to his home. Mei destroys the evil lamp with her arrow and Bandora retreats. Everyone celebrates, and the Zyurangers agree to seal the lamp and return it to the sea so that Jinn’s powers can never be used for evil again. The end.
Nelson: Yeah, see, this episode got like a legit like, ‘oh s***’ moment out of me when Bandora showed up and was like, “Alright, come on.”
Ethan: She appears with like lightning and thunder. It’s very cool.
Nelson: Yeah, it seems like she’s gonna like, telekinesis the lamp over to her, but she just picks it up and blows it up. I was like, “Oh!! Oh, okay!”
Ethan: This really demonstrates like-
Nelson: She’s evil!
Ethan: One, she’s evil, and two, she is a witch. She knows how magic works. She’s a powerful sorceress and she will use her power to mess things up for people. I mean, basically like, stealing this Jinn, who by the way mentions Aladdin by name multiple times, is apparently supposed to be THE Genie from the story of Aladdin, which is crazy, but she like has a fundamental understanding of the rules of this magical being. Like, “If I blow up your lamp and present a new one you have to live in it. That’s your whole deal.”
Nelson: Dem’s da rules.
Ethan: It’s a really cool evil red lamp too.
Nelson: It’s more a teapot than a lamp.
Ethan: Oh, I wonder if she sold anything that looked like that in her curio shop??
Nelson: Ohhhh! Talking about the lady who played Bandora, who we have a research topic on.
Ethan: Maybe that’s where it came from. Yeah, Soga Machiko. That was like episode three?
Andrew: Yeah, it was early.
Ethan: Yeah, this is a good one. It’s not as good as “Food Fight” is, for being a one-off, and- not “Food Fight,” but “Kyofu! Shunkan’ui.” And like there seems to be maybe some degree of strange Orientalism happening with the genie, that’s a little bit weird. He’s got like, harem pants on, he looks like a jackal, but it’s not really focused on and it’s like- It’s more of a pop culture, Arabian nights, I don’t know.
Nelson: Yeah, it’s a thing that like, I feel like somebody would take offense to it, but I…
Ethan: It’s like, background radiation level… exoticism, it’s not- it’s less jarring, for example, than Ernie walking out of the kitchen at the Youth Center with two Hawai’ian women in leis and hula skirts like, flanking him.
Nelson: I would say it’s less jarring than, say…
Andrew: Mr. Ticklesneezer?
Nelson: Or yeah, or if you want to take somebody that looks similar to the Jinn, Mr. Popo from Dragon Ball Z. I’d say it’s a little less jarring than that.
Ethan: Significantly.
Andrew: Maybe we’ll talk more about Dragon Ball Z at some point, but Mr. Popo is such a fascinating character, because he looks like a racist caricature of a black man, but he is also like-
Nelson: When you find out what it is, it’s like, “Okay…”
Andrew: Deeply steeped in in Japanese folklore and not actually- yeah.
Nelson: Yeah, it’s one of those things where once you like actually do the digging, you’re like, “Alright, well, I’m not mad about that. That’s fine.”
[Transcriber’s note: Some quick research shows that Mr. Popo may be partly based on the Hindu and Buddhist deity Mahakala, sometimes called “The Great Black One.”]
Andrew: Yeah, I liked this episode. I don’t have much more to say about it. This is the first episode of Sentai that I watched on my large TV, instead of at my desk.
Ethan: How was that?
Andrew: The intro to this show goes so hard.
Nelson: Yeah, dude!
Andrew: And like, I know I’ve been saying that about Power Rangers recently, but like the cinematography on this show really stands up to being-
Nelson: The little jumps at the beginning, man? They get me so hyped.
Ethan: At this point, I mean this is 1992 or 3, and then Gorenger came out in ’75. So almost 20 years straight of experience.
Andrew: So that’s the other thing, is that I’ve also been watching Gorenger. I’m like six or seven episodes into that now and it is fantastic, it is so good and-
Ethan: I really enjoyed that manga, and I do want to watch the show at some point.
Andrew: Yeah, there are a couple of movies as well and-
Ethan: Oh, there’s tons of Sentai movies.
Andrew: Yeah, but Gorenger specifically. But no, I’ve been watching that and it’s been really interesting to contrast that against both Zyuranger and also against Power Rangers, because no Zords, it’s very much a hand-to-hand and weapons kind of thing, but the pre-giant robot bits are very, very similar, and the composition of the team from Zyuranger to Gorenger is very, very similar. And Zyuranger is is executed with a lot more practice, but even Gorenger has qualities about it that would have been completely unseen on American television at the time. It just visually looks so much different than anything that was coming out of American TV at the time.
Ethan: Mhm. We’ve had superhero stuff… I mean, what- when did Batman debut in comic form?
Andrew: Superman is ’38, Batman’s ’39 or ’40.
Ethan: So like, we’ve had superhero stuff, and I know there was superhero-esque TV shows. But like you said, nothing like, with this level of panache was coming out.
Nelson: I’d be interested to take a look at that.
Andrew: I think you’re gonna have to. I think you’re gonna have to put some clips right here.
Nelson: I’m gonna have to take a look at it to put some put some clips in so people will watch this.
Ethan: Nelson’s to-watch list never gets shorter. It only gets longer.
Nelson: Yeah, well…
Andrew: And it’s mostly my fault.
Nelson: It’s, yeah, I mean, yeah, it’s funny. I think it was episode nine, where you started talking about The West Wing. And I was like, “Alright, hold on.” Which, that part oh my god that was going back to that part cracked me up so much. ‘Cause we were already going and then you just lean over, “…you ever watch The West Wing?”
Andrew: Well, we were pretty far down a rabbit hole… So speaking of which, down a rabbit hole, let’s do a Rangers recap.
Ethan: Alright.
Nelson: Alright, Rangers recap. This is “No Clowning Around.”
Andrew: Yeah.
[“Go! Go! Power Rangers!!”]
Andrew: Power Rangers episode 11, “No Clowning Around,” was written by Mark Hofmeier and directed by Adrian Carr. This is Mark’s first episode, but we’re gonna see him in the next several. He goes on to write four episodes. Adrian Carr has previously directed “Day of the Dumpster,” “High Five,” and “A Pressing Engagement.” So, some of the best episodes that we’ve had so far.
Ethan: And also just like… the first.
Andrew: The first.
Ethan: The first couple. That’s cool.
Andrew: This episode is real bonkers. This one- it goes at such a pace that like, if I was telling somebody who had never experienced Power Rangers where to start, of the episodes we’ve watched so far, I think this might be the one.
Nelson: This would be a good… good jumping off point.
Andrew: It is just all killer, no filler. They open at a carnival, with basically no exposition. Zack is walking on stilts and the shots they did of him and his stunt double here were very well-executed. The wide shot makes it look like Zack is on stilts; they don’t use the wide shot very often… it worked. Obviously Billy is overly verbose, because that’s the thing that they are really leaning into these next three or four episodes.
Nelson: Oh, I hate it. I hate it so much.
Andrew: Especially the next one, I think.
Ethan: Well, the next one is “Power Rangers Punks.”
Andrew: Oh, no, so the- thirteen-
Nelson: Thirteen is what I’m thinking about.
Andrew: While Billy is being overly verbose, the Power Rangers walk off, and they do a shot of the clown that they have been kind of goofing around with and um…
Ethan: Alarm bells.
Andrew: Yeah, well, with absolutely no context-
Ethan: Sirens, klaxons, everything.
Nelson: Yeah, evil clowns.
Andrew: Yeah, with absolutely no context, they just drop a monster face over the top of his face. Just do an overlay and it’s not explained- He’s just a monster clown and we’re supposed to know this right out of the gate.
Nelson: Yeah, he’s a Putty and then the other one is the monster, right?
Andrew: So the episode rockets along. It moves very quickly, especially compared to the languid pace of some of the like, middle episodes that we’ve seen. This one felt intentional in a way that a lot of them leading up to this have not, and I’m gonna put that down to Mark Hofmeier actually writing an episode, as opposed to just trying to string some elements together.
Ethan: I can believe that.
Andrew: At the carnival, a clown is juggling. Trini shows up with a young girl.
Nelson: It’s her cousin Sylvia.
Andrew: It is her cousin Sylvia. Bulk and Skull steal some cotton candy and this leads to one of the more iconic visuals from the intro, where they’re waving the cotton candy next to their face.
Ethan: There’s like, a girl, like, doing a ring toss or something-
Andrew: Two girls doing a ring toss.
Ethan: And they just like, pluck their cotton candy off of the little paper cones. It’s very in-character.
Andrew: It’s one of the first examples that we’ve seen of Bulk and Skull being bullies successfully.
Ethan: Right.
Andrew: And it like, it rescues their characters in a lot of ways
Nelson: They can bully everybody except the Power Rangers.
Andrew: The Power Rangers! Because the Power Rangers are the bigger bullies.
Nelson: Yeah! I mean pretty much, yeah.
Andrew: Billy is offered the option to juggle some eggs, and obviously he cannot do this, so the eggs smash on Bulk and Skull, because we have to humiliate them with food.
Nelson: Yeah, he’s just like, “Alright, well, I’ll try juggling, but also f*** these guys.”
Ethan: And the clown, it’s worth mentioning, is trying to get Sylvia, Trini’s young cousin, to do the juggling.
Nelson: Again, alarm bells. Going crazy. Like why does this clown want a child.
Andrew: So we cut to Rita, and Rita confirms the clown is evil, and then monologues a bit about the plot and…
Nelson: The clown’s name is Pineapple.
Andrew: Yes, the clown’s name is Pineapple. This bit with Rita was very, very quick and felt a little rushed, not necessarily in a bad way, but just like… it was perfunctory. We needed to get past Rita, we needed to establish that this was her plot. Pineapple the clown then just kidnaps Sylvia. The Rangers are doing some kind of gymnastics thing, that they do very badly.
Ethan: Human pyramid, which is like (I think) one of the most–I mean Ryan would be able to tell us–one of the most basic, easiest things to do in gymnastics, and they’re like struggling, which doesn’t make any sense.
Nelson: Again, Incredibles theory. Just saying.
Ethan: Oh, I see.
Andrew: So Sylvia is kidnapped by Pineapple, and according to Rita, Sylvia has been turned into a cardboard cut-out. Now, later in the episode, she’s not a cardboard cut-out, and she’s just dehydrated. She has been dehydrated. So apparently humans, when you dehydrate them, turn into cardboard.
Ethan: It’s like those novelty towels you can get that are like, compressed into a little brick and even if you take them out of the plastic, they just stay that way until you wet them and then they unravel.
Nelson: Or like those little dinosaur things.
Ethan: Right, the little dinosaur capsules, that kind of stuff.
Andrew: So further antics ensue. Jason causes a stampede at the carnival.
Ethan: I made a note of this. “Oh, now they’re just creating a panic. What is this episode?”
Nelson: Yeah, they straight up cause a riot.
Andrew: He grabs a bullhorn and he shouts, “Everyone get out! It’s a trap from Rita!” or something to that effect.
Ethan: “Rita is attacking!” and it’s like… hey, you can’t tell a couple hundred people to just run, because that’s how people get trampled and die.
Andrew: But also, why would anybody know who Rita is?
Nelson I think the town knows who Rita Repulsa is.
Ethan: The’ve seen multiple giant monsters in the city…
Andrew: But no one has said Rita Repulsa is responsible for these monsters. The Power Rangers don’t have a spokesperson. Did Jason just out himself as as a Power Ranger?
Ethan: I don’t know, I feel like there’s been…
Nelson: I think they just make it seem like, “Monsters! Everybody run!!” You know, fire in a crowded building.
Ethan: Well, so like Rita has appeared multiple times on Earth like very prominently I don’t know if she’s done like TV broadcasts per se.
Nelson: Yeah, I think they know. They know who Rita Repulsa is.
Ethan: I think it’s plausible that some of the crowd might know. That’s a good point to bring up: that Jason is a total rando in a red tank top who’s just there with everyone else. Now, is he technically correct that the fair is a trap? Yes. But that is totally incidental, and it is a miracle- And if this was a different kind of show then like, multiple injuries, potentially deaths, would have occurred as a result of this, and that’s something he’d have to like, carry with him and deal with. And maybe like, get some emergency response training. There’s multiple Sentai and Power Ranger shows that are based around just the concept of emergency rescue workers.
Andrew: What does the collateral damage from this look like?
Ethan: Exactly. But because this is Power Rangers season one, it’s just-
Nelson: We’re not thinking about it.
Ethan: Everybody’s fine, it’s not a big deal, you can shout fire in a crowded theater and everyone gets away fine.
Andrew: So in the meantime, Trini has taken Sylvia’s cardboard cut-out to Alpha, and uh…
Nelson: Billy’s garage. Actually, I have this noted, Trini takes Sylvia back to Billy’s garage because he has a quasitronic molecular generator.
Ethan: Yeah, we’re back to the quasitronics. I also made a note of how like, high def and well-printed that cut out was. Like that was a really well-made prop. They only made the one, but it was really good.
Andrew: Alpha determines, through analysis, that Sylvia is dehydrated, and proceeds to just dump a bucket of water on her. This doesn’t work, and then it does work.
Ethan: Yeah, it takes a second.
Andrew: And then Alpha throws a bucket of water in her face, which she blames on Trini, and Alpha tries to hide amongst the detritus.
Ethan: Tries to pretend to be… I don’t know, an empty…
Nelson: Works perfectly!
Ethan: Yeah, Sylvia doesn’t notice him, so…
Andrew: In the meantime, Pineapple the clown turns into Pineoctopus.
Nelson: God, I hated this monster.
Andrew: And Pineoctopus tries to dehydrate the Rangers, but he can’t.
Ethan: Yep, it’s just, “Oh your suits protect you from my magic!” Well, that’s… Thank you for this thrilling drama.
Nelson: And it seems like Rita knew, because she immediately sends Goldar down to help him. It’s just like, “Ugh, get- get down there. Help Pineoctopus. He sucks. Help him”
Andrew: In addition to Goldar, Rita makes the monster grow. The rangers summon the Zords and they fight as small Zords for a while and then go tank mode.
Ethan: We saw some mixed-unit tactics in this one, which I always love.
Andrew: This is, I think, the second time that we’ve seen them do anything with the Zords other than just right form the tank or the Megazord.
Ethan: Yeah, we got the Triceratops chain horns and we got the Mastodon ice breath. It’s like, “Yeah!!”
Andrew: That bit was great.
Ethan: Tactics!
Andrew: But then they go tank mode, which is always a bad idea.
Nelson: Never works.
Andrew: And then they transform into the Megazord, and I don’t even think they use the sword, I think they use their their head beam, but neither here nor there.
Ethan: Oh, yeah the horn crest blast. Just awesome. Again, love to see more techniques and attacks than just the sword. Don’t get me wrong, I love the sword slash, but it’s so cool when other things get used.
Andrew: Later, they reopen the carnival. Trini and Sylvia share a tender moment. And they have a moral of this story, which is that children shouldn’t run off.
Nelson: Yeah, don’t run off without your parents in a crowded place, or you’ll get turned into a cardboard cut-out.
Andrew: So I have two notes here that I want to make sure that we call out. One is that the Rangers all shouted “Morphin’!” in unison as an exclamation. I don’t remember them doing that before but it was real, real silly.
Ethan: So we’ve we’ve seen ‘morphitudinal’ and ‘morphenomenous’ and all those sorts of things, but this one is just ‘morphin’!’
Andrew: And that they all did it in unison, as if they had been practicing It didn’t scan.
Ethan: It doesn’t hit.
Andrew: The other note that I have here is that the Megazord talks in this one. I don’t remember the Megazord talking before, but the Megazord says, “Megazord sequence has been initiated!” and “Megazord activate!”
Nelson: Yeah, that caught me off guard.
Ethan: I can’t remember if it’s been in previous episodes, but I think this is a mainstay from this point forward.
Nelson: It is! Like because when it happened I was like… heard that before, but I think that’s the first episode that it’s…
Ethan: Super, super noticeable.
Andrew: And I didn’t like it. Why would the Megazord talk?
Nelson: Because that’s a feature they can put! in! toys!
Andrew: But they didn’t.
Nelson: They did!
Andrew: Recently, though. Not not at the time.
Nelson: Yeah, but I’m sure at the time, they still tried.
Ethan: I don’t remember an electronic Megazord that uses this specific audio. I had a few notes about this one. I mean, I’ve already brought up just that the stranger danger sirens are f***ing going.
Andrew: Oh, the entire time. These clowns are so creepy. This might be why so many people from our generation have a fear of clowns.
Nelson: I mean, that’s one of ’em.
Andrew: More than “It.”
Ethan: Definitely contributes, but specifically, I mean, I don’t know. How do y’all feel that the perception of stranger danger has changed since we were kids?
Nelson: Well, I mean with the Internet, I mean, it’s more prevalent, but also I feel like people are dumber.
Ethan: Yeah, that’s like a whole new different dimension of…
Nelson: Yeah, because with me growing up, stranger danger also coincided with the whole To Catch a Predator thing. And so it’s like, I’ve always been on that like, DTA, Don’t Trust Anybody, you know, unless they give you a reason to trust them, and even then, you know, keep one eye out.
Andrew: But also, the important thing to remember is that kids, especially, but anybody: you are much more likely to be harmed by someone you know, than by a stranger.
Ethan: The statistics do not bear up around that.
Andrew: And in this particular episode, the way that they have the clowns, in particular, behaving was designed to set off alarm bells, but it is also not the way that someone would behave if they were actually trying to kidnap that child.
Ethan: Right. So like I can remember my parents giving me a talk, just like: “If we’re out somewhere, stick with us. If someone tries to get you to go somewhere with them, don’t do that.” And that was basically the talk. I just said, “Okay. That makes sense to me. Like I know y’all. I live here with y’all. I don’t know whoever at the mall or whatever.” But like you mentioned, this is not how that actually happens. Human trafficking is a real thing and is a real danger and should be eradicated, but this is not how it happens. It is almost always a family member or a family friend or you know, mom’s new boyfriend or who knows. And so this just feels very jarring.
Nelson: It’s very of the times.
Ethan: It is very of the times. Some of the other notes that I have here is: one of the Putties walks behind the carousel and transforms into a Putty, from a clown, and comes out, but he’s still wearing his neck ruff and holding his umbrella, and he is like, twirling it in the most menacing possible way you can twirl an umbrella, and that cracked me up.
Andrew: So I don’t know if this was intentional, but a lot of the the Putties as clowns bits really harkened back to A Clockwork Orange.
Nelson: Yeah, oh snap! I didn’t even think about that, dude.
Andrew: That is that is where my head went immediately, and like, I’ve watched A Clockwork Orange twice, which is not something I would recommend anybody do.
Nelson: Yeah, that’s a real one’n’done movie.
Andrew: It is a movie that you do not watch two times. But the second time was with someone who had never seen it, and I was like, “Well, you got to watch it once.” A Clockwork Orange, for those who are not familiar, is an incredibly brutal film about some incredibly brutal people who do some really horrible things, and over the course of the film they move and act and dance like these clowns. And the way that they are menacing is the same way that these Putties are coming out. They’re wearing very similar kind of affectations and frills and the umbrella and it was…
Nelson: Yeah, I ain’t even gonna lie, I didn’t even make that connection.
Andrew: And I don’t know if it was intentional or not, but-
Ethan: Who knows?
Andrew: It is burned into my brain.
Nelson: Yeah, no, I get that, yeah.
Ethan: The other moment I wanted to call out is when Jason is fighting Putties by the… whatever the flippy cage thing is, they’re trying to grab him by his tank top straps through the bars. And I just thought that was hysterical. They can just barely reach and there’s just those little straps to pinch and they’re just like, “Eh! Gotcha!” and he’s like, “Oh no, I can’t get away!”
Andrew: One of the things that made this episode really interesting was the amount of US footage.
Nelson: Yeah, there’s a lot of it.
Andrew: And I feel like that’s part of the reason why it was able to rocket along so quickly, is that they they just didn’t use very much mask footage, which means that this is probably one of the more expensive episodes for them to produce. And in spite of that, like, I didn’t like this. I didn’t like the clowns. I didn’t like putting the child in this much obvious like, real-feeling danger, as opposed to a lot of the other episodes where the danger is more abstract.
Ethan: No, it reminds me of that moment in “Happy Birthday, Zack” when Bulk and Skull are being genuinely menacing. And that- it has like a whole undertone there that’s not like, “Ha ha, give me your lunch money.” It’s like, something far more serious than that, and that I definitely got that feeling from this episode as well.
Andrew: That’s not to say this is a bad episode. It did a good job. It moves very quickly, and like I said, I think it would be a great like- you’re trying to figure out what Power Rangers is about? This is what Power Rangers is about. But it wasn’t fun.
Ethan: No.
Nelson: There was a moment at the beginning that got a laugh out of me, for those yaoi fans out there. When Zack falls off the stilts and Jason catches him and he’s like, “Oh my hero!”
Ethan: So I mentioned this to my girlfriend. I mean, I’ve mentioned on the show before, how in “Happy Birthday, Zack,” and there’s lots of other little moments, when Zack realizes they’ve built him this surprise party, he grabs Kim and Trini’s hands and he’s like, “Oh my god. Thank you so much!” So like my shipper brain has already been going, and then this happens when Zack falls down and it’s not played off for homophobia points, like we’ve seen previously in the show.
Nelson: No!
Ethan: It’s actually- I mean, it’s not focused on…
Nelson: But Jason gives him just a little like, “Oh, you.”
Ethan: Jason’s just like, mmm, and I’m like, HMMMM. [To Andrew] I have a question for you specifically.
Andrew: Okay.
Ethan: At the very end when Billy is on his paint can stilts, he has a computer attached to the stilts. What is that? Can you find out?
Andrew: Yeah, I’ll find out, hold on.
Nelson: Was that like an on-board balance thing or…
Ethan: I don’t know.
Andrew: It was supposed to be, and they they talk about it. Billy’s like, “With my new invention, anybody can walk on stilts!” but they cut away from it so quickly that I didn’t like…
Nelson: Yeah, I barely caught that, that’s a funny one.
Andrew: You don’t get a very good shot of it. It looks like it might even be a cash register.
Ethan: It could be a cash drawer.
Andrew: Yeah. It’s got a big piece missing where the screen would have been.
Nelson: So they just put a piece of a computer on the side on the side of some stilts.
Ethan: They took two… probably seven foot four-by-fours, glued a bunch of s*** to it.
Nelson: That looks about right. That sounds about right for the ’90s.
Andrew: Yeah, no idea. No idea.
Nelson: You got the research this week, Ethan?
Ethan: Yeah, I’m gonna handle it.
Andrew: Before you actually start on the research, I was checking the Power Rangers wiki to to get some info and there are several things about this episode that I should have included in my recap, that I just read in the Power Rangers wiki, that we should call out. Zordon’s not in this one. They never go to the command center.
Nelson: Oh, yeah, they don’t. Right.
AndreW: And I didn’t notice, but they don’t. They’re in Billy’s garage. One of the DVD extras that they did down the road, when they actually released the series on DVD, talks about the production of Power Rangers, and this is the first episode that they finished.
Ethan: Interesting. Is it the first one that they filmed?
Andrew: It is the first episode that they completed. So they were filming episodes concurrently. They were-
Nelson: That’s probably why it has the least mask footage.
Andrew: Right, right.
Nelson: That makes a lot of sense.
Andrew: They were doing all of this footage–all the American side footage–at the same time, across several episodes, and this is the first one that they finished. The wiki also calls out that this is the first time a monster disguises itself as a human in the show so far.
Ethan: In Power Rangers, yeah. That’s pretty standard for Dora monsters in Sentai, but yeah.
Andrew: And this is also the first episode where a monster is destroyed by the Megazord’s crest, which I did mention, but…
Nelson: Also this monster sucks.
Andrew: Yeah, it’s not a great monster.
Nelson: Costume sucks, I had no idea-
Andrew: The clown was way scarier. I don’t know what a Pineoctopus is supposed to be.
Nelson: Until they said the name I was like, what am I looking at here? Because it just looked like just a bundle of like, confetti and stuff, like, it looked stupid, you know? Cause like with the Eye Guy, it was like, “Ew, that’s gross.” But this was like the first one I looked at and I was like this is… this sucks.
Ethan: It’s just kind of like whatever. And so this is… the Sentai monster is Dora Endos and I don’t know what his deal is.
Nelson: On to the research!
Ethan: I just wrote it this morning, so it’s maybe not as long or in-depth as they have been previously.
Nelson: That’s all right. We’re already running close to an hour.
Ethan: But like, I just want to give an account of my whereabouts and activities of the past like 36-ish hours.
Nelson: Where you been, bud?
Ethan: So, my main gig is at a brewery here in town, and I had probably 30-something kegs to wash. They take 11 minutes apiece, I can only do one at a time, and I have to refill the chemical reservoirs in between batches.
Nelson: Jeez.
Ethan: So, I was at work for nine hours yesterday, from like noon-ish to like 9 p.m, went home, watched three episodes of Sentai, took notes, wrote three summaries, went to bed. Got up, made a delicious steak wrap for breakfast with some homemade tzaziki sauce, pretty choice, sat down back in front of the computer, watched three episodes of Power Rangers, took notes, and wrote this research topic. So like, anyway, this is Intro to Tokusatsu part two. So all the way back in episode five, I presented a research topic called Intro to Tokusatsu part one, and I think the time is right to continue that. We left off, essentially, with the creation of Ultraman by special effects master Tsuburaya Eiji in the 60s, in 1966, to be specific. Technically, Ultra Q was the beginning of that franchise, which did not feature the titular hero, but rather followed a squad of paranormal and kaiju researchers. Ultraman ’66 followed this up, although was not technically a sequel. Tsuburaya Productions would go on to make even more Ultraman shows in 1967, ’71, ’72, ’73, ’74, ’80, ’96, ’97, ’98, ’01, ’04, ’05, and ’06. There have also been stage shows, manga, and foreign adaptations, as well as several language dubs released. I think Netflix did like a CG anime Ultraman at some point. As we discussed in episode one, 1971 witnessed the release of the first Kamen Rider TV show, created by Ishinomori Shotaro, whose other creation Himitsu Sentai Gorenger, would be released in 1975. The Metal Heroes subgenre of tokusatsu, which we have mentioned once or twice in passing on this show, kicked off in 1982 with Space Sheriff Gavan. The upshot of all of this is that from the late ’60s into the ’80s, roughly 15 to 20 year period, was a massive explosion of the tokusatsu genre in television, and between toy sales and ad revenue, the studios and production companies were printing money, and moreover gained themselves an absolutely devoted fan base, which is partly why so many of these series are ongoing today, because like, the people making Zyuranger, Sugimura Noboru and all these other people, would have grown up on Ultraman, and Kamen Rider, even, which was not that far before, but they would have been fans of those shows and, as I mentioned, creators like Hideaki Anno, creator of Evangelion, is like directly inspired by these and, you know, works in a different medium of animation, but now he’s also directed, I think, two different live action movies now, and it’s just like a constantly rolling thing of like growing up, watching, and then getting inspired, moving into that field, and then the kids and and teens who are watching your stuff and then grow up and get inspired.
Nelson: If only every career path was that easy.
Andrew: Ishinomori speaks at length in various interviews about how he was directly inspired by Astro Boy and how, like, his his dream job was was to just do that. And so he does, you know? You mentioned the toy sales here and there’s one kind of aspect of that, that at some point we’ll probably talk about in more detail, but that I want to call out here and that’s these toys started- late ’70s, ’78, ’79, you get the Shogun Warriors line in the US. The Shogun Warriors are like straight based on various tokusatsu characters, a bunch of different characters, and also Godzilla and Rodin and-
Ethan: We have a Super Shogun-scale Optimus Prime over there by Nelson right now, and I think there are probably still a few in this building. We don’t have any in the room at the moment. This is the size we’re talking about.
Andrew: Yeah, so they’re these giant robots.
Nelson: These things are huge.
Ethan: They’re huge. They’re blow mold…
Andrew: And they all feature rocket fists.
[Nelson fires the rocket fist.]
Ethan: They do rocket fists. Pretty limited articulation, pretty limited accessories, but they’re big, they’re bright, they’re colorful.
Andrew: And they were relatively cheap at the time. This Optimus Prime is not; he’s like $300.
Nelson: Yeah, no, this thing seems expensive.
Andrew: Yeah, so the Shogun Warriors were done at that size, but they were also done at like a three-inch scale.
Nelson: I don’t know how you put- I mean, I feel like- ’cause I’m looking at these Shogun Warriors things and like, some of them seem like they have a lot of detail to put into such like a three-inch scale thing.
Andrew: Yeah, yeah, and the little ones were diecast.
Nelson: Wait, is this on wheels?
Andrew: It’s on wheels. They were on wheels.
Ethan: I dread to think how many siblings have been beaned in the noggin with a diecast three-inch figure of a Mazinger or whoever.
Andrew: And they did a five-inch line as well, but, so in ’75 when Gorenger came out, they did a line of Sofubi, of little Japanese soft vinyl.
Ethan: Crafsman’s been on that Sofubi tip for a couple weeks now.
Andrew: So I, at a toy show I went to in February, I picked up the line, the run of the Gorenger Sofubi.
Ethan: I remember seeing pictures of those.
Andrew: From the original run, and they’re incredible, and I wish that we had gotten something like that out of the later shows, you know? Because they’re just little like, three-inch guys, same articulation, just, you know, shoulders move and the waist rotates and that’s it. But it’s the Rangers, you know?
Nelson: Do they still have like firing fists?
Andrew: No, because they’re they’re itty-bitty.
Nelson: Okay, yeah, because I was like, that’s- we already talked about the choking hazards and all that.
A But yeah, so the toy sales were big. This was a huge aspect of all of this. We see it a lot with Bandai. It took decades for Power Rangers to become something more than just an arm of Bandai, to the point that like, now that Hasbro is in control of the Power Rangers merchandising, Bandai is a much weaker company as a result.
Ethan: And they’ve pivoted a lot to like, electronic products also. Bandai Namco makes video games.
Andrew: Yeah, in the next episode we will talk about some of Bandai’s video game output. But yeah, the toys from the go–all the way back, as far as you can go–have been a critical part of this.
Ethan: There are also many other franchises and shows which have escaped mention here today, so go explore. You’re bound to find something you like, and thanks to the efforts of fansubbers, many of these shows are hugely more accessible to non-Japanese speakers than they have been historically. Now to take a sort of another little u-turn, as with the example of Andrew’s dad that he mentioned in a previous episode, bits and pieces of tokusatsu have been filtering over to other parts of the world, to various degrees, since the beginning. Godzilla, obviously, as well as Ultraman and others, but the Sabanization process might just represent the most definite and directed effort in this regard. We had a VHS of Godzilla VS Megalon when I was a kid, for example, but it was a pretty straightforward English dub with no editing or localization. Despite its many flaws and general cringiness, I can respect the vision for Power Rangers and the ambition of the project. Saban is a slimeball and a despicable human being, but he had a solid idea here, and I think the ongoing legacy speaks for itself.
Andrew: Yeah, absolutely. It’s kind of astounding, because just like with these television producers coming up with the the previous manga and tokusatsu series in Japan, and being inspired by those, and creating things based off of those, you end up with a similar experience here, where a lot of people saw Astro Boy and decided that they were going to get into animation because they saw Astro Boy, or saw Ultraman. I have to imagine that that at least some of the people who got involved with Power Rangers were people who had grown up, much like my dad did, with Ultraman or The Space Giants, I think, or Three Space Giants.
Ethan: I saw that mentioned in in my research for today.
Andrew: That was a hugely popular show stateside, that nobody, basically, talks about today.
Ethan: It’s funny you mention that. Two of the actors from Power Rangers HyperForce were in both Super Sentai and Power Rangers. Not the same adaptation, I think? I remember the character’s names, let me see if I can remember the actor’s names… Peter Sudarso and his brotherrr Yoshi. Their family is Indonesian, but they worked in the Japanese film industry and were in Sentai shows, and then also like, kind of double-dipped and came over to California or wherever they were filming and filmed Power Rangers stuff as well, which is just pretty neat. Pretty cool that, you know, there’s certain people who can not just take inspiration from and go to work in, but also like straddle both production chains, kind of.
Andrew: Absolutely, and you know, we’ve talked a lot about David Yost. Yost is the actor who plays Billy. He’s one of the producers on several of the more recent Power Rangers series. He has taken a very active role in this thing.
Ethan: Sure! Good.
Andrew: He’s one of the more recognizable faces from the show, and he suffered, you know? And so it’s really great, and we talked about-
Nelson: Paul Schrier. Paul Shear?
[General confusion.]
Andrew: Paul Schrier? We’ll go with that. How he comes out of the show and and parlays it into a whole career, and like, yeah, it is almost like once you’ve started doing this thing, it’s really easy to keep doing it.
Nelson: Oh, it’s funny: I was at a bar, talking to a guy about this podcast, because I’ve kind of become the talk of part of our friend group, because of this podcast.
Andrew: Of course.
Nelson: They’re just like, “Y’all see that Power Rangers podcast?” Then I’m like, “Guys. I mean, yeah.”
Ethan: “It’s not a big deal or anything.”
Nelson: Yeah, so like I started telling him about the HyperForce stuff.
Ethan: Have you listened to it at all?
Nelson: I’ve listened a little bit of it, but they started doing a comic run of the HyperForce stuff.
Ethan: Yes, there’s a crossover event in the middle of the only season of the HyperForce podcast with the Shattered Grid comics event, which was really cool and fun and interesting. And then they pick up the story of that squad of Rangers after the end of season one. I don’t know if they’re going to make another season at some point. This was- that was all pre-COVID. We live in a different universe now.
Nelson: But this dude was- he was also telling me about how they finally got Amy Jo Johnson back to like, help out on like, a run of comics that they were doing, and like strictly for like, Pink Ranger stuff.
Andrew: That’s neat.
Ethan: Yeah, she- our universe’s Kimberly gets into some cool stuff, and then there are multiple alternate universe Kimberlys who go into some crazy wild stuff.
Nelson: It’s pretty much like, kind of like a Flashpoint event. Like, Pink Rangers from the perspective of our universe’s Kimberly.
Andrew: That’s gonna be fun.
Nelson: At least, that’s that’s how he explained it to me, so can’t wait for that. So, thanks, Noah, for putting me on that.
Ethan: Do we have anything else, gentlemen?
Andrew: Nope. I think we’ve had too much.
Nelson: We still got two more to do.
Ethan: Alright, we’ll be back next time to discuss episodes 12 of Zyuranger “Papa wa Kyuuketsuki?! (Papa’s a Vampire?!)” and Power Rangers, “Power Ranger Punks.” Is it “Power Ranger Punks” or “Power Rangers Punks”? I don’t know. If you’ve enjoyed this show, please feel free to send me $5, and if you want to find me online, don’t. But you can follow the show on the Fediverse @KenkyuuSentaiPodcastRangers@Meet.CommunityMedia.Network. Andrew, how can people get in touch and what should they look out for?
Andrew: I’m @AJRoach42@Retro.Social and I just opened a bookstore. HemlockBazaar.com. That’s B-A-Z-A-A-R, like a marketplace, not like something strange.
Neslon: Yes, you sure did.
Andrew: Nelson!
Ethan: What do you want to plug?
Nelson: Folks… Hey, I’m not gonna lie to you, I don’t really have much to throw out this week besides Working Class Music. Go watch that.
Andrew: Hey, hey, Nelson.
Nelson: Yeah.
Ethan: Oh no.
Andrew: When you gonna record another album?
Nelson: I’m working on it, but I don’t know if anything that I’m making is…
Andrew: Is it gonna be a Holders album or a Jon Thefruitman album?
Nelson: Both.
Andrew: Okay. Neither.
Nelson: We’re working on, we’re working on but-
Ethan: Jon Thefruitholders album.
Nelson: We’re probably gonna record the last Holders album here, whenever Cole gets back from being a super famous musician. Woo. And you know, I’m just working on stuff at home. But yeah, go watch Working Class Music. Watch more stuff on New Ellijay TV… yeah!
Ethan: Okay.
Nelson: That’s all I got.
Ethan: That’s all the show we have for you today. Thank you so much for listening, and thanks also to Hurly-Burly and the Volcanic Fallout for the use of their song “Colossal Might (Totally Radical Instrumental version)” for our intro and outro music. Kenkyuu Sentai Podcast Rangers is licensed CC-BY-SA and produced in collaboration with New Ellijay Television at the Ellijay Makerspace, which stands on the ancestral, unceded, stolen, and occupied lands of the Cherokee people. You can learn more about the Makerspace by visiting EllijayMakerspace.org, and you can learn more about the Cherokee people by visiting Cherokee.org. Strength, love, and solidarity to all oppressed people, and in the words of a wise man, “F*** capitalism; go home.”
Ethan: Maybe someday, if PeerTube gets the right plugins, but…
Andrew: We could be live. We could do it. We just need to run everything into a video mixer,
Ethan: Which we have.
Andrew: Yeah.
Nelson: We’d need like, a live censor bar.
Ethan: If it slips, it slips. Sorry.
Andrew: Have you seen David Chang’s new show?
Nelson: No.
Andrew: It’s called “Dinner Time Live,” and it’s just him inviting comedians on and then he cooks dinner for them live.
Nelson: Oh, yeah, I’ve seen that because he did an episode with Seth Rogen.
Andrew: Yeah, they took $15,000 worth of caviar, and they just covered a Pizza Hut pizza with $15,000 worth of caviar.
[EDITORS NOTE: Dinner Time Live struggled with their censorship/content rating. It was relevant, I swear — Andrew]
Ethan: Three, two, one. [Clap.]
Andrew: Alright.
[“It’s morphin’ time!” + intro music]
Ethan: Minna-san yokoso, welcome to your favorite cross-cultural, deep dive analysis and recap podcast covering Super Sentai and Power Rangers, Kenkyuu Sentai Podcast Rangers. My name is Ethan; I use he/him pronouns, and with me is my usual co-host Andrew.
Andrew: Hey everybody, I’m Andrew; I also use he/him pronouns.
Ethan: Today we’re discussing Kyoryu Sentai Zyuranger episode 10, “Saru wa Mou Iya! (Monkeys No More!)” and Power Rangers season one episode 10, “Happy Birthday, Zack.” We’re also going to mix it up just a little today as Andrew is going to do his recap first. Without further ado, unless we have further ado? I think we had a lot of further ado last episode, so we’re good. Let’s get into the recap!
[“Go! Go! Power Rangers!”]
Andrew: Alright, so today we’re talking about “Happy Birthday, Zack,” which was written by Stewart St. John and directed by Jeff Reiner. I think that’s how you say that. Before I say anything else about this episode, I do want to say one small callout here: Zack’s outfit in this episode goes way too hard. Like, Zack’s a good-looking guy, but this is the first time in the episode that I’ve been like, “Oh, you can’t even play a teenager. You’re just a dude.” He’s got like, the Yankees jersey on.
Ethan: Yeah, the baseball jersey is a good look.
Andrew: Yeah. Anyway, just wanted to call that out. We open at the Youth Center. Billy’s listening to a walkman. They use this as an opportunity to make fun of Billy. It’s one of these things where he’s not speaking normal English and also kind of acting like a space cadet. Ernie is using some kind of really overbuilt automated cake machine, and it explodes.
Ethan: For some reason, an oven is not good enough. Didn’t he have a cake last episode that he had baked in a regular oven, assumably? [Transcriber’s Note: I do not stand by my use of the word “assumably.”]
Andrew: I would assume that the issue here is that Bulk destroys his cakes every time he makes them. So the cake machine explodes, and he calls for Billy’s help. Billy can’t hear him because he’s listening to music. Ha, ha, ha. Apparently, the automated cake machine is Billy’s invention, and it covers Ernie in what appears to be shaving cream, dyed blue.
Ethan: Something like that. I wrote ‘elephant toothpaste,’ which is a weird science experiment you can make.
Andrew: Ernie specifically at this point says, “I hate machines!” which I took to mean that he hates Billy. We then cut to Rita’s mansion, where Rita says that it’s somebody’s birthday. This is the first mention of a birthday in the episode. They’re planning a birthday party at the Youth Center, but Rita is the one who informs us of this. Weird writing.
Ethan: Can she read like, government records on the Power Rangers? Is she looking at their driver’s license? How does she know this?
Andrew: And if she can, why doesn’t she go after their parents?
Ethan: Right.
Andrew: We then come back to the Youth Center where suddenly they’re all talking about the fact that it’s Zack’s birthday. Jason and Ernie have a moment here where they talk about the secret identity of the Power Rangers, and this is the first time that we get anybody from Angel Grove acknowledging that the Power Rangers exist.
Ethan: Yeah, this is the first instance of any kind of like metanarrative commentary, and Jason’s just like, “The Power Who?” It’s pretty good.
Andrew: He tries to convince Ernie that the Power Rangers are aliens, which I thought was a good bit.
Ethan: That is a good bit because it will turn out to be true. On multiple occasions, actually.
Andrew: Eventually there will be Power Rangers who are aliens. Bulk and Skull show up even though the Youth Center is supposed to be closed. And I want to take a minute here. This was like the worst appearance of Bulk and Skull. Like this is them at their most villainous, in a way that-
Ethan: Genuine real creep predator type…
Andrew: Yeah, up to this point, Bulk and Skull have just been comic relief, and here they are a threat.
Ethan: You can see like, how much bigger they are than Trini and Kimberly, and it’s- they’re in a more or less empty building, late [or very early?] in the day.
Andrew: That [Bulk] thinks is empty. That- he thinks that there are no adults here.
Ethan: Yeah, I mean other than maybe that moment where Bulk grabs Jason, and it seems like he’s maybe going to suplex him or something, and like, genuinely try to hurt him, and it’s kind of jarring, because this is a moment of like actual peril, which is quite jarring, coming from the two goofballs.
Andrew: The comic relief characters, yeah. And it comes out of nowhere. So Bulk shows up and he blows his nose in the birthday banner, and Skull immediately turns around and starts threatening what appears to be sexual violence against Trini. Bulk then pops some balloons and gets really into Kimmy’s face. The segment goes on for a really long time, and it’s like- it was a lot, but it ends with Skull getting a face full of goo, because of course it does, because that’s how all of these segments end. We then cut back to Rita in her palace where Rita decides to give Zack a monster for his birthday. So she goes and she bugs Finster to make a monster, and he decides to make the Knasty Knight.
Ethan: They cut to Zyuranger footage here, which I was so excited about.
Andrew: Yeah, it was it was really interesting. They cut to the footage of the Black Ranger from Zyuranger, not morphed, and fighting the the Knasty Knight. And they talk about how this is the last time they used this guy.
Ethan: On Tarnac III, which had to have been 170 million years plus ago.
Andrew: But yeah, so that was kind of neat. There’s a bit where Rita is flipping through a book of monsters, and that’s also really cool. They’re showing production art of the various critters that they have created so far, and I thought that was a very well-executed sequence. They cut back to the Youth Center, and they’re really just leaning on this gag of Billy not speaking normal English and somebody having to translate for him, and specifically Trini having to translate for him. And again, this is like verging into racist territory, where the only one who can understand the nerd is the Asian. Like… yeah, Zack comes by the youth center, and Ernie just lies to him about all his friends not being there. Ostensibly, this is to protect the surprise party, but like, Zack walks away not feeling good about himself.
Ethan: Oh, yeah, he hits a major down note over the course of this episode.
Andrew: So then we cut to three of Rita’s monsters, including Finster, trying to forge a sword at a campground. Rita’s there too, and she does a spell to infuse the sword with magic under the moonlight. It’s a really neat segment, but it flies in the face of all established Power Ranger lore up to this point. Earlier, Finster was sculpting the Knight. But in spite of that, the sword being forged under the moonlight causes him to appear without being fired in the monster kiln. We then cut back to Angel Grove, to the high school. The Rangers pretend like they have forgotten Zack’s birthday, with Kimmy going so far as to say that it’s her dog’s birthday.
Ethan: It’s good writing, but it’s- it kind of goes back to what we talked about with like secret literature nerd Kimberly. Like, she is like, scrambling and inventing this whole crazy story. It’s like, where did you pull that from, Kim?
Andrew: And like, this makes Zack sad. I didn’t like this. I hate this trope, but this is just the neurodivergent in me. Like, I don’t like seeing other people being made to be embarrassed, you know?
Ethan: I made a note that the music here is like a sad, like, minor chord, leitmotif of the Power Rangers [theme] that’s like slowed way down.
Andrew: I made the same note. In the background, as Zack is being sad. They’ve got this kind of like…
[“Forget it.” (Sad music sting)]
Ethan: (Vocalizing) It’s a good touch.
Andrew: No, it really was. It was a nice touch. It drove home the fact that like, this was a sad moment. And-
Ethan: Oh, do we know anybody with a trombone?
Andrew: I think it speaks to the production values of this episode. This episode, just across the board, has had more face footage and better, more well-produced face footage than any other episode we’ve seen so far. And this musical refrain that was clearly recorded just for this episode is another example of that. So Zack retreats to the mountains to feel bad for himself, and he is immediately ambushed by Rita and a bunch of monsters. One of them has a television camera for some reason. This is not adequately explained.
Ethan: Yes. So let me consult the chart. That is, hold on… The Knasty Knight corresponds to Dora Knight, who shows up in episode 15 of Zyuranger, “Destroy the Dark Super Sword.”
Andrew: So we’ve got a while.
Ethan: We’ve got a while to go. I do not remember the context of the…
Andrew: The movie camera.
Ethan: The film camera.
Andrew: So the monsters are using a TV camera for reasons that are not explained. Zack engages the Knasty Knight and it’s a really brutal fight. He transforms pretty much immediately and is already like, damaged when the fight starts. Like, his axe thing is already corroded and covered in goo.
Ethan: I think it’s worth mentioning here before we get too much further: what I do remember about Dora Knight is that, like what you mentioned with the unconventional nature of his appearance, he is a monster that Goushi has fought previously. And I think that episode actually goes into a little bit of Goushi’s backstory with his older sister being his mentor and fighting teacher who was killed by this monster. Again, it could be misremembering. It’s been a long time since I watched this, but that’s part of why that happens. Anyway.
Andrew: Zack transforming here was kind of unique, because I think it’s the first time that we’ve seen one of the rangers morph entirely on their own. Something happens to the camera that the monsters are using, but what is not clear. And then Zordon sends the rest of the rangers to save the day. The rangers come in, weapons blazing and their weapons are immediately damaged by contact with the Knasty Knight’s sword. So they have to use their guns. Their guns also don’t do anything. The rangers are, at this point, cooked. So Rita makes the monster big. This time, instead of saying make my monster grow, she says, “Take that, wise guy!” I think it might be my favorite moment in Power Rangers so far. Just Rita Repulsa going: [“Take that, wise guy!!”]
Ethan: Did you notice the weird thing about the Zord summoning sequence this time? There’s actually two weird things.
Andrew: The individual rangers summon their Zords one at a time, except for Kimberly, who does not speak.
Ethan: Except for Kimberly! She doesn’t get one!
Andrew: It’s a weird choice and it takes way longer than the normal Dinozord sequence.
Ethan: Two or three more seconds, maybe, for her to get her usual call-out. And the fact that the other four rangers get like, an extended call-out. Just odd editing choices.
Andrew: It was an odd choice.
Ethan: And I wonder if they filmed that and cut it out later or… I don’t know!
Andrew: Sound problems, you know, but yeah, no.
Ethan: Could be any number of things.
Andrew: I noticed both of those things.
Ethan: So funny that we both made a note of that. I also wondered if that was a new music track that was underlying that.
Andrew: It might have been. I don’t know.
Ethan: I couldn’t tell you what it was, in my mind right now, but apparently it caught my attention at the time.
Andrew: Once again, they skip tank mode, they go straight to Megazord mode as is appropriate. They should never go to tank mode. Tank mode does them no good. The Knasty Knight corrodes the Power Sword and knocks over the Megazord. Zack devises a plan and Kimberly uses the phrase ‘morphenomenal,’ which is bad. I mean, it’s so bad.
[“Morphenomenal, Zack. We’ll give him a little bit of his own medicine.”]
Andrew: So this results in them doing some kind of reverse energy drain thing to beat the Knight, which causes Rita to exclaim “Great galaxy gas!” I thought that was very good. I thought that this ancient witch shouting [“Great galaxy gas!”] Yeah, it was good. Rita goes home and she yells at her monsters for a minute. Zack and the rangers go to his surprise party and he feels less bad. The cake machine explodes again. While they’re at the surprise party, the music in the background states that you can get away with anything you want on your birthday, which I think is a really bad message for children. And then I think I’ve said everything that I need to say about this episode. Zack’s outfit is great. I hated the plotline of keeping the surprise party a secret. But this episode was really good. I hope that this means that we’ve reached the point where Power Rangers is finding its footing. But if not, this at least felt like an episode that they intended to outlive the television run.
Ethgan: Yes, I think when I was doing an image search just now that it got its own VHS release.
Andrew: We will talk about that momentarily.
Ethan: Oh, okay. Exciting.
Andrew: But this was the first episode that I felt like could stand on its own. If you were to show me this as a kid, I would have been hooked.
Ethan: Oh, yeah.
Andrew: Every episode leading up to this, I mean, there were big robots and laser swords, and I probably would have been into it, but like, it wouldn’t have caught me like this did.
Ethan: Like, a real plot.
Andrew: Yeah! And the characters in the episode, like, are actual characters, like everybody gets to have their own moment. The teenagers get to be scared for a second. And like, I hated it. It made me really uncomfortable, but it was good. Okay, so, Ethan, anything you’d like to add about this episode?
Ethan: When they spring the surprise on Zack, he goes in for the double Kimberly/Trini hug, and he holds Trini’s hand for like a good second or two afterwards. And my shipper brain was like, “Oh, that’s what this is.” And I can just see that. It’s not been super subtle. I don’t want to get into it. But I’m just like, I’m watching them with laser eyes, like, yes, good. Yeah, I mean, I’m pretty much concur with you. It’s it’s, if not the best, probably top three so far.
Andrew: It’s not even close. This is the first good episode. You can throw “Food Fight” up there, maybe. And the one with the Eye Guy.
Ethan: The location matching was phenomenal. Whatever location they filmed with Walter Jones out there in the mountains was like, obviously not in Japan.
Andrew: But it was nearly exact match to where this battle happens.
Ethan: So close, too, like the rock formations and the coloring. And you know, that was really good.
Andrew: There wasn’t any of this like, okay, we’ve morphed and transformed stuff.
Ethan: The only like, weird inconsistency, as you mentioned, is the video camera that that Squat and Baboo are holding.
Andrew: The video camera and the fact that Zack’s axe is damaged the second that the fight starts.
Ethan: And that’s like the only weird inconsistency. So it seems like they’re getting more comfortable adapting that footage in a way that makes sense rather than like coming up with some sort of-
Andrew: Contrived excuse.
Ethan: -screwball idea and trying to shoehorn the thing in and like, match Maria’s outfit to Emiko’s outfit, even though they’re two totally different kids, and this is being filmed two years apart. And I also noticed- I actually messaged you and our buddy Sundog about the the bass that the bass player was playing- is a Steinberger style, narrow-body bass with what we call a headless- so like, it’s sort of flipped around. There’s no tuners on the headstock. They’re all in the body. And I just thought it was sick, like a blue sunburst. And I just thought that was cool. It’s a good episode.
Andrew: Cool. Sentai.
Ethan: We’ll start our Sentai recap.
[“Kyoryu Sentai… Zyuranger!!”]
Ethan: “Saru wa Mou Iya,” as with the last episode, was written by Sugimura Noboru and directed by Ogasawara Takeshi. Prince Yuuro and his crew, the Zyurangers, and Bandora and her minions have all reached the island of Delos where the Apello tribe lives in all their faux-Grecian glory. Reaching the cave where the dinosaur eggs are hidden, the Rangers are ambushed by Bandora who has elected to seal the eggs away beneath a rockfall since she and her minions cannot pass the barrier around them. You may remember this from “Big Sisters.” Again, makes so much more sense here. Like, unbelievably so much more sense. In order to access the cave, our heroes must cross the bomb fields where a crew of Apello tribe exiles (question mark?) live in a sort of Mad Max lifestyle and throw lit sticks of dynamite at anyone who passes through their territory. The sense has stopped. This doesn’t make any sense. Yuuro, Emiko, and the Rangers get separated, but Yuuro finds Emiko again fairly quickly. She convinces him to take her to the second cave entrance, but something seems a little off. Once there, she asks for one of the barrier crystals as a reward for helping Yuuro, and he obliges, but Emiko smashes the sphere, destroying the barrier. It was Dora Cockatrice Mark Two all along, and Bandora’s minions steal the eggs. The battle quickly grows to a fever pitch with the Zyurangers fighting Dora Cockatrice again, and a game of keep-away unfolding between Yuuro, Bandora’s minions, and the bomb weirdos. The chest containing the eggs eventually falls into the sea once more, and Daizyujin destroys Dora Cockatrice again. Time is a flat circle. After the battle, it seems as though the Apello tribe will remain cursed by the gods, but the Rangers and Emiko plead to the Guardian Beasts, who lift the curse and allow the tribe to return to heaven. Emiko gets a cool dress, the end.
[Music sting]
Ethan: This one is a little bit hectic, a little bit frantic. I like that the Dora Cockatrice is using its disguise tactics again. As we talked about last episode, the Cockatrice doesn’t have like a ton of historical precedent, compared to something like a Sphinx, but it has established it has this shape-shifting power because it pretended to be a waiter in the woods last episode, and the bomb weirdos are very weird. They’re like, in army helmets and goggles and things, and they’re literally just throwing M80s.
Andrew: I loved it.
Ethan: It’s like, you’ve got the Isle of Delos, right? You’ve got the Apello tribe, and they’re just doing, you know, they’re monkeys. They’re not really monkeys, they’re just people with a tail. People could have tails, it’s fine. And they’re just like, living their lives in their togas, and then like, five minutes away are these freakazoids with lit sticks of dynamite? Where do they get it? They’re on an island in the middle of the ocean.
Andrew: God.
Ethan: Maybe! It could be God’s dynamite.
Andrew: It’s God’s dynamite.
Ethan: The interesting thing about this that I didn’t want to get into on our last episode, because it’s part of this episode, but the Guardian Beasts appear to be able to extend God’s forgiveness to the Apello tribe. They are like, the intercessors, in much the way that like, Catholics pray to saints, individual saints, rather than straight to Jesus. [Andrew laughs.] I mean, that’s the thing.
Andrew: No, you’re- that’s exactly what’s going on. It’s just such a weird thing to think about, that you’re going to pray to a Tyrannosaurus.
Ethan: Right. I mean, it seems like they are going to be like, really harsh about it and keep the Apello tribe on Earth forever, but the Rangers and Emiko plead on their behalf. So this further raises more questions: What is the relationship between the Guardian Beasts and this God who has the golden orchard? We know more or less the relationship between like the five ancient tribes and the Guardian Beasts and Daizyujin. That one makes sense. Past that point is like, what is going on? What is this golden orchard?
Andrew: Well, and there’s also the whole idea that the Guardian Beasts are both gods and machines. That they are both holy and man-made.
Ethan: I don’t think it’s ever implied that they’re handmade.
Andrew: They are mechanical.
Ethan: It’s definitely implied in Power Rangers, multiple times, that they’re mechanical and can be like, repaired and upgraded.
Andrew: Sure. They’re clearly mechanical.
Ethan: Yeah. I mean, we can see that, right? But it is not ever touched on in the show that they are robotic, in that way. So this is where like, the marketing stuff kind of comes in. They’re toyetic in that way, you know, but it’s all very mystical, as Nelson was saying on our last episode.
Andrew: Speaking of which, not to go jump the track, but when Ernie was talking about the Power Rangers in “Happy Birthday, Zach,” he calls them Zords.
Ethan: Yes, he does call them Zords.
Andrew: He calls them Zords. So that word has escaped Zordon.
Ethan: I hadn’t even thought about that.
Andrew: That carries some implications.
Ethan: Do we think Billy is on some Usenet type stuff?
Andrew: Just bragging?
Ethan: Not necessarily bragging, but like, you know how Bruce Wayne has been known in various incarnations and forms to go online and argue that Bruce Wayne is Batman and provide all this [knocks microphone over] crackpot evidence specifically to make people who think that Bruce Wayne is Batman…
Andrew: Look crazy.
Ethan: Look crazy. So I could easily see Billy going online, getting in an IRC channel.
Andrew: I could see it going in the other direction. I could see Billy sitting in an IRC channel or on some, you know, Tor-based dark web back room.
Ethan: Did they have Tor in 1992?
Andrew: No, they didn’t have the web in 1992.
Ethan: Oh, you’re right.
Andrew: Yeah, we are early Internet.
Ethan: Oh, he would have been on some like some like-
Andrew: Gopher, FTP…
Ethan: University of California, like, specific, like, Berkeley board.
Andrew: He had Usenet. But anyway, I could see Billy trying to like research Zordon, trying to find information about ‘What is this dude that I’m serving?’, you know? I could see that happening. Him being the one, of the group, to reach out to like his contact somewhere and in the process, leaking information like a sieve, a siev- sieve?
Ethan: Sieve.
Andrew: Because he…
Ethan: Is the way that he is.
Andrew: Is the way that he is. He’s got no poker face.
Ethan: No, I could just see him, you know, correcting someone. Are you familiar with the video game War Thunder? Have you ever heard of this?
Andrew: No.
Ethan: It’s like a war sim game. And the player forums on this game have a consistent problem of active duty service members in the US Armed Forces leaking classified specifications-
Nelson, off screen: Oh my god.
Ethan: -to prove a point about in-game mechanics. “This tank cannot go this fast. This tank cannot hit a moving target at this many yards. And here’s how I know,” and posting a whole-ass DoD-classified… This happens again and again and again.
Andrew: I love that.
Ethan: It’s so funny. I can see Billy kind of playing a little inside baseball and “Uh, well, they’re not mecha, they’re Zords. The Triceratops top speed is 75 miles per hour.” I can see that very easily. But no, it’s interesting that- I mean, we know the Power Rangers get on the news later and there’s like a Power Rangers day in the city park.
Nelson, off screen: Oh, they were already on the news.
Ethan: Oh, they were already on the news. Okay.
Andrew: But at this point, that they have been well-known enough, that it’s a topic of conversation. All right. I didn’t mean to derail it. You talking about them not being mechanical, I was like, Oh, yeah, Ernie’s got the name down.
Ethan: Yeah, this is what the talkback portion is for, is talking. What do you think Billy’s username would have been?
Andrew: It depends. Did he make it before or after he became a Power Ranger?
Ethan: Well, I mean, I feel like, you know, his last name is Cranston. Billy sounds like berry. So I could see him being like Cranberry and then a series of numbers. I just think that would be cute, if he was Cranberry.
Andrew: I think his username is probably BluePowerRanger. Yeah.
Ethan: Oh, no. All right. Well, you have our research segment. You’ve hinted at it already, but let’s get the full scope.
Andrew: So I’ve been working on a research segment about the Power Rangers video games. I mentioned that before. And while I was researching that, I came across the answer to a question that we asked in one of our earliest episodes, and to a few other questions that we’ve asked along the way. If you’ll recall, when Nelson, our producer, appeared on episode two of this show, he had watched the wrong episode. He had watched “Food Fight.” And we spent a few minutes talking about how sometimes “Food Fight” gets listed in the wrong order and we didn’t know why, and we speculated, but I can confirm definitively why now. And along the way, I can answer a couple other questions. So the reason is VHS tapes. When Power Rangers came to home video, it was in the era of the VHS. VHS tapes were more expensive to produce than DVDs would be.
Ethan: How many members of our audience do you think have never, like, held a VHS tape?
Andrew: I imagine a lot of our audience is our age.
Ethan: Yeah. But I wonder how many people, like, how many people in the world don’t even own any DVDs now? Anyway.
Andrew: So VHS tapes were more expensive to produce than DVDs would be. And they only held about two hours of material at the max end. It was not common for shows to get a full season release, and Power Rangers was no exception, but the VHS releases for Power Rangers are weird. So I’m going to stick a full list in the show notes and I’ll link to the article on the BreezeWiki about the VHS releases. So the first two make sense: VHS number one and two are episodes one and two of Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers. Episode one establishes context and episode two introduces the teleporters and those are very important episodes. But they were also the first VHS tapes to be released from the show.
Ethan: So that’s that’s “Day of the Dumpster” and “Hi-Five.”
Andrew: Yeah.
Ethan: What is the maximum time length capacity of a VHS tape?
Andrew: It depends on what mode you’re recording in and a bunch of other stuff. About three hours, but two was standard. If you went more than two, they usually went to two tapes.
Ethan: It’s just interesting that they have these like barely-
Andrew: 22 minutes.
Ethan: 25 minute episodes on on a tape by themselves.
Andrew: So they weren’t by themselves. They had a ton of trailers.
Ethan: That makes seeeense.
Andrew: Trailers for other Saban material, trailers for other Power Rangers material, commercials for Power Rangers toys. Because-
Ethan: Oh, too hot- Do you remember [commercial announcer voice] “TOO HOT TO HANDLE”? Do you remember that?
Andrew: No.
Ethan: Okay, it’s like a kid playing with the Megazord in his house and the house explodes. And it shows him and he’s got like crazy eyes, like, soot on his face and his hair is blown back. [commercial announcer voice] “TOO HOT TO HANDLE.” Very good commercials.
[“Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers! Too hot to handle.”]
Andrew: When they did these VHS tapes, these VHS tapes were not about selling the tape. They were about selling-
Ethan: Everthing else. [Laughs.].
Andrew: -the toys. So the tapes were sold pretty cheaply. They were done occasionally as promotions with restaurants and things. And VHS number one and two are hard to find. They came out before any other tapes did. They were kind of, “We’re going to test the waters and see if this works.” This is all 1994. And they worked. They did really well and stores ran out of them and started clamoring for another one.
Ethan: I know I had the movie in a blister case on VHS. I’m trying to remember if I had any other Power Rangers movies or VHSes. Definitely had Turbo on VHS, the movie. Might have only been movies. Anyway, continue.
Andrew: I never saw individual episodes on tape.
Ethan: I mean, looking at this cover image for the “Happy Birthday, Zack” [VHS release], I know I have seen it at some point.
Andrew: Sure. Just a standard cardboard box release. So episodes three and four that were released on VHS are “Food Fight” and today’s episode, “Happy Birthday, Zack.” I thought “Food Fight” was a weird choice. It’s among the better episodes of the early series, but it’s not great, you know. But that’s the reason that “Food Fight” will occasionally get listed out of order or get put far earlier in watchlists than it’s supposed to. “Food Fight” was, for a lot of people, episode three.
Ethan: Makes perfect sense.
Andrew: Now, why was that episode two on the watchlist that we had instead of episode three? Who knows? But “Food Fight” frequently gets listed earlier than it should be because it was the first episode that a lot of people had on VHS. I’m less surprised that “Happy Birthday, Zack” was released on VHS because it’s the best episode we’ve seen so far, by a pretty wide margin.
Ethan: Yeah, not close.
Andrew: 12 days later, they did another VHS drop, which featured episodes we have not seen yet. “No Clowning Around,” which is episode 11 of the show overall. And then there were six more VHS tapes released from season one of Power Rangers. The next five are the Green Ranger Saga, and I’m excited for us to get to the Green Ranger Saga.
Ethan: I’m pumped.
Andrew: But the Green Ranger Saga was basically the only VHS tapes that were kept in continuous production. All the early episodes were one issue and scrapped. And then the final VHS from season one was the official fan club video, which we’ll have to save for a special episode.
Ethan: I’m so intrigued.
Andrew: Four more episodes were released on VHS in 1994. Three of them were season two episodes, and one of them was a VHS exclusive.
Ethan: That would not have been the Bulk and Skull show.
Andrew: I don’t think so.
Ethan: That came later.
Andrew: 1995 brought 10 more Power Rangers VHS tapes; 1996 brought four more. I think ’96 is also when we get the movie, is that correct?
Ethan: ’95, ’96. Somewhere in there, yeah.
Andrew: But we have zero Power Rangers VHS tapes in ’97, only one in 1998 and only two in 1999. And that’s pretty much the entire classic era of Power Rangers.
Ethan: This is season one, two and three, and then Zeo.
Andrew: Zeo, yeah. Now Power Rangers continued releasing VHS tapes well into the DVD era. Dino Thunder VHS tapes were coming out in 2004, and SPD VHS tapes were coming out in 2005.
Ethan: That’s wild. That’s crazy.
Andrew: But trying to catch Power Rangers on recap in 1994 meant relying on inconsistent reruns or picking up one of the 11 episodes available on VHS. And that’s it, for more than a decade. If you wanted to watch season one of Power Rangers, you were stuck with one of the 11 VHS tapes, or hoping that you taped it when it came on TV. I think that helps to explain some of the filler episodes and how little care was spent on them. Power Rangers was brought to the U.S. to sell toys, and it’s easier to sell toys with new episodes, because they were trying to sell new toys. They didn’t want to sell the toys that had come out a year ago, because they weren’t making those anymore. It wasn’t until 2007 that Power Rangers got a proper full season DVD release, and even that was region two only, in German.
Ethan: That’s bizarre.
Andrew: The first region one English release wasn’t until 2012, 20th anniversary of the show, before you could actually watch season one.
Ethan: The whole show, yeah. I mean, I think this echoes like a lot of the carelessness that like, early film was handled with.
Andrew: Yeah, yeah. It was not seen as something important. It was something that you could throw away.
Ethan: I mean, we’re still seeing that today with movies being deleted and scrapped for tax write-offs before they ever get a single screening.
[Nelson breathes heavily offscreen.]
Andrew: Because our-
Ethan: Sorry, I just rose Nelson’s blood pressure by probably 10 points.
Andrew: Because our culture… for me and you, it’s our culture. For Haim Saban or..
Ethan: David Zaslav.
Andrew: Exactly. It’s numbers on a spreadsheet. It’s money.
Ethan: It comes back to that McKinsey Institute MBA mentality that should be eradicated from the Earth for all time.
Andrew: So the upshot of all this is that watching old episodes of Power Rangers was basically impossible. And they knew from the gate that only the episodes that they picked would ever get seen again. And the show ran in syndication, but even in syndication, they produced so many episodes over such a long time that they could pick which episodes were going to get syndicated.
Ethan: A little bit of a throw spaghetti at the wall approach, I think.
Andrew: Exactly. And so when something like “Happy Birthday, Zack” hits it and lands, of course that is the one that gets released. When the Green Ranger Saga comes around and everybody decides, “Oh, this is when Power Rangers has made it.” I barely remember the Green Ranger Saga, but I remember the Green Ranger being my favorite when I was a kid.
Ethan: It was endlessly contentious between all of the boy children at, well, all of them minus one who only wanted to be the Pink Ranger. But all of us would squabble about who got to be Tommy. And then after the big kid inevitably said, “No, I’m Tommy, and I’ll fight you.” Then it was between everybody else who got to be Jason.
Andrew: Yeah, I was always left with, I guess, is the word, with Billy. But yeah, like I said, I ended up going down the road because I was looking at the Power Rangers video games, and the video games start coming out in in ’95. And they kind of ride this similar wave in that they got to market really quickly, and they were pretty poorly made. I’ll come back to video games in a few weeks unless I get distracted with another topic between now and then. But I just thought that this was really, really fascinating. So I’ve got one of the later VHS tapes. I’ve got one of the- I think it’s Power Rangers [Lost] Galaxy. It comes in a blister pack. And I’ve got a single episode of the Mystic Knights of Tir Na Nog on VHS.
Ethan: I’ve seen that. I saw that tape in the lobby. I was like -gasp!-
Andrew: And then I’ve picked up a couple of other tokusatsu series as they were imported into the US. But some of these shows are still incredibly difficult to find. So many of them don’t get US releases at all.
Ethan: So I was having a conversation online with someone about a Sentai show that’s relatively recent called ToQger, which is like a train-themed Ranger Squadron. And it’s sick. It will never get adapted for a US release because if we awaken the train lust in today’s children, the dominance of the automobile will be forever sundered. And they cannot allow- the petrochemical industry cannot allow that to happen. But yeah, there’s a couple of Sentai shows that have not been adapted. So we’ll have to think about if and how we want to cover those, because they’re all interesting. They’re all good.
Andrew: The same problem you mentioned with the Warner stuff that they’ve been canceling and shows like Dead Space, that just get kind of disappeared from the catalog.
Ethan: I want to watch that damn Wile E. Coyote movie.
Andrew: Right. There are places where it gets weirder. And I think an interesting one that’s at least tangentially relevant to this show is Robotech.
Ethan: Oh yeah. There is stuff in the news today about Robotech.
Andrew: I know, that’s why I’m talking about it. Robotech was an anime that was brought to the US. It’s one of the first successful animes to be brought to the US. It was the anime Macross and it was brought to the US as Robotech. But it was basically Sabanized.
Ethan: In a lot of ways, yeah.
Andrew: They took the show and they chopped it up and they made a new show with it. And it wasn’t the same show.
Ethan: If I’m not mistaken, there were also bits of other shows spliced in as well.
Andrew: And Voltron ends up getting the same treatment. The original run of Voltron wasn’t long enough for a full season in syndication, so they just tacked another show on to the end and rewrote it so that it kind of sort of happened in the same universe. Robotech is the same idea. They took these two different- I think it’s just different seasons of a show. It might be two different shows entirely, but they made them exist within the same continuity in a way that they were not supposed to. The reason that this matters is because Macross is now available on Disney+. Now, I’m no fan of Disney, but I will applaud them making a previously very difficult to see series available in the US. However, this does not include the season that was adapted into Robotech.
Ethan: …Is the original Macross show.
Andrew: And everything else that happens in Macross depends on that context that you absolutely are not allowed to have in the US. And the reason why is because a company called Harmony Gold owns the rights to Robotech and as a result of them owning the rights to Robotech, it means they own the US rights to the first season of Macross and they won’t license it to the US.
Ethan: To anyone.
Andrew: To anyone.
Ethan: People have been trying for decades.
Andrew: Decades. You know, this is in the news as we’re recording this and I found this to be kind of an interesting analog. It took years for any of the Sentai shows to get an official US release, and I genuinely don’t know what, I mean, aside from a couple of Shout Factory DVDs, I don’t-
Ethan: I mean, the Shout Factory catalog is substantial at this point.
Andrew: It’s incredible. But like, if I wanted to go watch Gorenger, can I? I have no idea. I don’t think that there’s a legal way for us to do that. The closest I can get is reading the the recently published translation of the manga.
Ethan: I will say also, if you’re listening in 2024, Tubi currently has a ton of Sentai shows, just up. I’m watching Gingaman right now, which is- which was adapted into Power Rangers Lost Galaxy, and they’re just up there. They’re subbed. They’re free.
Andrew: Cool.
Ethan: Ad blockers actually work on Tubi, which is pretty choice. Who knows how long that will be the case? You know, these are notoriously contentious rights licenses and things, but if you’re listening, you know, when this is released and you want another way to watch Zyuranger or you want to watch past Zyuranger, or- I haven’t checked the whole thing, but I know they have at least from Zyuranger onward, in most cases. And, you know, I’ve just been working my way through the shows.
Andrew: And then there is one other thing I want to call out. I originally pulled Zyuranger from Archive.org. And this was very much a gray market kind of thing; Archive.org hosts user uploads, and as long as a copyright holder has not complained, then they can continue to host the upload, just like YouTube. But in this instance, Archive.org is currently facing down a pretty nasty lawsuit that was brought about by some publishers over Archive.org’s tendency, or practice, rather, of lending eBooks. They had physical books in their collections, they produced scans of those books, and they were lending the books from the scans. You could check them out for- in increments of five minutes, and people mostly use them for like double-checking quotations or referencing citations. I’ve personally used the system a lot for whenever I’m researching old 78s or old film to figure out when a thing was actually released, because a lot of those records only exist on paper. And the Author’s Guild and a bunch of publishers got together and they’re suing the Internet Archive over this. And they already won once and it looks like they’re probably going to win their appeal as well. And this could be really bad for what is one of the best resources for researchers on the internet. So, you know, if you care about this kind of thing, give them some money, make a couple of calls, don’t really know who to call, I’ve been calling senators and just saying, “Hey, make the archive legal.” But I don’t know if that’s doing any good. But I just wanted to call that out here, as we’re talking about how difficult it is to find some of these things and how these things don’t really have a home online. The fact that there is this non-commercial space where you can just go and dump stuff and it live forever, you know, at no cost to you. It’s an incredible resource that we’re in danger of losing.
Ethan: And especially when the creations themselves are so often treated as totally disposable by the powers that be, you know, by the studio executives and other such folks. And they just don’t seem to value it in any way that we can detect.
Andrew: You know, we recently opened a bookstore, and I’ve been looking at how many books that were published within the last five years that are completely unavailable. They’re not technically out of print, but they’re just- they’re- I can’t buy them. They will eventually do another print runn, but in the meantime, there are authors out there who aren’t making any money on this work, because if the publisher prints more books, they have to pay the author more money. And so in the short term, it is cheaper for them to let the thing rot. The author is stuck. They can’t do anything else with this work.
Ethan: That’s what the publishing contract does.
Andrew: Yeah. So they’re now captive to a system that will not allow people to legally enjoy their work. I mean, you run into it in the manga world all the time, too, with the piracy being rampant. It’s almost a meme at this point within the community, that everybody reads pirated manga. But the reason is that it’s difficult to do anything else.
Ethan: Yeah, I would say it’s definitely improving.
Andrew: Especially recently.
Ethan: You mentioned the Shonen Jump app on our last episode. I read, essentially, all of Bleach and Naruto in bad fan scanlations. And I mean bad translations, I mean bad scans, just frequently terrible. Weird font choices. Some stuff was just straight up wrong. And now you can get those other places much more easily. And I know a lot of, like… take Nintendo, for example, releasing Tears of the Kingdom and all of the last several Pokemon games in multiple languages, worldwide, simultaneously. That was unthinkable 20 years ago.
Andrew: Sure.
Ethan: Because that requires them to have not just an English translator, but multiple teams of translators for multiple languages. And they have that now.
Andrew: The company that publishes Shonen Jump, they run an app called Manga Plus. And simultaneously, every new manga that gets released on Manga Plus, everything from that week’s Shonen Jump plus a bunch of other magazines, plus a bunch of web exclusives gets released simultaneously in Japanese and English. And about half of them are also translated into Spanish. And that’s all free, because piracy has gotten so rampant at this point that they are doing anything that they can to claw back some of that. The fact that they’re doing this is an exception. They are going to exceptional lengths, as the stewards of a huge portion of this kind of now international brand, you know? So many other companies look at this situation and because of the way that financialization has worked, especially in this country, they go, actually, we would make more money if you couldn’t read our product. Actually, we would make more money if you couldn’t watch our movie. Actually, we would make more money if we didn’t make art. And having gone through and seeing what it used to look like for these Power Rangers VHS tapes, and how hard it was to watch this stuff for so many years, and then that brief window where not only was it available, but it was reasonably priced and everywhere, and you could just go out and you could buy the thing. You could pay money to a person and you could walk out with the show that you wanted on a disk that will probably still work in 30 years. And then today, this stuff is out of print again. Technically, there is a Blu-ray release, but like, I can’t find it. So that’s Power Rangers Home Media Releases.
Ethan: Archiving is your friend.
Andrew: And you gotta do it because nobody else is going to.
Ethan: Treasure the things that get made. And if you make things, treasure them yourself. I treasure this podcast. Well, that is a huge topic to cover. And I really appreciate all the work you put in. The fact that they were still releasing VHS as late as that is so wild.
Andrew: SPD,
Ethan: 2005.
Andrew: Yeah, Dino Thunder, Ninja Storm.
Ethan: It probably looks great on a CRT though. Well, anyway, we’ll be back next time to discuss episodes 11 of Zyuanger, “Goshujin-sama! (My Master)”, and Power Rangers, “No Clowning Around.” If you’ve enjoyed the show, please feel free to send me $5, and if you want to find me online, don’t. But you can follow the show on the Fediverse @KenkyuuSentaiPodcastRangers@Meet. CommunityMedia.Network. Andrew, how can people get in touch and what should they look out for?
Andrew: You can find me online at AndrewRoach.net, and what you should look out for is our archival work. Through New Ellijay Television, I archive a ton of what would otherwise be entirely lost media, stuff that’s never gotten an official home media release. I’m mostly working on television shows from the ’40s and ’50s, and that means that I’m getting them on reels of film that were made by pointing a film camera at a small television screen during a live broadcast. And the companies that would have originally owned the rights to these things have just given up on them. They don’t think that there’s a market for this stuff anymore, and so huge portions of American pop culture and the pop culture from all over the world are just- they’re disappearing. Just within the last week, I received one of the costumes that was worn for one of these shows that I’ve been archiving because nobody else wants it, because I’m the only one who cares. So, you know, if you want to go find something that’s worth seeing, check out our Space Patrol archives on New Ellijay Television, and remember that if you don’t keep this stuff alive, nobody else is going to.
Ethan: That’s all the show we have for you today. Thank you so much for listening, and thanks also to Hurly-Burly and the Volcanic Fallout for the use of their song “Colossal Might (Totally Radical Instrumental version)” for our intro and outro music. Kenkyuu Sentai Podcast Rangers is licensed CC-BY-SA and produced in collaboration with New Ellijay Television at the Ellijay Makerspace, which stands on the ancestral, unceded, stolen, and occupied lands of the Cherokee people. You can learn more about the Makerspace by visiting EllijayMakerspace.org and you can learn more about the Cherokee people by visiting Cherokee.org. Strength, love, and solidarity to all oppressed people and in the words of a wise man, fuck capitalism, go home.
Famed crime noir author Dasheill Hammett was born this day 130 years ago. Today, he is best remembered for writing the novels and short stories that inspired the adventures of Sam Spade, The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man, and The Glass key.
We were fortunate enough to find this seldom seen, Made-For-TV adaptation of his novel The Glass Key:
Nelson: Alright, time for the cold open that everybody loves.
Ethan: Oh yeah, me typing up the expanded intro script here.
Nelson: Yeah, because the cold opens are always scripted. That’s what people don’t know. We plan these out.
Andrew: My niece just turned 16, my stepsister’s kid. And she had a birthday party where she invited all her friends over and they played the family edition of Cards Against Humanity. Do you know about this?
Nelson: There’s a family edition?
Andrew: There’s a family edition and it’s the most boring thing.
Nelson: That sounds awful.
Andrew: It’s really, really, really bad. So if you can imagine just a bunch of teenagers sitting on the back porch of this woman’s house like, trying to find something scandalous in the family edition of Cards Against Humanity. I felt bad for everybody involved.
Nelson: Yeah, that sounds pretty rough. It’s like, how can we be offensive but not offensive?
Andrew: How can we be offensive but approved by conservative Mormons?
Nelson: All right.
Ethan: All right. (Absolutely unintelligible) So three, two, one, clap.
Andrew?: Let’s do it.
Nelson: All right, R.I.P. Toriyama-sama. All right.
Ethan: Three, two, one. [Clap.]
Nelson: Close enough.
[“It’s morphin’ time!” + intro music]
Ethan: Minna-san yokoso, welcome to your favorite cross-cultural deep dive analysis and recap podcast covering Super Sentai and Power Rangers, Kenkyuu Sentai Podcast Rangers. My name is Ethan; I use he/him pronouns, and with me is my usual co-host, Andrew.
Andrew: Hey, everybody. My name is Andrew. I also use he/him pronouns
Nelson: And producer Nelson here.
Ethan: And Nelson is joining us once again today.
Nelson: He’in’ and him’in’.
Andrew: He’in’ and him’in’.
Nelson: He’in’ and him’in’.
Ethan: No incidents on the drive up today?
Nelson: No.
Ethan: Smooth sailing?
Nelson: Smooth sailing.
Ethan: That’s what we like to hear.
Andrew and Nelson: Yeah…
Nelson: ‘S pretty chill, pretty chill.
Ethan: Today, we are discussing Kyoryu Sentai Zyuranger episode 9, “Hashire! Tamago Oji (Run! Prince of the Eggs)”. If you take it literally, it’s literally “Run! Egg Prince,” which is pretty funny. And Power Rangers, season 1, episode 9, “For Whom the Bell Trolls,” which is just a terrible pun.
Andrew: It’s barely even a pun.
Ethan: It’s barely a pun. It’s one-
Nelson: It’s barely even an episode.
Ethan: Yeah, yeah.
Andrew: I mean… give us a minute.
Ethan: We do have two things we need to talk about before we get into the show proper, concerning two people formerly connected to Power Rangers, Haim Saban himself and Austin St. John. As we mentioned in episode 1, Haim Saban is a hardcore Zionist and is currently, at the time of this writing in March of 2024, hosting dinners and raising funds for AIPAC, the American-Israeli Political Action Committee, which money will go towards continuing the genocide against the people of Palestine. Obviously, this is evil and it sucks, and we entirely repudiate Saban’s politics. We don’t want to get sued, so we won’t say much more than that, but we want you to know where we stand. Do y’all want to chime in on that at all?
Nelson: Free Palestine.
Andrew: Yeah.
Ethan: Yep, that’s pretty much the message. Austin St. John, meanwhile, is attempting to start up an apparel line featuring quotations from notable figures in world history, including but not limited to Adolf Hitler.
Nelson: But mainly Hitler.
Ethan: Yeah. Obviously, this is also evil and it sucks. And it’s also just kind of boneheaded. And we repudiate this, obviously. This is a guy who’s been in hot water multiple times over the past couple years and just can’t seem to stop being a weird fascist.
Andrew: This is such an own goal, you know? It would have been such an easy thing for him to just not make t-shirts with Hitler quotes on them. I’m amazed. I’m amazed that somebody thought, you know what I’m going to do?
Ethan: This is… yeah.
Nelson: Yeah.
Ethan: This has been the former Power Rangers assh*** update.
Andrew: Also, I will say all the Zyuanger episodes are back on Archive.org. Power Rangers back too.
Nelson: Yeah, the Power Rangers have been back. Yeah, they came back like a week after we did that. That’s where I’ve been watching them. I mean, that’s not where I’ve been watching ’em!
Ethan: Listeners, if you fixed that problem, good job. I don’t know how or who, but…
Andrew: But thank you.
Nelson Yeah, somebody out there, you did it.
Andrew: It’s significant, but we’ll talk about that in the next episode.
Ethan: Yeah. Without further ado, let’s get into the recap.
[“Kyoryu Sentai… Zyuranger!!”]
Ethan: “Hashire! Tamago Oji” was written by Sugimura Noboru and directed by Ogasawara Takeshi. It is the first part of a two-parter concerning the last two dinosaur eggs in the world and the people appointed by God to protect them. This may be familiar to you, if you remember “Big Sisters,” this is the original footage from “Big Sisters.” I think I remarked in episode seven that Maria’s outfit is a clone of Emiko’s outfit from this episode. And it’s just so jarring. Because they’re two completely different kids. Anyway.
Nelson: Speaking of jarring, I love how this episode starts. It is a mile a minute, pun intended. And you’ll see why.
Ethan: We start off with Yuuro, Prince of the Apello tribe, and his two retainers, Crockle and Daisy, as they fly to Japan in search of the Zyurangers. Their magical, warping VW Beetle appears in a girl named Emiko’s house, followed shortly by Dora Cockatrice and a crew of Golems, and then again by the Zyurangers. Our heroes manage to fight off the attackers, but Dora Cockatrice steals Yuuro and Emiko away into his dimension. There, the children are confronted by Bandora. Yuuro defies her, and the children flee. This is the origin of the RADBUG.
Nelson: Yes.
Ethan: I think I remarked in our previous episode that I thought it was somebody’s grandfather’s invention, which is not terribly far off, but it’s Crockle’s weird magical warp speed VW Bug. Meanwhile, in the secret base below the Sakura Condo building, Crockle and Daisy explain to the Zyurangers why they have come. 170 million years ago, after Bandora’s banishment, all the dinosaurs were gone and only two eggs remained. The tribal elders sealed these in a magical chest.
Andrew: 170 million years ago, all the dinosaurs were gone?
Ethan: Yeah.
Andrew: Okay.
Ethan: If you go back to our research piece on-
Andrew: On dinosaurs!
Ethan: -dinosaurs and the timeline of life, you will know that dinosaurs didn’t exist yet. They were still to come 170 million years ago. Anyway.
Nelson: But they were gone though, so I mean, they were kinda…
Ethan: They hadn’t been yet! You can’t be gone if you have not yet been.
Nelson: I mean…
Ethan: It’s like, are you dead before you’re alive?
Nelson: Yeah! [Transcriber’s note: This question is still out, as far as I’m concerned.]
Technical Difficulties Future Nelson: So yeah, the tribal elders took these two eggs and they sealed them in a magical chest and cast them into the sea, like you do with all your most prized possessions, so that they might be preserved for the future. Eventually, the eggs washed up on Delos, the island where the Apello tribe lives, so Yuuro hid them away. But Bandora and her monsters attacked, causing the prince and his retainers to come seeking the aid of the Zyurangers. So Crockle helps the Zyurangers find Dora Cockatrice’s dimension with one of his inventions. They’re these goofy glasses that can see portals to other worlds that they all have a good laugh at. After a bit of searching, the rangers spot the portal and they ride right into it. Yuuro and Emiko spot a restaurant in the woods in Dora Cockatrice’s dimension and sit down to eat, but it’s quickly revealed that this is a trap. As they flee and hide, Emiko spots Prince Yuuro’s tail and loudly declares him to be a monster, giving away their position and getting herself captured by Dora Cockatrice. As Emiko dangles precariously from a rope, Prince Yuuro explains that he’s actually a monkey, as is his whole tribe. In the ancient times, the Apello tribe were God’s orchard keepers, but Dora Cockatrice tricked them into eating the golden fruit so they were banished from heaven and cursed to live as monkeys until they could earn forgiveness. Bandora antagonizes Yuuro, telling him that he must reveal the location of these eggs or Emiko will die, and so he does, but Dora Cockatrice cuts the rope anyway. Luckily, Daizyujin’s hand suddenly appears, catching Emiko out of the air and letting her down to safety. Bandora gloats as she escapes to Delos, turning Dora Cockatrice into a giant as she leaves. Yuuro, Crockle, Daisy, and Emiko pursue Bandora as the rangers fight and eventually defeat Dora Cockatrice. But this isn’t over, there’s a part two, to be continued.
Ethan: I had a couple of talking points for the talkback, which is what the f*** is going on with God? Who is God? Why is God? What is going on?
Nelson: It’s a very good question.
Ethan: The concept of God in Zyuranger. What’s the deal? Okay, we have-
Nelson: I mean, yeah, because it’s like, are the Beasts the gods? Or do they answer to a God?
Ethan: We have the Guardian Beasts, right, who are like the totems of the five ancient tribes, the Yamato, the Etofu, all the tribes that the Rangers come from. These are like their patron deities.
Nelson: But they’re not gods.
Ethan: They combine to form Daizyujin, who is like the living embodiment of a god. His name literally means like “Great Beast Spirit,” and he commands the Rangers as if he is a god. But this is not Daizyujin’s orchard, because they would just say that. It’s the heavenly orchard of golden fruit, but it is not Daizyujin’s. So who is this Kami, who is this God? Is it the Christian God?
Nelson: Maybe, maybe.
Ethan: I mean, I just have questions.
Nelson: Yeah, you know, there are Christians in Japan.
Ethan: There are Christians, famously.
Nelson: You guys have been watching Shogun on FX?
Andrew and Ethan: No.
Ethan: I was gonna- I thought you were going to say you’ve been watching Samurai Champloo, because that features into that also.
Nelson: There is that. There is that too. I probably am due a rewatch of that.
Ethan: And like my research topic will touch on this today, but yeah, I have just so many questions about… What is the cosmology here?
Nelson, doing his best Jerry Seinfeld: What’s the deal with God?
Ethan: Who is this deity that has these golden orchards?
Nelson: I think it might be like God-God, you know?
Ethan: Yeah, I don’t know.
Nelson: It’s the big man upstairs in the white robe.
Andrew: So you’ve seen more of Zyuranger than I have. Does God continue to feature
Ethan: Satan does. God? Not that I recall.
Andrew: So this isn’t a situation like you run into in like, the- towards the end of Dragon Ball where they’re like, yeah, this is the Supreme God and then this is the God of Gods and then this is the God of the Universe.
Nelson: Oh, yeah, and get in the whole Supreme Kai nonsense, Jesus Christ.
Ethan: No, they don’t really- Yeah, I have so many questions. And like, we’ll get into it a little bit with the research, but the research really only looks at the parts of this cosmology as they exist in our world and not in theirs, which is extremely confusing and strange.
Andrew: Yeah, baffling. I didn’t really think about it when I was watching the episode, you know? But there is such a mystical element to everything that’s happening on the Zyuranger side. And again, it’s been about a month since the last time I watched any of these, so I was coming into this, like, having put a lot of the mythology out of my head, you know? And coming back to it, yeah, there’s some implications to this.
Neslon: All right. Now for the Ranger recap.
Ethan: Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait! We have to go back to the beginning of the episode, because I made a note here, which is that Barza’s weird ear comes back.
Nelson: Yes, I was going to say that! The weird ear comes back!
Andrew: I forgot that entirely!
All: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Ethan: I noticed that and I was like, oh sh- I was- because I thought it never showed up again in the show. But it actually- it shows up again.
Nelson: And it stays!
Ethan: And it’s still stuck to the side of his head when he like, turns around and you get like a full on- And so we just wanted to shout out to Barza’s weird ear, completely forgotten until I looked at my notes just there.
Andrew: I made note of that when I was watching the thing and then had completely forgotten. Yeah, the worst bit of the first episode of Zyuranger comes back.
Nelson: Barza’s weird ear made a return.
Ethan: It can hear a car in warp space.
Nelson: Yeah. Also, return of Barza. He hasn’t been back-
Ethan: Yeah, Barza’s back! It’s always good to see Barza.
Nelson: Yeah.
Ethan: Okay. That was- definitely the last thing. I think that about wraps it up for Zyuranger this week, so you want to get us our Rangers recap?
Andrew: Yeah.
[“Go! Go! Power Rangers!”]
Andrew: We’re talking about Power Rangers, “For Whom the Bell Trolls.” This episode was written by Jeff Deckman, Ronnie Sperling, and Stuart St. John. That’s three people. Just keep in mind as you’re watching this episode that it was written by three people. It was directed by Robert Hughes. I do want to call out before I even get into the recap: I read some interviews about the production of this episode. And this episode was written by Jeff Deckman. Ronnie Sperling made some contributions, but it was mostly written by Jeff Deckman. Stuart St. John wrote one scene. And it is the thing that takes this from being what was almost a good episode to being a very, very bad episode.
Nelson: Is it the last scene?
Andrew: It is the last scene. That’s all Stuart St. John’s fault.
Nelson: All right. You’ll see what that is.
Andrew: So yeah. And directed by Robert Hughes. Okay. Recap: We open in the high school. We meet their teacher for the first time. She comes back frequently, but here they’re doing show and tell for some reason.
Nelson: Well, they call it Hobbies Week.
Andrew: They do call it Hobbies Week, but they don’t call it Hobbies Week out of the gate. Out of the gate, they’re just doing show and tell with no context. Trini, specifically, is doing show and tell. She has dolls, and she shows off some of her dolls. And one of them is Mr. Ticklesneezer. Mr. Ticklesneezer is terrible. While they’re doing the show and tell, Rita is watching for some reason, because even though she wants the destruction of Earth, she spends all her time just watching the Power Rangers through her magic telescope. We get a cutaway to Rita long enough to establish that she is watching and then we’re back to show and tell. I do want to point out here: the bit that they dubbed for Rita here was probably the best dubbing I’ve seen.
Nelson: Yeah!
Ethan: I noticed that as well. It was very well done.
[“That Trini… has had it!”]
Andrew: So back to show and tell. Jason is spinning a stick.
Nelson: It is funny because I was watching this and when Jason went up, I was like, all right, Jason’s going to do karate and…
Andrew: He’s just starts spinning in a stick! Zack pretends to surf, which I thought was a choice, considering that they’ve already established that he’s like a really excellent dancer. And then Kimmy does some gymnastics, which appears to terrify their teacher.
Nelson: Well, I mean, she did a handstand on a desk, and like, I’m pretty sure that was all Amy Jo Johnson because they had her face in camera and everything.
Andrew: Yeah, there was there was no stunt actor there. It was an impressive, like, “I’m going to do this thing.” And then Billy does like, your typical like, middle school science fair volcano.
Ethan: It’s so much grosser than that, though.
Andrew: It’s got this really bright pink slime. But I’m calling this out specifically because Billy- it has been demonstrated that this man can make things that far exceed the capacity of any other human on the planet.
Ethan: He’s like a genius inventor.
Andrew: And what he shows off for show and tell for Hobby Week is a pink slime volcano, a bad middle school science experiment.
Nelson: Okay, I think it’s the Incredibles theory here, though.
Andrew: You think he’s trying to hide his level?
Ethan: Ohhhhhhhh.
Nelson: Yes. He can’t be like, “Oh, I’m a super genius!” Or else they’ll be like, “Ehh, maybe you might be a Power Ranger.”
Andrew: OK, yeah, I’ll buy that.
Ethan: I can see that.
Nelson: He’s got to be just as smart as everybody else.
Ethan: We’re having to reach a little. I think that does track. But like he did invent a more sophisticated communicator than the Apple Watch, which requires no Bluetooth connection, no external power. I don’t know how he did that, but it kicks ass. Anyway.
Andrew: It’s at this point that we find out this is Hobby Week and not just show and tell. Which was just, again, a really weird choice. It’s not that weird of a choice when the target audience for the show is is eight year olds. But this clearly establishes that the target audience for the show is eight year old.
Nelson: We get a little Bulk and Skull action near the end.
Andrew: At this point, Bulk and Skull take Trini’s doll.
Ethan: They’re like, heckling the whole time.
Andrew: Yeah. They specifically take Mr. Ticklesneezer and, of course, this ends with Bulk humiliated this time by the slime from the volcano.
Nelson: Well-deserved this time, I will give you that.
Andrew: Oh, it is frequently well-deserved. They wrote these characters to be little s***.
Nelson: Yeah, but I mean, I think I think this time it’s probably up there. He got a mouthful of goo. And then Skull got a face full of goo.
Andrew: Yeah. So they cut to Trini’s bedroom, which is full of even more dolls. All the dolls she had for show and tell and then way, way more.
Ethan: If we’re assuming that Trini is 17, high school senior, this is so weird.
Andrew: It is a weird amount of dolls.
Ethan: She lives in a Victorian style home, she wears a nightdress to sleep, and her entire room is covered in collectible dolls. I’m just getting totally incomprehensible vibes.
Nelson: Big grandma vibes.
Ethan: Yeah.
Andrew: So we cut back to Rita and her henchmen and they are scheming. The assorted monsters are sent to take Mr. Ticklesneezer. Why? Who knows? This is accomplished by a genuinely tense segment. It’s one of the first like actual tense segments of the show. They do teleportation, there’s a lot of like shadows and then Mr. Ticklesneezer is made full size and taken to Rita’s palace.
Ethan: I wrote ‘They got Ticklesneezer with the motherf*** ing doohickey.’ [Transcriber’s note: Rest in piss Abe Shinzo, you fascist ghoul.]
Nelson: They really did.
Andrew: No explanation as to how they’ve done this. Every monster we’ve seen up to this point with maybe one exception has been created by Finster.
Ethan: Yeah, I think the crucial part here is that Baboo does not take the doll and leave, and then they zap him and make him a person. He zaps Ticklesneezer in Trini’s bedroom, with Trini asleep five feet away.
Andrew and Nelson: Yeah!
Ethan: I mean, I guess it makes sense because Baboo is kind of dopey, but it is such a weird situation.
Andrew: They take the full size Ticklesneezer to Rita’s palace on the moon. And Mr. Ticklesneezer proceeds to explain that he collects things in his magic jar. They use a shot of Rita and Mr. Ticklesneezer over and over again, like, just cutting back and forth between them in a way that like deeply unsettled me.
Ethan: Rita is being very weird here, in that she is speaking only in couplets. So like all of the monsters that Finster makes already acknowledge her as their mistress; she doesn’t have to convince them of anything. But she is like conscripting Ticklesneezer here.
Nelson: That’s probably how she put him under her spell.
Andrew: I mean, I’ll address that, because she did not put him under any spell. But she does- she bullies him into collecting things on Earth.
Ethan: Tokyo Tower…
Andrew: I did note here that Ticklesneezer is one of the worst suits we’ve seen so far.
Ethan: It’s bad.
Andrew: In all of the like, costumes that Power Rangers has. And some of them are not especially great, you know, but this one appears amateurish.
Nelson: It looks very sundamaged.
Andrew: Yeah, I mean, it just it looks like they’ve dusted off a really old, badly-made costume and they’re like, “We’re just going to reuse this one.”
Ethan: I think Nelson is picking up on what I kind of picked up on, between the Japanese and U.S. footage, the suit seems to have deteriorated somewhat and maybe been patched up somehow. Did it look a little gooier?
Nelson: It looked- Yeah, it looks weirdly gooey.
Ethan: I thought- OK, I’m glad I wasn’t the only one who thought that.
Andrew: No, like it was breaking down.
Ethan: The original character that Ticklesneezer is based on is Fairy Dondon. The plot is essentially the same, you know, he’s sort of a hapless goofball who just does collect stuff in his magic jar and Bandora more or less tricks him into doing that on Earth.
Nelson: My problem with this monster, this costume, is just the stereotypically Asian like, look to it. Like it’s got this old stereotypical Asian villager- Like it’s very like, “Uohohoh?”, you know what I mean?
Ethan: He’s a very weird. He’s a weird mishmash of…
Nelson: The teeth, and the eyes… And it’s… [alarmed noises] you know? I don’t- mm. Hmmm.
Andrew: So he sets about collecting things with his magic jar. He calls them his goodies, yes.
Ethan: I wrote here, ‘If I had a nickel for every time tiny people were stuck in a tiny vehicle, I’d have two nickels, which isn’t much, but it’s weird that it happened twice.’
Andrew: So he collects the car that Billy and Trini are in. They are shrunken down to a very small size.
Ethan: Which is like, an adorable little hatchback.
Andrew: “I don’t want to hurt you. Just add you to my collection,” he says. At this point, for absolutely no reason, Rita sends Goldar to earth. Jason and Zach are in the rec center and they are sparring and they proceed to break some boards with their fists. This gives the writers a perfect opportunity to humiliate Bulk and Skull some more.
Nelson: He cuts a cake.
Andrew: Bulk decides to smash a cake. Now, as soon as they cut over to Bulk and Skull, Ernie sets this cake down behind them. It was very much Chekhov’s cake. And I’m glad that in this instance-
Ethan: It was the same thing with the veggie chili in episode whatever it was.
Nelson: Oh, where’s this going?
Ethan: As soon as some food gets mentioned, you’re like, “Oh, Bulk’s head is going in there.”
Andrew: And I was really relieved in this case that it was just his hand. The bit here is that he is- “Oh, I can smash a board. Anybody can smash a board.” And he karate chops the cake and hurts his hand. It’s not a good bit.
Nelson: I mean, he did set the bench press record.
Andrew: He did!
Nelson: Before Jason broke it. Let’s not forget that.
Andrew: So the Rangers are called away and they are shown, by Zordon, Mr. Ticklesneezer, as he captures an airplane out of the sky. Zordon says that Mr. Ticklesneezer is under a spell, but he explicitly is not. He volunteered for this work. He was like, “Hey, I want to go out and collect goodies.” And Rita was like, “Yeah, go do that thing that you do.”
Nelson: Gotta give him the benefit of the doubt, you know? I think that’s what Zordon was doing.
Andrew: So the remaining Rangers, minus Billy and Trini, morph and are suddenly fighting Putties. There’s no transition here. It’s just morphing, fighting putties immediately.
Nelson: Well, the transformation is the transition.
Andrew: I guess.
Nelson: If we’re going by Power Rangers logic.
Andrew: Ticklesneezer trips and loses his bottle. But then Goldar attacks the bottle and the bottle is wedged on some train tracks. This again in this episode was a genuinely tense moment. Are Billy and Trini going to die? Well, obviously, of course not. But like it was- it did not look like they were going to be able to save them. They did a good job at this. Of course, they do save Billy and Trini. Billy and Trini are freed and immediately transform. And then Billy especially just proceeds to kick so much ass. Just- the Blue Ranger steps in and is immediately taking on like four putties at a time. Mr. Ticklesneezer meanwhile is upset that he lost his bottle. Rita comes to Earth. We don’t see her come to Earth. She’s just suddenly there and takes this moment to make Mr. Ticklesneezer grow.
Ethan: He specifically says, “Oh, Empress Rita, what’s up?”
Nelson: “Hey, what’s up, dude?”
[“Oh, Empress Rita… What’s up?”]
Andrew: All the other monsters retreat back to Rita’s palace, apparently.
Nelson: And that’s because they’re being threatened with being put in the jar. Like the the Megazord gets the jar, and there’s a child here.
Andrew: Hold on, I’ll get there. So Mr. Ticklesneezer was sad, he was sulking that he didn’t have his bottle. And when Rita is there, she’s like, “Why haven’t you captured the Power Rangers?” And he’s like, “I don’t have my bottle!” They make him big, and suddenly he’s got his bottle again with absolutely no explanation.
Ethan: I mean, it’s sort of an established convention, when you get giant, like- it’s like-
Andrew: You get your weapon back?
Ethan: Your weapons and all your health and stuff back.
Andrew: So Jason summons the Dinozord and the Dinozord sequence is just so cool, no matter how many times I see it. They immediately go Megazord, which is the preferable option. They don’t mess around with tank mode. Ticklesneezer opens his bottle and captures the Power Rangers. Somehow they use the Mega Sword to escape. It’s not really explained. They also, I think, call it by the wrong- the Mega Sword.
Ethan: Yeah, not the Power Sword.
Andrew: Right. They call it the Mega Sword, which was, again, a weird thing. The Rangers then use- attempt to use the bottle to collect Rita. Now, in every shot of the Megazord, there is just an unexplained Japanese boy standing next to the Megazord.
Nelson: There was a child there! I was- ohhhh my god!
Ethan: I didn’t notice this.
Nelson: You didn’t notice? There’s a whole kid!
Andrew: In every shot of the Megazord, there’s a Japanese boy standing next to him, and he’s like waist-height on the Megazord. So this is a giant child. There is a giant child.
Nelson: Yeah! Yeah!
Ethan: I completely missed the giant child.
Nelson: Oh yeah, you go back, you’re going to be like, “Wait, what, huh?”
Andrew: And obviously, this is because they just didn’t edit the kid out of the mask footage, but it’s just such a weird thing in this episode that already feels really slapdash.
Nelson: Which I think explains why they added the last scene, because they realized, ooh, we f***ed up.
Andrew: Yeah, we’re not doing it over again.
Nelson: We got to explain why this is so weird.
Andrew: So at this point, Ticklesneezer has many bottles, not just one. Up to this point, he’s only been shown with one bottle, and sometimes it’s full, and sometimes it’s empty. But now he’s just opening a bunch of bottles, and they’re all different sizes, and he’s releasing the bullet train and Tokyo Tower and-
Ethan: All the other normal California stuff.
Andrew: Yeah, the other normal California stuff. And Kimmy is weirdly maternal to him, and is like, “You better put it all back!”
Nelson: Let it go~…
Andrew: Cool, so all of that was real weird. And then we have a close-up on Trini sleeping. And we were given this implication that it was all a dream, right? And she wakes up, and she looks, and Mr. Ticklesneezer is gone. And so we have that horror movie moment of, ‘Oh, it wasn’t all a dream.’ And then the camera pans down, and Mr. Ticklesneezer is just on the floor. So Trini has rats, apparently, that have knocked her doll off of her dresser. And then to round out the episode, normally we would make fun of Bulk and Skull again. This time we go back to the classroom, and they show off their flea circus, and the teacher is infested with fleas. And I thought it was a nice ending that we didn’t make fun of Bulk and Skull.
Ethan: Yeah, it’s interesting to note that actually both of their first names are given in this episode.
Andrew: Yeah, I’ve got that written here in my notes.
Ethan: Farkas and Eugene, and this is such an old guy joke, of a flea circus? I mean, I know what they are just because, you know, I listened to swing music, or I don’t know. Or like I watched Disney’s Antz that has a flea running a circus, and maybe I-
Nelson: No, that was A Bug’s Life.
Ethan: Oh, that was A Bug’s Life.
Nelson: Yeah, A Bug’s Life, yeah.
Ethan: What did I say? Disney’s Antz? That’s Dreamworks!
Nelson: Yeah, that’s Dreamworks.
Ethan: Totally wrong. Totally wrong. No fleas in Antz.
Andrew: The basic idea, though, with your flea circus is that it was a mechanical circus. It was a clockwork thing. And the idea was that you said, “Oh, no, I have trained fleas to operate all of this equipment.” So it’s like a really weird double half joke.
Ethan: That you can tell was written by old guys. Which, I mean, I don’t know, maybe that fits with Bulk and Skull’s character. Like, maybe they like, live with their grandparents rather than their parents. And so they’re into, like, hokey old stuff.
Nelson: Well, you’ll see later that they do live with their parents. We meet their parents in a later episode.
Ethan: Oh. Maybe their parents are just really, really old school. I mean, I don’t know.
Nelson: That might track.
Andrew: All right, so my first thought going into this episode. I’ve had a lot going on in the last, like, month. I opened a bookstore and as a byproduct of that, this episode was the longest gap I’ve had since we started this, between watching episodes, and after having taken a break away from Power Rangers for a few weeks and coming back to it. This was also the first episode I watched on my TV instead of at my desk. So the first episode I watched with, like, a proper sound system instead of at a computer. And the intro to Power Rangers is just so good.
Nelson: Yeah, it gets me every time.
Andrew: It’s incredible. The theme song is magnificent. And that was the first thing that stood out to me, which just how good that was. Yeah, I mean, it’s incredible. OK, so for me, this episode was a really mixed bag. On the one hand, it had some of the best sequences from an episode of Power Rangers so far. On the other hand, it was all a dream. And I hate that.
Nelson: Yeah, I hate that kind of cop out in an episode.
Andrew: So according to the Power Rangers Wiki, through BreezeWiki, and they actually referenced an interview that I read in its entirety, that all being a dream was a last minute addition. They brought in a second and third writer to try and salvage this thing because they just didn’t like how it was going. And it was a cop out. It was a last minute, we’re going to throw this- and it didn’t work. As I said earlier, I really appreciated that Bulk and Skull weren’t the object of the final joke. I loved seeing Rita on the ground during the battle. It was it was like actually really thrilling for her to be a part of things. And she made the whole battle sequence that much more menacing. But it was just a dream, apparently. And this implies that Trini knows the- or has imagined the exact layout of Rita’s palace.
Ethan: …Yeah.
Andrew: As you mentioned, this is the episode where we learned that Bulk and Skull are named Farkas and Eugene.
Ethan: I don’t remember if we mentioned on air that Farkas is the Hungarian word for wolf.
Nelson: Yeah, we did.
Ethan: Like that’s a pretty badass first name, last name, Bulkmeier. So like-
Andrew: Big wolf!
Ethan: It’s a pretty solid name. Bulkmeier is made up, but it’s pretty good. Eugene, there’s no saving Eugene. I’m sorry. Just stick with Skull. You’ll be fine.
Andrew: I did also write down on my notes: I think that this is the first time that the blue monster shows up in Rita’s entourage. According to the wiki, his name is Squat, and he was my favorite as a child.
Nelson: Yeah, the vampire thing.
Andrew: Yeah.
Nelson: No, he was in the…
Ethan: So there’s…
Nelson: He was in the episode with the chicken.
Andrew: No, the chubby blue monster.
Ethan: Yeah, that’s Squat. So he has been around, but this is definitely the most active he has been. So he and Baboo are like a troll and a vampire. And they are just sort of bumbling, hapless, helpless goons. I mean, you know, you’ve got Goldar or Grifforzer as your like actual muscle. He’s the actually scary one. He’s got a big sword. He’s based on a manticore, apparently. They’re very sort of yakety sax. Run around like headless chickens, like… But this- he actually was given a mission and did the thing, which was cool.
Andrew: Yeah. That’s all I got. What did you think of this episode, Ethan?
Ethan: I mean, I’m a little less upset by the ending. I mean, I think there’s still some ambiguity there. Like, Ticklesneezer fell on his own accord because he’s still got a little bit of that magic juice left in him. And, you know, sometimes when you wake up, you’re not sure which things that you’ve experienced are real and a dream. I’ve definitely had dreams that felt extremely vivid and real, and been through real life things that felt like a dream. So I think there’s a little bit more ambiguity there. And but I mean, I think in general that it was all a dream is a cop out, and is not a great way to tidy up your episode. But sitcom people love it for whatever reason, or soap opera, or whatever. I have so many questions about Trini’s home life and like, she lives in this really nice, beautiful Victorian house, but she wears like an old granny nightdress to sleep, which seems weird for a 17 year old girl in California in 1992 or 3. And then just all the dolls. There’s dozens of them and they are all over the walls in her room. I just have a lot of questions about that.
Andrew: Did you ever meet my great grandmother?
Ethan: No.
Andrew: Okay.
Ethan: Well, I might have met her once or twice, in passing, briefly.
Andrew: So when I was little, I spent a lot of time at my great grandmother’s house. And she was, obviously, an old lady, but she was living on her own. Her husband had passed away shortly before I was born. And so she spent the last like 25 years of her life working, driving to work every day. And she had more money than she needed to live on. And so what she did when she had extra money is she bought dolls. And her whole house was full of dolls. And there were rooms that were just floor to ceiling dolls on tiered shelving. And they were terrifying.
Nelson: Yeah, that sounds unpleasant.
Ethan: Yeah, my mom had one, and it had the the eyes that tilt depending on how you move the doll.
Nelson: Oh, I hate that. Big nope on that man.
Ethan: (mimicking his mom) “It’s not creepy, it’s cute! I loved playing with this when I was a kid!” Keep it. Keep it.
Nelson: Keep that and keep those.
Andrew: All right, Nelson, how about you? What did you think of this episode?
Nelson: Oh, man, besides the weirdly semi-racist doll, I liked it. I like that Billy was playing fixer a lot in this, you know, helping Trini find her doll, helped her with her keys, for some reason. She’s got a little pom pom on her- little yellow pom pom on her keys, so that was nice. Little nice touches like that, besides the fact that they wear their colors all the time. But yeah, the dream thing, total cop out, big, big cop out there. Yeah. So the fact that there’s just a kid in the in the whole kaiju sequence.
Andrew: I’m really looking forward to seeing this mask footage in context.
Nelson: I mean, even when you like you go back and see it, there’s just-
Andrew: He’s just standing there.
Nelson: There’s just a kid, just standing there.
Andrew: Yeah, and he’s Megazord-sized.
Nelson: It’s just- he’s just standing next to the Megazord.
Ethan: I completely missed that. I don’t know how I completely missed that.
Nelson: Yeah, because they cut back to it like more than once. Like, because the first time I thought I was like, “Mm, I’m trippin.” because I was, you know, I was eating breakfast while I was watching it. So I was like, ah, maybe I missed this. I went back. No, there’s a whole kid. He’s just there.
Andrew: I don’t know that I would have noticed it if I if I was watching it on at my desk on my computer, but like, watching it on my big TV. Like this was a life-sized child just standing in my living room. I’m going to see if the wiki has a picture of it.
Ethan: Oh! Yeah! No, he’s just right there!
Andrew: He’s just right there!
Ethan: Who is this child? I don’t remember the Fairy Dondon episode at all. Which one is he in? Let me see. That’s not till episode 14, which is called “Become Small!” And I don’t remember it at all.
Nelson: This episode with Fairy Dondon is going to be interesting. Maybe everything shrinks except for where they are?
Ethan: That’s what the bottle, the magic bottle, does, is it shrinks things into it.
Nelson: So yeah, maybe they were like in there with, I don’t know. It was very weird. But yeah, other than that, I will give this episode a six out of 10. Who’s got the research today?
Ethan: Okay, so my research topic today is kind of three mini-topics put together.
Nelson: Research sandwich.
Ethan: Yeah, a little research sandwich. So I’ve got the cockatrice, the Garden of the Hesperides and the Garden of Eden. I’m just so intrigued by the mythology remix going on in this episode and the next one. So the first thing we have is the cockatrice. The word first shows up in English in the 14th century as a stand-in for snakes in the Bible, with the etymology tracing back through old French and Latin to Greek. But the Greek word actually seems to refer to like a mongoose-like creature that’s an enemy of dragons and snakes. The cockatrice and the basilisk have often been conflated with one another, with various different recipes resulting in either a cockatrice or a basilisk, such as hatching a chicken’s egg under a toad for a basilisk or under a snake for a cockatrice. It pretty much has nothing to do with the other two parts of this segment, the Garden of the Hesperides or the Garden of Eden, and has even less historical precedents than like, a sphinx, for example. It’s been like a popular mythical monster since that point. But tales of the sphinx or of the hydra or Cerberus go back, you know, 2000 years. So the cockatrice is a really, really weird one. It’s supposed to have like the body of a chicken and the wings of a dragon or a bat and like a snake’s tail and can breathe fire or turn you to stone or who knows what.
Andrew: I just thought it was a funky chicken.
Ethan: Yeah, no, that’s a chunky chicken. So next part, the Garden of the Hesperides is a location detailed in the 12 Labors of Heracles, where Heracles must go to obtain three golden apples to fulfill his 11th labor. The garden is tended by three, or sometimes four, or maybe seven goddesses or nymphs, known as the Hesperides and also guarded by a dragon called Ladon. In some versions of the myth, Heracles convinces the Titan Atlas to retrieve the apples for him, as in some versions of the myth, Atlas is the father of the Hesperides. But in other versions, Heracles goes to the Garden himself and slays Ladon to take the golden apples. The Argonauts would also later visit the Garden. This is pretty clearly the inspiration for the heavenly orchard that the Apello Tribe once tended. So like nothing about the garden of Eden deals with golden fruit. So the Garden of the Hesperides is where the golden fruit part comes from. But there’s no tribe of people who tends to them. They’re just goddesses or nymphs. And sometimes, I mean, if you read the Wikipedia article, you’ll see they have like eight different possible parentages, depending on which version of the myth you’re reading. So it’s not that important. But lastly, we have the Garden of Eden, which probably most of the listeners of this podcast will be familiar with, but the Garden of Eden is where the God of Abraham is said to have created the first two humans in a state of grace and perfect innocence, instructing them only to never eat the fruit of knowledge. A serpent convinces them to eat the fruit anyway, and they are cast out, having lost their innocence, bearing knowledge of good and evil. In Zyuranger, Dora Cockatrice plays the part of the serpent, which fits one of its possible origins as being hatched under a snake. But the fruit is the golden fruit of the Hesperides, not the fruit of knowledge of good and evil. This mishmash of myth and tradition is fascinating to me because it demonstrates a difference in perspective. To the Japanese creators of Super Sentai, Greek myth, Abrahamic tradition, and a made-up monster with scant historical references are all sort of on equal ground as far as inspiration for their story goes. There’s not a lot of remixing of Abrahamic and specifically Christian mythos in this country, especially because evangelicals absolutely lose their minds if someone makes Jesus a character in a video game or something. Another really interesting example of this is the manga and anime Saint Young Men, which features Jesus and Buddha as modern-day roommates. I am just intrigued by the process.
Nelson: Oh, so it’s like that MTV show with the… You know what I’m talking about? Where they’ve got JFK and Gandhi.
Ethan: Oh, Clone High.
Nelson: Clone High, yeah!
Ethan: It’s not like Clone High.
Nelson: Well, I will check it out while I’m working on this episode.
Andrew: I mean, that’s- my apologies for the third Dragon Ball reference in this episode, but that’s also how Dragon Ball kind of comes into existence.
Ethan: It does a lot of stuff like that.
Andrew: It’s Journey to the West. It’s Journey to the West, filtered through pop culture, with a bunch of other bits of mythology thrown in and then a bunch of sci-fi nonsense and stuff that came out of Toriyama’s head. But it starts off with that same kind of mythological underpinning. I made the connection to Eden when I was watching this one. Like, yeah, they ate the apple. They got turned into monkeys. That’s weird. But I did not make the connection back to the Labors of Heracles, which I guess is a really obvious connection to make when you remember that it’s a golden apple. How much further are we going to go with the golden apple metaphor? Do we have a Helen of Troy?
Ethan: No. So that’s interesting that you mentioned that, though, because Eris’s apple of discord comes from this- in some versions of the myth, comes from this orchard. Sometimes it’s one tree. Sometimes it’s an orchard. Sometimes it’s Hera’s orchard.
Andrew: The only other reference I have in my head for this orchard is Eris.
Ethan: I don’t think this particular facet of myth comes back to feature, but again, I could be wrong. I’ve completely, like I mentioned earlier, have completely forgotten the context of Fairy Dondon. Or why there’s a Megazord-sized boy in that episode. But yeah, just the way that the creators of Super Sentai feel comfortable taking these bits of Abrahamic myth, when that would never happen in this country. Anytime somebody makes, like, Dante’s Inferno video game or, I mean, what’s- I’m sure you have an example of…
Andrew: I’ve got an example. I’ve got, I think, what is the exception here. Do you remember Bedazzled?
Ethan: Did that have, what was Sabrina’s, Sabrina the Teenage Witch’s actress?
Andrew: I don’t think so. It had Brendan Frasier.
Ethan: Oh, and Elizabeth Hurley!
Andrew: Yeah, and Elizabeth Hurley.
Ethan: I don’t think I’ve ever actually watched that movie, but I’ve looked at the cover.
Andrew: Okay, so it came out in, like, 2001 or 2000, and the basic premise is Elizabeth Hurley is the Christian devil, and she gives Brendan Frasier seven wishes to make his life better. And along the way, he meets Jesus, apparently, who is just, like, a dude he meets in prison? Yeah, so point being, every once in a while, somebody will try it and get away with it. Not mixing, but at least making light of. And this movie was wildly successful, but it really had to toe a line, and there was massive outrage.
Ethan: Oh, yeah.
Nelson: Movie sounds awesome.
Andrew: Have you seen it?
Nelson: No, but I’m gonna watch this. Jesus is just a guy in prison?
Andrew: Yeah.
Nelson: Wow.
Andrew: For an early 2000s, very broad comedy, it holds up surprisingly well.
Nelson: Sounds fun.
Ethan: I watched The Devil’s Advocate not that long ago.
Nelson: Oh, I love that movie!
Ethan: With Al Pacino and Keanu Reeves being [drawls] a simple country lawyer. And I felt like that had such a cool, fun take on the devil and demons.
Andrew: When did that come out?
Ethan: ’97.
Andrew: Okay, so it’s interesting, because there was this time period, roughly, you know, 96, 97, up through like 2003 or so, where you could get away with that kind of thing. Did you see The Order? With…
Ethan: With Heath Ledger.
Andrew: Yeah, Heath Ledger.
Nelson: No, I know about it, but I haven’t seen it, no.
Andrew: It’s like half the crew from A Knight’s Tale, playing excommunicated Catholic priests who are searching for the Antichrist in order to enable one of their friends to not go to hell. It’s like, this dark psychological thriller with a bunch of demons in it. It was really good.
Nelson: Sounds pretty good.
Andrew: But, you know, so there was this time period where you could kind of sort of get away with playing with these Christian themes in your work. Matthew McConaughey’s Frailty comes out around the same time period where McConaughey is playing-
Ethan: I’m not familiar.
Andrew: Frailty, McConaughey is playing a man who has been touched by God. He has received the word of God.
Nelson: Where’d God touch him?
Andrew: And God has instructed him to go kill demons. And so Matthew McConaughey spends the movie just going around, taking a pickaxe to just random people on the street. And so you’re getting all of this from an interview with one of the main characters, who’s a police officer, and like, he’s recounting his version of these murders. And [McConaughey’s character]’s like, “No, they were all demons. God will protect me.” And as the audience, you’re like, oh, this is just a straight serial killer. But as the movie wears on, you get more and more of the supernatural element creeping in. And like, this again was right in that same pocket where you could kind of get away with that. And you know, having grown up with that, I don’t really think about it too much when stuff like this comes up. But I cannot imagine any of those movies coming out today. Our political climate has gotten so polarized and specifically the religious contingent has gotten so loud. I grew up in a religious household. We had no Pokemon because Pokemon was the devil. You know?
Ethan: No, we grew up in the time of Harry Potter being the most Satanic thing anybody could think of, despite the fact that they celebrate Easter and Christmas, at the school, in the books every year.
Nelson: That’s weird.
Ethan: Yeah.
Nelson Yeah, that’s a…
Ethan: I mean, media literacy in like, an older segment of the population of this country really started crashing around 2000.
Andrew: 2001.
Ethan: And then like 9/11 happened and everybody lost their f***ing minds.
Nelson: there’s Y2K, 9/11.
Ethan: And it has not improved an iota since then.
Nelson: You know, people wonder how we got to 2016.
Andrew: I don’t want to go too far-
Nelson: Yeah, this is a Power Rangers podcast.
Andrew: I don’t want to go too far away from Power Rangers, but how many other like early 90s children’s properties have you revisited as an adult?
Ethan: Some, I would say definitely some.
Andrew: Yeah. Have either of you watched Pete and Pete?
Ethan: No.
Nelson: Dude, yeah! Okay, because it’s got the greatest theme song ever.
Andrew: “Hey, Sandy.”
Nelson: Yeah, by Polaris. I was just playing it one day and Xander’s like, “Oh, you like Pete and Pete?” And I was like, “The f*** are you talking about, man?” And he’s just like, “This is the theme song to Pete and Pete.” And I was like, this? This was a theme song to a television show?
Andrew: There’s lots of examples that I could use here. But I think Pete and Pete is the most salient one.
Nelson: The Adventures of Pete and Pete.
Andrew: This show was good. It was a very well-crafted show that kind of relished in the fact that they could be a little more absurd than they could be for an adult television show. But it never talked down to the kids that were watching it. It was a kind of post-modern surrealist masterpiece that was masquerading as a children’s program. We got stuff like that when we were kids. We also got Power Rangers. And like these two things existed in the same year, but on a weird kind of spectrum where Power Rangers was very brash and loud and fast and was there to sell toys. And Pete and Pete was somehow just like, art happening on TV.
Nelson: Yeah, it was a show about two dudes.
Andrew: Two brothers, both named Pete, for some reason. The younger one has a tattoo. Again, no real explanation given. Their mom has a plate in her head, with which she can pick up radio signals, and this is a plot point on multiple occasions. But Pete and Pete at its heart was about the fact that kids should be trusted and adults should not. And the older I get, the more it’s true.
Nelson: Yeah, I mean, trust me, I’m an adult.
Andrew: I should not be trusted.
Nelson: Don’t trust me.
Ethan: We kind of- we’re living now like- we’re sort of watching the TikTok hearings in Congress happen. And trying to explain to a 70 or 80 year old senator what TikTok is. And that’s when they’re not being actively racist, and like confronting the Singaporean CEO.
Nelson: “Do you have any ties to China?” “I’m from Singapore.”
Andrew: “Are you a member of the Chinese Communist Party?”
Nelson: “I’m from Singapore.” And it’s like, oh my God.
Ethan: This is the environment that we’re in and the environment we’ve been in for many years now.
Andrew: But there was a brief window-
Nelson: Yeah, we were so close.
Andrew: -from shortly before we were born, until around the time that we were coming of age where that is not how media was. And where something like this, something like this playing of Christian mythology alongside Greek mythology, that might have flown. You might have gotten away with it even in a children’s program. And Pete and Pete certainly plays with the idea of God on multiple occasions. And like, even the Rugrats do it every once in a while.
Nelson: They had a whole like, Jewish holiday episode.
Andrew: Multiples, yeah.
Ethan: I would really like to hear like a Jewish perspective, retrospective on Rugrats.
Andrew: Sure.
Nelson: Yeah, there are a couple of good ones on YouTube that I’ve seen.
Ethan: But like I’m thinking of Greed from Fullmetal Alchemist. Gets nailed to a chunk of floor at one point and transported back to his creator. And he is stapled to the floor. So in the Japanese version, he’s just- they just cut out the floor around him. So naturally it’s cross shaped; that’s just the shape that humans are. But in the localization, the English localization, they made an effort to fill in that space around it, so it specifically wouldn’t look like a crucifix. And it’s just- what difference does it make? It’s clearly- he’s not any kind of a Christ analog. He’s a really bad dude actually. But just it’s the climate in this country for decades now has been so touchy that like even going close to that Christian imagery, people will start to lose their mind.
Andrew: Did you ever watch the West Wing?
Nelson: Well, hold on, hold on. This is going to go on for days.
Andrew: Give me 30 seconds. You ever watched the West Wing? The whole show is just kind of really cheesy and somebody’s-
Nelson: Lotta walking and talking.
Andrew: But it’s somebody’s like idealized fantasy version of what politics-
Ethan: A friend of mine called it the platonic ideal of the American presidency. And that made a lot of sense to me.
Nelson: That’s beautiful.
Andrew: But Bartlett’s character, on more than one occasion, has to confront conservative Christians and confronts them and calls them out. And like it’s some of the few moments in the show that I think really stand up, you know?
Ethan: That first episode is a masterpiece.
Andrew: But then like, again, here we are two decades on. I can’t think of any show in recent years that has accurately portrayed the Christian church as the villains that they often are.
Ethan: They were the bad guys in a Far Cry game. But I don’t- it was like some cult in Kansas or something. I don’t know enough about it to really comment on it.
Andrew: All right, that’s that’s our episode.
Nelson: Do we have any announcements to close with before we depart?
Ethan: I don’t think so.
Andrew: Yeah, we’ve got one.
Nelson: Yeah, we got one! Bookstore’s open. Go to the bookstore.
Andrew: So everybody, you can find Hemlock Bazaar at HemlockBazaar.com. This is our new bookstore in downtown Ellijay and online. Books, records, pretty soon, manga and lots of movies and stuff.
Nelson: Yes.
Andrew: I’m really excited about it.
Nelson: Come to the bazaaaaaaar.
Andrew: I’ve worked on it a lot. That’s Hemlock Bazaar, B-A-Z-A-A-R, you know, like a marketplace, not like a weird person. Let’s do an outro.
Nelson: Right.
Ethan: We’ll be back next time to discuss episodes 10 of Zyuranger, “Saru wa mou iya (Monkeys No More)”, or “No More Monkey Business,” depending on who you ask. And Power Rangers, “Happy Birthday, Zack.” If you’ve enjoyed the show, please feel free to send me $5. And if you want to find me online, don’t. But you can follow the show on the Fediverse at KenkyuuSentaiPodcastRangers@Meet.CommunityMedia.Network. Andrew, how can people get in touch and what should they look out for?
Andrew: Yeah, you can find me @AJRoach42@Retro.Social on The Fediverse. And you should look out for my bookstore, which is now real. We’ve also got a couple of new albums coming out from Analog Revolution, most contemporarily with the release of this podcast should be Small.
Nelson: Small, the band.
Andrew: Yeah, Small, the band. Their first LP is going to be out from the Lightning Limited series from Analog Revolution and it slaps.
Nelson: Nice.
Ethan: Nelson, how about your shout outs?
Nelson: Hoo, well, go watch Working Class Music. You can watch it on this here network, where you’re watching this podcast. They’ve been getting me on more episodes lately. I don’t know why they keep wanting me to be on camera.
Andrew: I saw you playing guitar.
Nelson: Yeah, I got featured on PRS’s website and their Instagram.
Ethan: That’s cool.
Nelson: Yeah, so everybody’s dad knows who I am now.
Andrew: So when are we doing another Jon Thefruitman show?
Nelson: Oh, man, you didn’t get a John Thefruitman show to begin with.
Andrew: No, I got a Holders show and you broke two amps.
Nelson: Ah, phew, cause I rocked so f***ing hard
Andrew: That, you will also be able to catch New Ellijay Television soon.
Nelson: Hopefully we can edit out the bad parts. Make it good because it was quite…
Andrew: The man destroyed two amps and a pedal board.
Nelson: It was quite a sight. Yeah, but that’s it for me. I think that’s it for the podcast. We’ll be back next week with all the stuff that Ethan said.
Andrew: Two weeks.
Nelson: Two weeks.
Ethan: That’s all the show we have for you today. Thank you so much for listening and thanks also to Hurly-Burly and the Volcanic Fallout for the use of their song “Colossal Might (Totally Radical Instrumental Version)” for our intro and outro music. Kenkyuu Sentai Podcast Rangers is licensed CC-BY-SA and produced in collaboration with New Ellijay Television at the Ellijay Makerspace, which stands on the ancestral, unceded, stolen, and occupied lands of the Cherokee people. You can learn more about the Makerspace by visiting EllijayMakerspace.org and you can learn more about the Cherokee people by visiting Cherokee.org. Strength, love, and solidarity to all oppressed people and in the words of a wise man, “F*** capitalism; go home.””
Ethan: Where are the cool communist bikers who just like, roam around? I mean-
Nelson: That’s how it used to be!
Andrew: Are we gonna be a roaming gang of cool communist bikers, Ethan?
Ethan: I would love-
Nelson: Is that we’re-
Andrew: Let’s buy some bikes.
Ethan: Learning to ride a motorcycle is on my bucket list. I would really enjoy that.
Nelson: Yeah.
Andrew: All right.
Nelson: Welcome to episode sevvv… eight.
[Clap.]
Ethan: Excellent.
Nelson: Hahha!
[“It’s morphin’ time!” + intro music]
Ethan: Minna-san, yokoso. Welcome to your favorite cross-cultural deep dive analysis and recap podcast covering Super Sentai and Power Rangers, Kenkyuu Sentai Podcast Rangers. My name is Ethan, I use he/him pronouns, and with me is my usual co-host Andrew.
Andrew: Hey! I’m Andrew. I use he/him pronouns. I’m here!
Ethan: And also joining us again is our producer and irregular guest, Nelson. Welcome back.
Nelson: Yeah. What’s up? You guys know the deal. I’m still here.
Ethan: He’s always here anyway.
Nelson: But yeah, this is going to be a fun one, because I’m really sitting in the hot seat now, because I have not seen these episodes.
Ethan: Okay.
Andrew: It’s going to be fun.
Nelson: It’s going to be just like the first time I was on here.
Ethan: Well, you sort of have seen this episode.
Andrew: You’ve seen half of this episode.
Ethan: Because you watched “Food Fight” and “Kyofu! Shunkan’ui” is the source episode for that.
Nelson: Oh, so we’re still kind of on track.
Ethan and Andrew: Yeah! Yeah, yeah.
Ethan: So you’ve seen all of the mask footage, you just haven’t seen the Japan side face footage.
Nelson: Yeah. I don’t know how they made this good. If they did.
Ethan: Nelson is joining us to talk about the Sentai episode today, since it’s the same monster from episode six of Power Rangers. Today, we’re discussing Kyoryu Sentai Zyuranger episode eight “Kyofu! Shunkan’ui (Terror! Eaten in an instant)” and Power Rangers, season one, episode eight, “I, Eye Guy,” which is definitely super easy to say. Unless we have anything else…
Nelson: Wait, is it like…
Ethan: It’s “I,”-
Andrew: The letter I-
Ethan: -personal pronoun I, comma, “Eye,” E Y E, “Guy.”
Nelson: Okay, so it’s not like, “Aye aye, guy!”
Andrew and Ethan: No, no.
Nelson: It’s not that?
Ethan: It’s hard to like-
Nelson: Why would they do that?
Ethan: Like, it’s easy to parse, but it’s hard to enunciate in a way that it’s clear what you’re saying.
Andrew: You know like, the Isaac Asimov book ‘I, Robot?’
Nelson: Yeah.
Andrew: This is like “I, Eye Guy,” because he’s a guy made of eyes. He’s an eye guy.
Nelson: That’s a stretch.
Ethan: Yes.
Andrew: Uh-huh.
Nelson: That’s… reaching.
Andrew: Before we get into this, speaking of “I, Eye Guy.” I like to take notes for our talkback; I only have one note for the talkback for this, and it just says, “This monster is sick as hell.” I want to get that out of the way up front.
Ethan: It’s so cool.
Andrew: The Eye Guy-
Ethan: Such a cool design.
Andrew: -is fantastic. Okay.
Ethan: So in the Sentai episode, he’s called Dora Argos, and he’s based on the mythic Greek monster Argus, who had a whole body covered in eyes, so that no one could sneak up on him. That’s like his whole thing, is [that] he’s like a guardian of a temple or something like that, and he’s impossible to get past because he will just see you coming from any direction. I don’t remember- It was probably a Hercules joint. Like I said, I don’t remember any details.
Nelson: This guy is nightmare fuel!
Andrew: Isn’t he great?!
Ethan: Oh, yeah, yeah.
Andrew: He’s great! He’s wonderful!
Ethan: He traps- He does like the pocket dimension.
Nelson: This is the right one, right?
Andrew: Yeah, that’s him.
Ethan: He does like the pocket dimension thing, he disassembles and reassembles just like Dora Skelton.
Andrew: No, this this this guy is the best villain we’ve had so far.
Ethan: Great monster design.
Nelson: I don’t like this guy at all.
Ethan: Great monster design.
Nelson: This is legitimately…
Andrew: Yeah, stuff of nightmares. It’s wonderful.
Ethan: It’s got like, a mouth over it.
Nelson: The mouth is an eye!
Ethan: Yeah, but it’s got teeth!
Nelson: Dude, what-
Ethan: He’s got little fangies on there.
Nelson: The more I look at this, the more- It’s like- it’s- blegh, ugh. I know how people with tryptophobia feel, like Jesus Christ. This is…
Ethan: Well, without further ado, let’s get into the recap.
Nelson: Oh my god.
Ethan: Kyo- [starts laughing]
[“Kyoryu Sentai… Zyuranger!!”]
Ethan: “Kyofu! Shunkan’ui” was written by Sugimura Noboru and directed by Tojo Shohei, and it begins with a boy stuck in a tree. His name is Mamoru, but the other children call him Minnesota Fatso, because he was born in Minnesota and he’s kind of on the hefty side. Boi saves him from falling out of the tree and hurting himself, and Mamoru’s family treats Boi to a grand meal to say thank you. Mamoru’s parents are grocers and their absolute favorite thing to do is eat together as a family. We’re not off to a great start with this one.
Nelson: So is this like, an American kid, like a foreign exchange…?
Ethan: No, he’s Japanese, his family’s Japanese.
Nelson: Why do they call him Minnesota Fatboy??
Ethan: I think his family was on vacation or something when he was born?
Nelson: That’s such a like, weird place to pick.
Ethan: American people born in Japan is way more common because US imperialism. We have like 70 military bases in Japan, but a Japanese person born in America, but not being an American, not living there…
Nelson: And then they go back to Japan.
Ethan: Exactly. It’s odd.
Nelson: Okay.
Ethan: I think he says something about it, that he was born there when his parents were on vacation or something.
Nelson: Sounds like a like a Ric Flair insult.
Andrew, channeling Nature Boy himself: All right, Minnesota Fatboy!
Nelson: Yeah, he’s like- Jesus…
Ethan: The character is not treated in a fatphobic way.
Andrew: But his name is Minnesota Fatboy.
Ethan: But the kids do call him Minnesota Fatso, and that sucks.
Andrew: Yeah.
Nelson: Wait, so is there a Japanese translation for Minnesota Fatboy?
Ethan: It’s literally just “Mi-ne-so-ta Fa-tso.”
Nelson: That’s amazing. Love that.
Ethan: Yeah, it’s pretty good. They’re like- So it starts off, there’s like a soccer ball that’s gotten stuck up in a tree. So they all made him climb up there because they thought it would be funny. And so they’re like circling the tree taunting him, while he’s trying to like, help them and save this soccer ball or whatever it is. [Transcriber’s note: It’s a toy airplane.] It’s just bad.
Nelson: Maybe that’s like, the one episode that Haim Saban saw of like, Zyuranger and was like, “Aw, yeah.”
Andrew: “We’re going to base our whole vibe on this moment.”
Ethan: Could be.
Nelson: “We’re going to make a whole comic relief character off this vibe right here.”
Andrew: I’m- I mean, I almost said I’m glad that Bulk’s name is not Minnesota Fatso, but his name is Bulk.
Ethan: Right. Bulkmeyer, but…
Nelson: They literally named the fat guy Bulk. Wow.
Ethan: Bandora sees this meal through her telescope and becomes intensely jealous, and demands that Pleprichaun produce her a pig monster to eat up all the food in the world, very similar to the Power Rangers episode. Later, Mamoru and his folks are sitting down to lunch, but their food keeps vanishing off their plates, and they end up squabbling about it and flipping over their table. It’s the same story all over town as Dora Circe is eating everything he can get his trotters on, leaving everyone famished and irritable. It’s dire out there. People- I mean, people are like rioting in the streets, because he is eating so much, so fast. Boi runs across Mamoru again in the park three days later, half-starved and despondent. Boi buys him a burger, but the second Mamoru goes to take a bite, it vanishes. Boi begins to suspect something is up. [Laughter.] It’s only occurred to him just now, “This is odd. Isn’t this odd?” In the secret hideout, he shows the others your Rangers footage from the hidden camera. He has in Mamoru’s house.
Nelson: Wait, WHAT??
Ethan: Nobody comments on that.
Nelson: Why do they have- ? Okay, you know, so not even questioning that they have, you know, giant robots, because that’s ancient technology, but cameras?
Andrew: 170 million years old, yeah.
Nelson: Cameras.
Ethan: Yeah. He’s a quick learner, I guess. He’s been in the modern world for a few months and is already doing sex crimes.
Nelson: It’s different when Bandora peeks in on a child, because she’s an evil witch.
Ethan: Which, also, she just has a telescope.
Nelson: Yeah, she’s got a telescope.
Ethan: You didn’t have to like go to a store to learn how to use that like Boi would have had to.
Andrew: There is so much that I want to say here, that I will refrain from saying, because it is none of my business. We’re gonna move on.
Nelson: This is a family show!
Ethan: Nobody comments on the cameras, but they do spot Dora Circe in the frame by frame playback. Goushi recognizes the beast, and consults the ancient book, which we learn is called the Dino Denki, which is like ‘A Dinosaur Legend.’ The book says that if Dora Circe is not stopped, all of Japan is doomed to starve, but that he can only be defeated by the sacred herb moly.
Andrew: Quick question.
Ethan: Yeah.
Andrew: Pleprichaun made him?
Ethan: Yeah.
Andrew: So how’s he in a book?
Ethan: Pleprichaun made more of them in the past.
Nelson and Andrew: Ahh.
Ethan: The Dino Denki book is from 170 million years ago, but in it is the story of how an ancient Grecian kingdom was ruined by these Dora Circe monsters. They ate all the food and a famine killed this kingdom. Greece did not exist a 170 million years ago, I don’t think I have to say. So it’s one of these just goofball things about the show. But, I mean, we know that Bandora was sealed on Planet Nemesis after like, a reign of terror. So we should assume, then, that someone recorded in the Dino Denki these monsters.
Andrew: Yeah, okay.
Nelson: So Pleprichaun remembers how to make these monsters.
Andrew: I just- in my head, right, like, each one of these creatures was a new thing that Pleprichaun was making up on the spot.
Ethan: Right, that makes sense.
Nelson: He’s already got a bunch of models, already.
Andrew: Not that he was like, dusting off the old classics. That puts a new spin on Pleprichaun. And honestly, it makes Pleprichaun a little less cool than Finster.
Nelson: He’s playing the hits!
Andrew: He’s playing the hits, yeah!
Ethan: I think in this episode, he makes a noise of “puri puri.”
[Pleprichaun dialog]
Ethan: And it’s just- like, we talked about this in our Element chat, that like, where his name comes from is like, this onomatopoeia for like, being huffy about something. And so he like, makes that noise. He says that out loud. So yeah, that’s who this guy is.
Nelson: I do love that like, characters have their own like little noises that they make. You know, like the last episode I was on with Dora Sphinx, and he would just be like “bimbom bimbom!”
Ethan: “Bimbom!”
[Dora Sphinx dialog]
Nelson: It’s good stuff.
Ethan: Love Japanese onomatopoeias. The Rangers attempt to fight Dora Circe, but he overpowers them and eats their weapons, which they worked so hard to obtain. Things are looking grim until a strange old man starts firing golf balls at Dora Circe like they’re 80 millimeter cannon rounds. and this scares the pig off. However, the old man then waves his magical golf club at the Zyurangers and they’re transported to his magical mushroom forest. The old man reveals himself as Gnome, a longtime ally of Barza, who hasn’t actually been in the show in several episodes, and says he will give the heroes the sacred herb if they can eat all the food on his magical table. Nelson, how do you feel about seeing some golf balls go up a pig’s nose?
Nelson: I’m… I’m just honestly shocked. Okay. Gnome, not the Gnarly Gnome.
Ethan and Andrew: No.
Nelson: And not Dora Gnome guy.
Ethan: He’s got like tiny pence-nez glasses, super long mustache and eyebrows. Very odd-looking dude.
Nelson: And he’s friends with Barza.
Ethan: He’s friends with Barza. So do you remember, from “Food Fight,” the rooftop fight, where the pig eats the weapons?
Nelson and Andrew: Yes.
Ethan: It’s that scene.
Nelson: Yeah, and he shoots ’em-
Ethan: Power Rangers cuts it off before the golf balls start flying in, but they literally show up out of nowhere. They just start like, zooming in with like a magical aura halo around them. He’s like launching them and two of them go up the pig’s nostrils and he’s like, “Urgh, I can’t deal with this!” and he leaves.
Andrew: No, this bit was nuts.
Nelson: We haven’t seen him this whole time.
Ethan: Right.
Nelson: But he’s just been friends with Barza, who just came back like a few days ago, technically, in the story.
Ethan: Yeah, very recently.
Nelson: So has Gnome also just been a groundskeeper somewhere?
Ethan: He’s a magical fairy. I don’t know what to tell ya.
Nelson: Sure.
Andrew: So imagine for a minute, right, that the Power Rangers are fighting the pig monster, right, and all of a sudden Zordon’s old golf buddy just shows up and starts playing golf.
Nelson: That’s what I was thinking! He just starts just letting them lose at him.
Ethan: It’s brutal. It’s like a like a pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, like raining golf balls. Anyway, the Zyurangers give it their best effort to clear all the food off this table, but finally, it is only Boi still eating, and the last thing on the table is a carrot, a food which he hates beyond all others. He suffers through it, winning the moly herb and Gnome’s blessing. Meanwhile, the townsfolk are on the warpath, hunting for the creature eating all their food. And the Zyurangers lure Dora Circe out with the promise of something delicious. They trick him into eating the sacred herb, which is not a spicy radish, at which point he expels not only their weapons, but so much food that he physically deflates. The Rangers use their Howling Cannon to defeat Dora Circe, and Bandora is too hungry to make him a giant, so he actually stays dead. Mamoru’s family treats the Zyurangers to a home-cooked meal, but the first thing Mamoru’s mom brings out is, of course, an enormous carrot, and Boi faints dead away. The end.
Andrew: Yeah, so, I loved this.
Ethan: It’s a great one.
Andrew: It makes very little sense. I’m assuming the guy who played Barza was just unavailable for a couple of episodes, and they’ve got a Barza stand-in in this one, which is kind of an interesting thing. But like-
Ethan: This character sticks around. We will see more of this character.
Andrew: Aside from that weird little side bit, yeah, this one worked really well. Great little self-contained episode, lots of fun. The pig monster is still horrible.
Nelson: Yeah. And like, you mentioned him like, deflating before they shoot him.
Ethan: Yeah, it’s like the actor has handles on the inside of the costume, and pulls it in, so it looks, rather than nice/pleasant/chunky/round, it’s very thin. He just talks about, “Oh, I’m so hungry.”
Nelson: Oh, the reason he doesn’t become a giant is just because…
Ethan: Literally, Bandora like, goes to throw her staff and drops it, and is like, “I’m too hungry….”
Andrew: And see, I love that.
Ethan: Such a goofy episode.
Nelson: “Ugh, not today.”
Andrew: Because, we talked in the last episode a little bit about how, or maybe it was two ago, about how petty Rita is and about how small-minded she gets about the things that she is seeking. And Bandora, for the most part, avoids that. Bandora, for the most part, goes big. We’re going to transform all the children of Japan into trees. We’re going to eat the children’s souls. But in this one, she’s just like, “Nah, it’s too much work.””
Nelson: But I mean, this started- it started petty.
Ethan: The plan is to eat all the food in Japan and then presumably move on from there. But I guess the pig ate all of their food before he left so they just… Bandora, Totpat, Bookback, everyone’s just sort of like slumped on the floor of the palace, because they are too hungry to move.
Andrew: No, I love that.
Ethan: Boi hating carrots is so funny. He hates them. I mean, I also would not want to eat like an enormous raw carrot, just on a plate.
Nelson: Yeah, that sounds gross.
Ethan: That’s not like a pleasant eating experience, but he like, despises these foods, which is very funny. I don’t know, it’s just silly.
Nelson: Like cats with cucumbers.
Ethan: Right. Oh, the thing I want to mention is the Greco-Roman mythological influence here. Circe, in the Odyssey, is a witch who lives alone on an island in the ocean, and turns men into pigs. So we have like a mishmash of the name and the thing there. And then moly is an herb that comes up several times in the Greek and Roman myth. It’s just this like, very sacred holy plant that can cure wounds and stuff like that. It’s just interesting to see, you know, in the last episode, I think, was it six or seven that has Dora Goblin? I have it here.
Nelson: Somebody’s got notes.
Ethan: Episode seven.
Nelson: We have technology.
Ethan: So the Goblin is like, a British Celtic-inspired fairy, you know, loosely. But this is like solidly in the Greco-Roman mythological- which a lot of Bandora’s monsters are, and even her name comes from. And I just think those influences are really interesting. The way that they are pulling from them, remixing them, and then the way that the Japanese production team doing that, and then the American production team doing the same thing.
Andrew: And with Japan, it’s kind of a recontextualization. They’re taking, with Sentai, they’re taking these American myths and they’re recontextualizing them through this lens of Japanese folklore, and also kind of pop culture. When it comes into the U.S., it’s not so much that they’re getting recontextualized as that they’re getting decontextualized. These things that were built up around this this kind of Western mythology have all of their mythological elements stripped away and they’re left to be, “Hey, look at that weird guy.”
Ethan: Yeah. Chunky Chicken.
Andrew: Yeah. And don’t get me wrong, I love the Chunky Chicken.
Nelson: Who doesn’t?
Andrew: But it’s a very different thing.
Ethan: Yeah, and I think it’s interesting that, you know, if you sort of trace this, at least the thing that people claim is the mythological underpinnings of Western civilization, it’s like the U.S. back to Britain, and Britain back to Rome, and then Rome back to Greece. And these are like foundational myths, or at least they’re claimed to be for, quote, unquote, “the West,” which is fake and made up. But when Japan pulls from those, that’s not like their… That’s not like the myth of Amaterasu, for example. That’s not like their foundational cultural cornerstones. So they sort of play with it more than they might something else. And then like you said, Andrew, when they imported it back to the U.S., coming from the other way around the globe, it’s totally stripped of all those mythological underpinnings.
Andrew: And I know I’ve talked about the Mystic Knights of Tir Na Nog a lot on this show, and that’s not what the show is about, but I am personally watching the Mystic Knights of Tir Na Nog right now, and the Mystic Knights of Tir Na Nog figured that out.
Ethan: Yeah.
Andrew: It’s like, “Hey, we can play with Celtic myths and some of this like, traditional mythology and we can start pulling those elements in and make a good underpinning for the show, that is consistent and isn’t just, “Hey, look at this weird chicken.” But it took them a couple of years to get there.
Ethan: Yeah. But that’s the episode. It’s a good one. I think that covers the Sentai episode.
Andrew: Okay.
Ethan: Moving along, Andrew’s gonna give us to our Rangers Recap.
Nelson: Raaaangeeeeeers….
[“Go, go, Power Rangers!”]
Andrew: Power Rangers episode 8, “I,” comma, “Eye Guy.”
Ethan: That’s letter I, comma, space, E-Y-E, guy.
Andrew: Not aye-aye, but I, Eye.
Nelson: Like I, eye.
Andrew: Yeah.
Nelson: Guy.
Andrew: Yeah.
Ethan: Exactly.
Andrew: Because he’s a guy made of eyes.
Nelson: Aye.
Andrew: Okay, so this episode was directed by a man named David Blythe and written by a man named Stuart St. John.
Nelson: Any relation to Austin St. John?
Andrew: No! I thought that I was about to have a really interesting research topic when I saw that this was Stuart St. John. No, no relation to Austin St. John, just a similar name.
Ethan: That’s Jason’s actor in case anybody doesn’t know.
Andrew: Yeah. One thing that I do when I’m writing this recap is I pull out some notes for myself for stuff to make sure to talk about, and I only have one note for this episode, and that’s that this monster is sick as hell. The eye guy is sick as hell. So, Billy has a friend named Willy.
Ethan: -noise of extreme disappointment-
Nelson: Jeez.
Andrew: And Billy and Willy are inventors.
Ethan: -continued noises of disappointment-
Andrew: And Willy has created a virtual reality machine the likes of which would permanently alter like, the course of human development. And he plans on entering it into the local science fair.
Ethan: He’s 12.
Andrew: Uh-huh. Willy and the Power Rangers, not as Rangers, are going to the science fair and some Putties show up. The Power Rangers fight the Putties. They move on. They go to the science fair at the youth center.
Ethan: The slo-mo in this attempted kidnapping sequence is dumb as hell. It sucks. I mean, the first several minutes of this episode are kind of a drag. I will say Billy and Willy’s secret handshake is adorable. It’s very good. But this so far is not a winner.
Andrew: So Rita wants Willy’s machine.
Ethan: And his intelligence.
Andrew: Yeah, so she summons the Eye Guy. And Eye Guy’s sole mission is to capture the smartest children and to steal their intelligence and also this machine.
Ethan: I have written down in my notes: “nonstop eye puns.”
Andrew: Yeah.
[Eye Guy: “You’re a sight for sore eyes, your loveliness. It’s good to see you again. I assume that I can be of service to you.” Rita: “Yeah.” Eye Guy: “Aye aye, my queen!”]
Andrew: So we’re at the youth center. We’re at the science fair. Bulk and Skull are here.
Nelson: Here we go.
Ethan: This one goes to some places.
Nelson: Oh boy, here we go.
Andrew: The only important bit for the plot is that they pull some antics and Willy gets disqualified.
Ethan: Yes, very unfairly. Like immediately the judge for the science fair sees the shenanigans and for some reason pins it on Willy, despite the fact that he just showed up and has not done anything wrong.
Andrew: So I’m going to leave it at that. We’ll come back to Bulk and Skull later, because we’ve got a lot to say about Bulk and Skull in this episode, but for now I’m leaving it at that. Willy sulks because he’s been disqualified.
Ethan: Yes.
Andrew: So he goes off into the park, and everybody else follows shortly behind him. But the Eye Guy’s giant eyeball, his main eye, just shows up, captures Willy. For some reason the eye can transport all of his clothes except for his hat.
Ethan: Yeah, he lost his hat, so the Rangers find out something has happened to him.
Andrew: But Willy is transported into like a secret dimension inside the Eye Guy’s eye, which I guess is kind of supposed to parallel Willy’s like, virtual reality world, I guess.
Ethan: I have a note: “space camp gyroscope puker machine.” He’s in one of those things. If you watched like, a space camp commercial in the ’90s, you saw one of these.
Andrew: The gyroscope puker machine. Yeah, of course.
Nelson: Is that the thing that they strap you into and you start going in circles?
Ethan: And it’s like a tri-axial…
Andrew: It spins you this way and this way and this way, all at the same time.
Nelson: It’s like the f***in’… Da Vinci modern man thing, except it’s a ride.
Ethan: Yeah, yeah. So the eye slurps Willy up and puts him in one of those. And this is the intelligence extraction device. It’s not a plan.
Nelson: I mean, do you not slurp up all your intelligence? That’s how I take in my intelligence.
Andrew: Some of the Power Rangers look for Willy. They find his hat. They suspect that Rita has kidnapped Willy, for some reason.
Ethan: They go straight to it too. “This must be Rita.”
Andrew: Yeah. Not the kid was sad and he ran away. And granted in this case it was Rita, but like it’s just a really weird job to make. But they go to Zordon. They go to the Command Center and Zordon’s like, “Hey, there’s an Eye Guy.” So the Rangers go and confront the Eye Guy, except he’s missing his main eye, which is where Willy is. But they confront Eye Guy and Baboo. They shoot at Eye Guy and he blows up, but then all his eyes just reassemble. He blasts the Rangers, they fall down. Zordon pages Billy on his communicator, and only Billy for some reason. And he’s like, “Yo, the main eye, it’s in the woods. You gotta go.” So Billy goes out into the woods with his giant lance. Now we haven’t seen much of the giant lance on the show so far, but the giant lance is the best weapon in the Power Rangers game for the Sega Genesis, so I’m always really happy to see it appear on the show. And so Billy uses the lance to attack the Eye Guy, which weakens the rest of the monster. At this point, of course, Rita Repulsa makes the monster grow.
Nelson: Finally!
Andrew: And the Power Rangers summon their Megazord and they do battle. Frequently, they manage to defeat the thing and it shatters into a bunch of individual eyes and reforms. It’s creepy as all get out. It’s got like fang- wonderful monster.
Ethan: Yep.
Andrew: They finally use the Power Sword. What’s the Japanese name?
Ethan and Nelson: The Godhorn.
Andrew: They finally use the Godhorn, much better name. They finally use the Godhorn to destroy the Eye Guy and Willy is freed.
Nelson, smugly: They freed Willy.
Andrew: They freed Willy. And at this point, we gotta talk about Bulk and Skull some more. So they go back to the youth center. Billy gives Willy his hat back and Ernie, the guy who runs the youth center, and Willy’s professor are playing the VR thing that Willy made. They realize that Willy is in fact a genius and apologize to him. And then Bulk and Skull show up wearing only towels.
Ethan: Yeah, so we have to go back to the first science fair segment. There is pants vanishing spray. There’s shenanigans. Trash can turtle happens again. And then Bulk and Skull end up in like, a fashionizer machine.
Andrew: Yeah.
Ethan: It’s weird. I mean, it’s a cool invention. But, of course, it’s only used to humiliate these two characters, and they end up in drag, essentially. They end up in drag, and then they run off screen. Because they’ve been humiliated because… homophobia is…
Andrew: There’s nothing more humiliating in the ’90s than… yes.
Ethan: It sucks. It’s real bad. Not to say that drag is bad. Drag is fun and like, brings a lot of joy to a lot of people. But it’s used for nefarious purposes, I would say, in this moment.
Andrew: Yeah.
Ethan: So anyway, coming back to the second science fair sequence.
Andrew: They would rather show up just wearing towels than wearing the outfits that they left in. They walk in, they’re wearing towels, and they ask for their clothes back. And instead of being given their clothes back in any reasonable sense, they’re given their shrunken clothes.
Ethan: Tiny baby clothes.
Nelson: Do they try to put them on?
Ethan and Andrew: No, no.
Andrew: They just-
Ethan: That’s just- sort of- the episode sort of freeze frames on them, in towels, having come from like, showering. Because when they came out of the fashionizer machine, they’re like, not just in girls’ clothes, but like, full faces of makeup, wigs, everything. So they went to wash that off and then came back all the way from the showers into the main room of the juice bar.
Nelson: This is all one giant place. This is the gym, juice bar, cafeteria, science fair.
Ethan: It’s just very weird and awkward.
Andrew: Yeah, no, I did not like it. Aside from that bit, I actually really enjoyed this episode. I think that the Eye Guy is a great villain. I think that all of the mask footage in this was very well done. The bits with Willy are… I mean, they’re fine.
Ethan: Yeah. Like I said, the secret handshake is super cute. They say stuff like “quasi-tronic circuitry.” It’s, you know, it’s cute. You know, there’s good bits here and there’s bad bits here. I think the Dora Argos, in the episode that he shows up in, is even more well utilized.
Andrew: Sure.
Ethan: So I’m looking forward to hearing your reaction to that episode, when we get there.
Andrew: But yeah, I mean, just on the whole, I liked this episode. There are things to like in this episode. It’s got its problems, but like, especially compared to some of the ones that have led up to this that were just such a slog, like this one? It was fun.
Ethan: Yeah.
Nelson: I don’t- I don’t think- I don’t think I like the eye monster.
Andrew: No, he’s horrible.
Nelson: It’s up there with the pig.
Ethan: So when- so do you remember with Dora Skelton, the way he would reassemble was that they had all the bones like hanging from wires and then they dropped them from the wires, and then they reversed that footage?
Nelson: Yeah, I looked at a gif of it, yeah.
Ethan: They use that same effect here, except it’s just a- it’s just a cluster of eyeballs like, swarming up from the ground.
Andrew:It’s wonderful.
Ethan: I have written that the energy effects… “really good energy attack effects.”
Andrew: Yeah. The Eye Guy was one of the only monster toys I had as a kid because it was just so gross, and I loved it.
Ethan: When he launches little energy eyeballs, they have like mouths with teeth in them.
Nelson: How do you make a toy of that without it being the ultimate choking hazard?
Andrew: So the eyes were all molded on.
Ethan: It’s just a solid figure.
Nelson: Okay, cause I was gonna say like, he has so many break-off-able pieces…
Ethan: He had one or two that would shoot off, but they were tied with string. So you would just like poke the string back into the body. Anyway, I think that’s our talk back. So Andrew has our research topic for this episode, so what do we got?
Andrew: So, in my last research segment, I talked about the actor that appeared in the most episodes of Power Rangers. It was Paul Schrier, who plays Bulk and also the HyperForce Yellow Ranger, Jack Thomas, apparently.
Nelson: What’s Bulk’s full name?
Ethan: Farkas Bulkmeyer.
Andrew: Yeah, Farkas Bulkmeyer.
Ethan: Farkas is apparently Hungarian for “wolf” and Bulkmeyer is a fake, made-up German-sounding name.
Nelson: So his name is essentially Big Wolf.
Andrew: More or less.
Nelson: Nice.
Andrew: I didn’t actually talk much about Paul Schrier, though. So, today I’m going to do that. Schreyer was born on June 1st, 1970. He is, as of this recording, 53 years old. He’s an actor, obviously, but he’s also done some voice work. He did a ton of- well, a ton, I mean, it’s relative, but he did- he worked on anime dubs that Saban imported.
Ethan: Do you have any shows or characters listed that he…?
Andrew: Yeah, give me a second.
Ethan: Okay.
Andrew: He did some anime work with Saban, and then he went on to do some anime work without Saban. He was also a voice actor on a Cartoon Network show called the Mighty Magiswords. He played a character named Flonk.
Ethan: I love that.
Nelson: Did they get Jason Narvy in there to play another character called Kerplunk?
Ethan: I hope so.
Andrew: I don’t believe Jason Narvy was in that episode. The two of them are friends, outside of Power Rangers. They hang out, they work together. For anime, he [Schrier] was in a show called Technoman, where he played Technoman.
Nelson: He played Technoman in Technoman?
Ethan: That’s cool he got the lead role, though.
Andrew: He was in a show called Eagle Riders, and he was in a show called Daigunder.
Ethan: That sounds more up our alley.
Andrew: Eagle Riders was based on Gachaman 2 and Gachaman Fighter, and Daigunder was based on Bakuto Sengen Daiganda.
Ethan: Yeah, Daigunder.
Nelson: Good on ya.
Ethan: I had no idea he did anime dubs, but since Power Rangers is very close to its own anime dub, that makes a ton of sense.
Andrew: So after doing some dubbing for anime, he started directing. He goes on to direct several episodes of Power Rangers, later in the show.
Ethan: I read about this when I was looking into him for something else. Specifically, during the filming of Power Rangers The Movie, he and Narvy both, because they didn’t have huge roles in the movie, they [the studio execs] were like, “Well, we’re shooting more episodes of the TV show, why don’t you both go be assistant directors, while you’re not filming here?” And that just is such an efficient use of time.
Andrew: And it worked. So he went on to be a director on several episodes. And then he got into directing animation, and he directed 16 episodes of the Hello Kitty animated series.
Ethan: Well, that’s precious.
Andrew: But the thing that really caught me off guard, and the reason that I didn’t just include this info in the last research segment, is that he’s also an artist and specifically a 3D modeler, and I want to make sure I get this bit right. He worked with a team of artists who pioneered an entirely new style of comic book art, which makes heavy use of 3D models. He was one of the 3D modelers on that team. And then they demonstrated that new style of comic book art in a comic called The Red Star. I’d never heard of The Red Star before, but it’s a comic about a kind of idealized mythol- a kind of idealized mytholol-
Nelson: Mythological?
Andrew: Mythololigized?
Ethan: Mytholigized.
Andrew: A kind of idealized mythologized Soviet Russia. It’s this communist magic technology utopia. So, since the late ’90s, he’s been working as a 3D modeler on this techno fantasy Soviet Union comic book. And I just think that that is exceptionally cool.
Ethan: Yeah, I really want to look into that.
Andrew: I don’t know if the comic is still ongoing. It’s listed in several places as being ongoing, but like the last updates that I’m seeing from the comic are from like 2017 or 2018, so like, I don’t know when the last issue came out. I haven’t kept up with comics. I’m just- I’m not sure. But I’m going to seek the thing out, because I’m immensely curious.
Ethan: Yeah, no, that sounds killer.
Andrew: This dude took a bit part in a kid’s TV show where he was mocked and ridiculed, and he managed to turn that into a decades-long career as an actor, a voice actor, a director, and a Power Ranger. As I mentioned in the last episode, he does finally appear as the Yellow Ranger in Power Rangers HyperForce. And then because that wasn’t enough, he also became a 3D modeler who helped change the face of comic books with a 3D illustrated comic about a future sci-fi Soviet Russia. I mean…
Ethan: Yeah, solid dude.
Andrew: Yeah. So, that’s Paul Schrier. It feels weird for me to be talking about him two research segments in a row, but I found way more to say.
Ethan: Yeah, sometimes there is just that much.
Andrew: Yep. I’m going to go in a real different direction for next month’s research segment. I think it’s time for us to start talking about video games, but that’s what I had for today.
Ethan: That’s excellent. I love artist spotlight type things and it’s very cool how episode six’s research topic led you naturally into this one, and his career inside and outside of Power Rangers is just really cool.
Andrew: Yep. And like, his career was clearly very heavily shaped by Power Rangers, but it was not-
Ethan: Solely defined.
Andrew: Yeah, it’s not like he got stuck there. The work that he’s done as a 3D modeler is probably just as important, if not more so.
Ethan: Yeah, no, that sounds awesome.
Andrew: But then he’s also the guy who appears in the most episodes of Power Rangers, like, he is the guy who’s gotten the most mileage out of being involved in the series. And I just- I really- I think that’s really cool.
Ethan: That is really cool.
Andrew: And it makes it hurt all the more when they treat him like such s*** in these episodes.
Ethan: Yeah. And then we see in future seasons, I mean, he’s still kind of comic relief, but it’s not this style of like, overtly cruel writing that like places him in harm’s way, and constantly puts the heavyset guy in like, gross physical contact with food as a like, punch line. So like, I hope that he was able to like, advocate for himself, once the show was more established and be like, “Can we take this in a little bit of a different…?” and obviously, by the fact that he became an assistant director and a director, like, clearly he was able to garner some pull in the studio and that can only be a good thing.
Andrew: We’re not going to see much of that though in season one. In season one, everything is very seat of our pants. We don’t know if this is going to keep going. We don’t know if it’s going to work. The show, from everything that I’ve read and from everything that I remember, just gets better after season one.
Ethan: Yeah!
Nelson: Yeah, you got to start somewhere.
Ethan: It’s pioneering in a big way. And so like once they sort of had a process down, they were able to improve on it.
Andrew: So that’s Paul Schrier.
Ethan: Excellent. Thank you so much.
Andrew: Yeah.
Ethan: That was a very cool one.
Nelson: Nice.
Ethan: Do we have anything else about these episodes? I know Nelson doesn’t ’cause he didn’t actually watch them. We kinda sprung this on him.
Nelson: Yeah, I mean, these sound amazing.
Ethan: Yeah, they’re pretty good.
Andrew: Okay, so what I want you to do, right, is watch them. And then just just give us like a 30 second, like, ‘this is what I thought about these episodes.’
Nelson: Yeah, I’ll go back in post, and here’s my opinion on this:
Future Nelson: Well, now that I’ve seen these episodes, I gotta say, you guys definitely did a great job explaining what actually happened and painting a good picture, before I actually got to see it. And I think that we didn’t talk about that I thought was very funny was when Boi consoles Mamoru, and his pants fall down because he hasn’t been able to eat.
Andrew: Yep.
Nelson: So that’s what I think.
Andrew: Excellent. Thank you so much, Nelson.
Ethan: We’re always happy to have you here.
Nelson: Yeah, it’s good. It’s a good show. Well, these are two good shows and an even better podcast.
Ethan: Thank you. I guess that’s everything for this one. So-
Nelson: Hit ’em with the outro.
Ethan: We’ll be back next time to discuss episodes nine of Zyuranger, “Hashire!! Tamago Ouji,” which is “Run!! Prince of the Eggs.” Literally, “Run!! Egg Prince,” but that flows a little bit worse than than “Run!! Prince of the Eggs,” and Power Rangers, “For Whom the Bell Trolls.” Two guesses as to what’s the monster in that one. If you’ve enjoyed this show-
Nelson: Is it a troll?
Ethan: Actually, not. It’s actually…
Andrew: A bell.
Ethan: No, it’s Trini’s doll, that Rita brings to life. And his name is Mr. Ticklesneezer. [Long, horrified pause.] It’s bad. It’s bad! Anyway-
Nelson: Well, you guys aren’t gonna want to miss that.
Ethan: “For Whom the Bell Trolls.”
Andrew, barely holding it together: When we talk about Mr. Ticklesneezer!
Ethan: The Sentai equivalent is Fairy Dondon, which is like, not nearly as gross-sounding. Mr. Ticklesneezer, you got to wonder where they came up with it.
Nelson: That’s like some… I don’t know, man. It sounds like some old…
Ethan: It feels bad. Kimochi warui, as the Japanese would say.
Nelson It’s like some Hollywood pervert bulls***.
Ethan: Yes, uh-huh.
Nelson: Like some Dan Snyder alleged, you know, Mr. Ticklesneezer.
Ethan: Uh-huh.
[Everybody is grossed out for a second.]
Ethan: If you’ve enjoyed this show, please feel free to send me $5, and if you want to find me online, don’t. But you can follow the show on the Fediverse @KenkyuuSentaiPodcastRangers@Meet.CommunityMedia.Network. Andrew, how can people get in touch and what should they look out for?
Andrew: You can find me online at AndrewRoach.net or AJRoach42.com. And from there, you can find links to all the other things that I do.
Ethan: That pretty much covers it.
Nelson: Yeah. Wait, hold on, also, watch Working Class Music and my YouTube channel, IndieCon Recs. That’s where you can find me.
Ethan: Can you can you spell that out for us?
Nelson: IndieCon Recs?
Ethan: Yeah.
Nelson: No.
Ethan, laughing: Okay.
Andrew: Link in the description, thanks everybody!
Nelson: Yeah, I’ll put a picture of it here, because the spelling is weird, yes.
Ethan: Okay, that’s all the show we have for you today. Thank you so much for listening and thanks also to Hurly-Burly and the Volcanic Fallout for the use of their song “Colossal Might (totally radical instrumental version)” for our intro and outro music. Kenkyuu Sentai Podcast Rangers is licensed to CC-BY-SA, and produced in collaboration with New Ellijay Television at the Ellijay Makerspace, which stands on the ancestral, unceded, stolen, and occupied lands of the Cherokee people. You can learn more about the Makerspace by visiting EllijayMakerspace.org, and you can learn more about the Cherokee people by visiting Cherokee.org. Strength, love, and solidarity to all oppressed people, and in the words of a wise man, “F*** capitalism; go home.”
This is the first edition of Community Media, saddle stitched Zine style and bound at the Ellijay Makerspace. It only features the History, Meta Manual, and Manual and does not include later supplements. 8.5×5.5, stapled and trimmed, roughly 100 pages.
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