Mighty Morphin Power Rangers S01E01-02 Review: Teenagers with Attitude

Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, Season 1, Episodes 1-2

So, yeah, after jumping both feet into the Tokusatsu genre, it's a matter of time before I finally watched the Americanized version of Sentai, the ever-popular Power Rangers. And I thought where better to start than the first show that started it all in 1993? Go Go Power Rangers, am I right? I never actually got into Power Rangers like all of my friends did, catching a couple of episodes here and there and knowing the general premise of the show, but never actually latching on to it, y'know? So... yeah, well, here we go, with my very first watch through of this show. This is going to be a cheesy, silly, narm-y show filled with 90's nonsense, and I expected nothing less. It's not really a good show, not by normal narrative standards, but my lord is it entertaining. It's full of ridiculousness and it's just... it's just a neat show to watch just to unwind, y'know? 

This is going to be a bit of a faster-paced review, because... well, honestly, there's not a whole ton for me to talk about per episode and I really don't want to get into nitpicking about just how "oh, this scene from Kyoryu Sentai Zyuranger totally was an awkward transition from the American-shot fotoage to the Japanese action scenes". We'll acknowledge that Mighty Morphin Power Rangers is a show that makes a lot of liberal use of teleportation and dubbing over stock footage to make the impression that the scenes are all in continuity -- it's frankly a pretty ingenious way to adapt the show, I must say -- keep all of the Sentai-vs-monster and mecha-vs-monster scenes from Zyuranger, as well as the scenes in the villain's lair, but re-shoot everything else and dub over those scenes. As I understand, sometime down the line the American production team finally got access to some of the monster and ranger suits, allowing them to actually shoot scenes of their own? Anyway, I am completely clueless about anything in this show, so this is more of a combination of my reactions and reviews.

And, yeah, I know Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers is far from being serious. It's a toy advertisement show, from what I've seen the plotlines are very much in line with other Saturday-morning-cartoons like TMNT, Transformers or G.I. Joe, but we can definitely appreciate the cheese, yeah? I've watched around ten or so episodes, and while my original draft for this review was episodes 1-5, turns out I was wordy enough with the pilot episode that I ended up splitting up episodes 1-2 and 3-5. Unless there's something huge, I'm going to review the rest of MMPR's first season in batches of five. 

Episode 1: Day of the Dumpster

Y'know, pilot episodes tended to have it rough, and the pilot for MMPR starts off with a combination of an origin story and setting up the huge aspects of the setting. And it's... it's rough. Of course the deliciously 90's opening "Ahhh! After ten thousand years I'm free!" gives us a quick summary of what the origin story's about to be, but the episode itself really doesn't do a whole ton of elaboration on just what a lot of these things are. I'm not sure if things like backstory is something we're saving down the line, or if this is just the premise and we're just meant to accept it. Either way... the first scene is pretty quick, moving quickly as a pair of random astronauts come across a "space dumpster" (which is more like a genie-containing jar, really) in the Moon and open it, unleashing the sealed alien witch Rita Repulsa and a quartet of her lackey minions, and Rita (with the glorious voice of Barbara Goodson dubbing over the original Japanese actress Soga Machiko) wastes no time in hamming things up and declaring that, hey, she's gonna take over Earth.  Sure, the 'villain sealed away and unleashed by accident' is a pretty common supervillain trope -- I can think of like a dozen easily on top of my head, and that's just Tokusatsu. But this is perhaps one of the most bizarre and genuinely random way to start off a show, with no context as to who this Rita Repulsa witch character is, or the four bizarre goblin-minions she has with her.

And then... we cut to Angel Grove Youth Center, where we are quickly introduced to our heroes. Five young teenagers with attitude wholesome teenagers who hang out in a karate class or whatever, already wearing colour-coded clothes for the audience's benefit. And... it's kind of a genuinely bland introduction? The five charactesr are likable enough, but it's also obvious that they sort of fit some stereotypical moulds. Jason (red) is the athletic one who keeps showing off his deltoids in every single scene, and he's like a martial arts instructor. Billy (blue) is the geek one who's bad at physical sports, but the others don't make fun of him for that. Zack (black) is kind of a jokester, although also athletic and likes to incorporate dance moves into his karate. Kimberly (pink) is the stereotypical girly-girl/valley girl, and Trini (yellow) is the sporty girl -- al5hough she doesn't quite reach tomboy territory. They're all good buddies, and they hang out in the Youth Center, which is, uh... a gym, I guess? The cast, sans Billy, really loves exercise. Also, the Youth Center also doubles as a "Juice Bar"? Okay, sure. I don't think I've ever seen a 'youth center' like that, but sure.

We also get to meet two more characters, which are local jerkass bullies Bulk and Skull (respectively the big one and the Grease-cosplayer one), who quickly show up just to be douchebags, but the sort of comical, lovable douchebags more on the vein of Team Rocket more than anything -- they are kind of sleazy dicks in this first episode, but even as early as the first five episodes, they are admittedly subjected to some disproportionate retribution. They are pretty glorious. This scene in the Youth Center ran for... quite a while, perhaps longer than it should. I do like that the episode quickly allows both girls, even Kimberly, to essentially judo-toss the bullies instead of having one of the boys show up as the gallant hero.

The MMPR episodes I've watched so far tended to basically blaze through a generic plot before they can just play dubbed-over Sentai footage with all the masked people doing kung fu fighting and the giant robot-monster fighty-fight. This one sort of cuts back and forth between the Angel Grove Youth Center antics and Rita Repulsa's forces setting up a base on the moon, and having her weird... uh... bird-man (?) smart minion Finster set up what's essentially a strange combination of an oven, a factory assembly line and those things you see in Dexter's Laboratory, which he uses to create monsters out of putty, including our mooks, the Putty Patrollers.

Then Rita sets the plot into motion by... uh... casting an earthquake on Angel Grove! Yeah! Depending on the available footage, Power Rangers really plays hard and fast on just the sheer scale of Rita's space magic, and never really gives us a reason why she doesn't just do earthquakes all the time instead of peering through her magic telescope from her moon palace.

Anyway, we then see the good guys' boss, the floating head Zordon, who's just hovering in place with deliciously wonky 90's special effects in an... observatory? What is that building supposed to be? It's basically the Power Rangers' Bat-cave, and Zordon realizes that his old nemesis Rita has been released, and asks his silly clown-booted, saucer-headed robot assistant, Alpha Five, to, and I quote, "bring us five overbearing adn overemotional humans." Alpha Five's voice and antics annoy me a lot in these early episodes, since he's obviously the 'make him adorable to kids' sidekick characters, but I do love his response to Zordon. "No! Not that, not TEENAGERS!" And you'd think that there's some sort of handwave or explanation as to why Zordon selects five teenagers specifically. But nope, we don't even get anything. Zordon then goes into a full introdump, hinting at a backstory where he fought and sealed Rita in the past, but needs the kids now to be Power Rangers.

The dialogue is honestly kind of stilted (even by the standards of this season), and I do get a feeling that the writers and producers were kind of rushing putting the 'story' parts of this episode together, but the Angel Grove kids quickly turn down the completely unreasonable and random teleportation, abduction and insistence that they become magic superheroes to fight some nebulous moon-witch. The show must go on, though, and Rita ends up sending the Putties to get rid of the five children. Which leads to... a pretty decent fighting sequence! At least for this leg of the show, the American production team doesn't have access to the actual Power Rangers suits, but they do have access to some of the baddies, leading to scenes where the un-transformed Power Rangers are allowed to do some kung fu (or dance-fu, in Zack's case) against the Putties. They finally end up henshin-ing morphing into the Power Rangers via stock footage, and suddenly we're in Zyuranger footage where the footage is slightly grainier, and the filming is done in a different style!

The Power Rangers beat the putties, and then we get them teleported (this sort of random teleportation is very disorienting, but sort of necessary to fit the Sentai footage) to Angel Grove, where they fight the putties led by Rita's main brute minion, the winged beast-man Goldar. After a brief fighty-fight, Rita lobs her magic staff to the Earth, at which point it causes the ground to crack and, uh, Goldar grows into giant size, and to match this, the Power Rangers summon their Zords, giant metal robot dinosaurs prehistoric animals that are able to fuse together to form the Megazord, a giant combining mecha. This, ladies and gentleman, is the backbone of all Sentai and Power Rangers -- a fight between the rangers and the monster, then they become big and you have to call in the giant mecha to destroy it.

It does admittedly end up being a bit formulaic (mostly beause the Megazord/Daizyujin suit doesn't really allow for particularly acrobatic movement), but hey, it's a formula that sort of works. This is the first episode and Goldar's going to be here for a while, though, so he just sort of pussies out and teleports away after seeing the Megazord summon a sword from the heavens (though to be fair, wouldn't you?), and the Power Rangers basically decide to accept their responsibilities as superheroes taking orders from a bizarre giant floating alien head. Three's also a terrible fake out by Kimberly in this scene. Zordon gives the Power Rangers three rules: Never use your power for personal gain; never escalate a battle unless Rita forces you; keep your identity a secret. And for the life of me, that last one really doesn't make a whole lot of sense in the context of Power Rangers. In most superhero settings, sure, but eh. The 'escalation' rule is probably just there to justify why they dont just summon their giant beast buddies whenever they are faced with Putties.

Ultimately... it's definitely one hell of a messy first episode. We cover a fair amount of territory and information dumping in this episode, from introducing all of these characters and establishing the more fantastical parts of the sci-fi/magic, we get just enough of the mythology to get what's going on without delivering too much, and so much of Zordon's dialogue in particular does feel like it belongs more in a toy advertisement than an actual episode of a show. ("Here's the villain! Now here's the heroes!! Here's how the monsters are formed! Here's Zordon! Here's the Rangers! Here's the Zords! Here's the Megazord!") I'm also not a particularly huge fan of the Youth Center episodes, and I do really feel like there could've been a better way to introduce these characters to us than the genuinely bland scenes. Thankfully, though, this is sort of growing pains from the first episode, and they quickly settle into a groove.

Episode 2: High Five
So after that first pilot episode, Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers settles in pretty dang quickly into what's basically a formulaic approach to its episodes, which is honestly basically a description of most shows of the time. And without having to zoom zoom along at a breakneck speed in order to go from introdump scene to the next, allowing the actors playing the kids to actually, y'know, act and be actual characters as opposed to just being teleported from one scene to the next.

"High Five" is still quite a messy episode, though, and mostly it's because the showrunners still haven't quite perfected the art of adapting action scenes made for a completely different show to fit with their own, and hoo boy does the back end of this episode with all the Sentai action scenes feel really choppy as our heroes and villain of the week just teleport all over the place. From what I can tell with barely 10 episodes under my belt, they do get a bit better at organically incoroporating the scene changes and action scenes, but this early on? It's kinda rough.

The main non-monster story for this episode is a pretty simple one, involving Jason initially showing off that he can climb a rope to the ceiling of the gym, which ends up revealing that Trini is absolutely terrified of heights. We go through some bizarre scenes as, uh, Jason and Billy go into some bizarre hijinks that involves Jason swining towards Billy Tarzan-style, then grabbing Billy by the chest with his legs and the two swing about for a bit. What. Then the bullies Bulk and Skull enter, talk big, and Bulk's attempt to climb up the rope ends with him flat on his fat ass, and with plaster from the ceiling raining down on his head. And... y'know, they were being douches, but holy shit, man, someone help the dude.

Oh, and also, Billy, who's the smart one, apparently have reverse-engineered the technology of Zordon's base overnight, creating colour-coded watches that function as communicators. Because it piggy-backs on Zordon's tech, it also doubles as teleporters. It's nice that they're at least spreading out some of the 'gimmicks' out over the first couple of episodes instead of cramming everything into the first episode. Speaking of things that could've been in that overcrowded pilot is Rita explaining that she's behind Zordon's bizarre disembodied state, that the battle that sealed her in the space dumpster also ended with Rita trapping Zordon in a "time warp". How a time warp will cause someone to become a disembodied computer head, I don't know. But hey.

This leads to Rita's plan, where she launches a space shuttle that'll open up a similar time-warp hole, piloted by the skeleton monster called Bones. And this is pretty bizarre, leading to an odd scene of a tiny space shuttle zipping through a crowd of confused people -- something that probably made a bit more sense in the original Zyuranger footage.

Confusing things a bit more (considering Rita's stated plan) is that the Power Rangers end up fighting a bunch of Putty soldiers untransformed near a cliffside. This leads to the absolutely ridiculous 'combo move' that Jason, Zack and Kimberly does to essentially have the three of them combine into the most bizarre human windmill ever (seriously, though, what the fuck), and an excuse to have Trini face her fear, because dumb ol' Billy was backed up against a cliff and drops his transformation trinket, forcing Trini to scale up the side of the cliff to rescue Billy. Which... is a very simplistic way just so she can conquer her fear of heights in under 10 minutes, but, hey, Saturday morning cartoon.

And then with the American-cast-specific plot done, we basically go through a dizzying bit of scene to scene teleportation to make sense of the available Zyuranger footage. Bones is terrorizing an amusement park, and then the Power Rangers are teleported there. And then Bones spins his head and teleports them into a random bizarre purple dimension, which I assume is meant to be the 'time warp zone' or whatever (it's different than Zordon's time warp) but the show never really makes it that clear. And Rita's two other goons, Squat and Baboo, sort of show up with a cartoonishly large bomb just to mess things up even further. Billy and Trini figure out that they can't destroy Bones since he keeps reassembling himself, so Trini just lobs Bones' head to a convenient lava chasm nearby.

Then Rita casts a random spell to summon another monster, a giant Spartan gladiator dude who's Megazord-sized -- something that's particularly bizarre since most other times in the show, she relies on Finster's clay oven to make her minions. Also bizarre is that this unnamed giant Spartan man can apparently punch through dimensions, grab Jason, and essentially free the Power Rangers from their 'time warp'? Or something?This episode ends a bit differently, without the Megazord being formed, because all that's needed this time around is the Tyrannosaurus Zord beating the tar and blowing up the unnamed giant monster, by, uh... stomping the ground, creating a series of explosions that run across the ground, and that causes the giant monster to disappear. The episode ends with bottlecapping Trini's fear of heights, with Zack playing a prank with a skeleton mask to get Trini to climb up the gym rope.

Overall... it's extremely messy. I'm not sure how the original episode of Zyuranger that "High Five" borrows its action scenes from played out, but man, this one felt kind of all over the place, particularly in the second half where I suspect they were just trying and failing to really attempt to adapt the Sentai scenes and make sense of them, and I really wished they had sort of stuck to one plot or ther other. Instead we just sort of string everything on and stick the pretty basic plot of Trini's random fear of heights, and... yeah. This is not actually a good second outing at all. It's entertaining because it's so batshit-crazy how the script just jumps from one thing to the next, but it's a hot mess.

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And that's the first two episodes of Mighty Morphin'! Again, these episodes are enjoyable not in spite of their flaws, but especially because of them. I'm someone with near-none nostalgia for the show, but I can definitely appreciate the massive narm and general hamminess that the show is known for, and the Tokusatsu Sentai action is certainly neat to look at. It'll take a while before the show actually gets to a proper, solid episode, though.

Random Notes:

• "Ahhh! After ten thousand years, I'm free! It's time to conquer EARTH!" I've seen the memes, but it takes actually listening to Rita's delivery of the line in the opening that really sells it. The actual line spoken in the episode is nowhere as memetastic.

• Zordon's order to Alpha to recruit five "teenagers with attitude" is equally as ridiculous. Ah, 90's openings.
• Also, yes... the Yellow Ranger is a dude in Zyuranger. Named 'Boi', hilariously enough. That's the reason that the Yellow Ranger suit doesn't have a skirt! But the suit actor has a slender/athletic enough figure that they decided it'll work for the second female member of the team, I suppose. 
• We never learn what happened to the two astronauts, or why they didn't tell anyone about the moon-people they unleashed, but I've sneaked a peek onto the first episode of Zyuranger and apparently they got straight-up murdered there. Presumably Rita does the same thing off-screen. 
• I am trying so hard to not comment on the glorious 90's wardrobe. So hard. 
• I do have to note that if Rita didn't send the Putties to attack the five kids as they leave the Zordon-cave, we probably wouldn't have a show. 
• I absolutely adore the sheer goofiness of Finster's weird monster clay shaping machine. 
• It's stock footage, but the sight of the Zords being summoned from wherever the fuck they were before is pretty cool. Special kudos to the scene of the Tyrannosaurus Zord slowly rising out of a crack in the earth, and the Pterodactyl bursting out of a volcano Radon-style. 
• Also over-the-top-ridiculous but equally awesome is the fact that the Megazord's giant sword just quite literally falls down from the heavens. 
• Speaking of stock footage, the 'kids raise up their transformation coins' transformation sequence is pretty bad. 
• Zordon probably isn't the most up-to-date on paleontological news, but god dam it, mastodons and sabertooth tigers aren't freaking dinosaurs. (And technically, neither is the pterodactyl, but that's a lot more forgivable) They're not even from the same time period!
• Alpha Five's... pretty annoying. We'll leave it at that.