Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, Season 1, Episodes 6-10
Episode 6: Food Fight
The plot for "Food Fight" is honestly pretty dang simple, and honestly, it's less of a plot and more of an excuse to get the MMPR cast to lob goo-like yucky food prop at each other. Most of the time it's Bulk who gets pied or ice creamed in the face, but this time around random background extras and whatnot get drawn into a food fight when the Youth Central's food festival ended up in a massive, well, food fight when Bulk and his cronies start a food fight. In addition to a lot of wasted food and a ruined food festival, Mr. Kaplan's toupee is one of the casualties. What a waste of food, that's criminal. Also, in addition to the food fight, after a bit of a cutaway, we get to see Jason wearing an Uncle Sam top-hat, American flag arm-donuts and attack Bulk with sausage-nunchucks, because god forbid the Japanese part of this show is the more insane one.
Apparently moon-witches also suffer from stomachaches, and Rita is suffering from one that's exacerbated from the disgusting waste of food, so she sends down the monster of the week, Pudgy Pig, who begins gorging on every food he eats. And honestly, the Pudgy Pig is one-note. It's a pig, it eats food, it scares people. If it was any other monster, I'd call the random montage of eating food and garbage to be padding. But it's just so (pardon the pun) hammy and scenery-chewing that you can't help but love this dumb thing.
The Power Rangers deploy to save all food worldwide (Zordon gives the hilarious claim that the pig's going to eat ALL THE FOOD IN THE WORLD in 48 hours) and also to make sure the food fair isn't a disaster because they need to buy playground equipment or some shit, but the Pudgy Pig straight-up just eat the Power Rangers' weapons! And then it eats everything in the food festival in perhaps one of the most effective use of "let a monster suit wreak havoc in the American set". In a pretty neat moment, we even get Bulk and Skull attempting to stand up against the Pudgy Pig, although for obvious reasons the hideous abomination to mankind scares the two of them off. Through the festival, they realize that the Pig is a picky eater and doesn't eat anything that's spicy-hot (understandable, I'm not a fan of chili myself), so they decide to... trick Pudgy Pig into eating spicy food so it'll vomit out their weapons. God I love this show.
And that's literally what they do, where they show up with a steak and a bunch of giant sashimi pieces on a plate, spiced with 'spicy radishes', causing the Pudgy Pig to vomit out the power weapons and the Power Rangers to blow up Pudgy Pig with the combined Power Blaster. Not even a giant monster Megazord fight this time!
Overall... a very simple episode. I shouldn't like it this much, but I do. Pudgy Pig's so stupidly awesome.
Episode 7: Big Sisters
Well, I try not to really compare MMPR with Zyuranger, but I had to do a bit of a look-up, and basically confirm that the plot for "Big Sisters" essentially set it up so that a little girl wearing the exact same clothes with the exact same hair as the girl-of-the-week that was kidnapped in the equivalent episode of Zyuranger, so that they could make use of the action footage. Which... sounds like a hell lot of work for not much of a payoff, but they do a decent enough job at making the scene in question actually flow well, and they don't linger on the Japanese child actress' face long enough for it to become too obvious. We'll see if they do this more in the future, or if this trick of matching the clothes and hair of the Japanese actors will show up a bit more. But that's hardly the focus of the episode. The girl in question, Maria, is... kind of a prankster, who goes around shutting off cold water at a gym and being a little rascal, but after a picnic and a talk with Kimberly and Trini over how her dad just doesn't understand her, her little nasty prankster tendencies are apparently just sort of handwaved aside with like five lines of dialogue. She gets kidnapped pretty quickly by Rita's goons because of plot reasons, which, of course, leads to both my favourite (okay, second-favourite) monster in Mighty Morphin so far, as well as the introduction of the motherfucking RAD BUG. Which is so 90's it hurts. Like, it's even got a more 90's name than the Gnarly Gnome. The RAD BUG. Frikkin' radical, dude.
Anyway, the plot of why Rita needs to kidnap a little girl is that she needs to obtain the Power Eggs (the least bizarrely-named thing in this episode, honestly), a bunch of plot device that will allow her to make the ultimate monster. But the Power Eggs are sealed within a chest that can only be opened by a child! Arguably, though, the creature that Rita creates to originally get the egg, the CHUNKY CHICKEN, is probably already the ultimate monster. It's a fat chicken-man with rainbow colours holding a giant pair of shears, how can you not consider this the pinnacle of clay moon monsters? 
Also, if you think that the fact that chest that can only be opened by a child, and the fact that villains picking exactly the one child in Angel Grove that's on a picnic with the Power Rangers are both pretty flimsy excuses... well, apparently Billy's communication watches are down for some reason, and so are Zordon's teleportation devices. So the Rangers regroup in Billy's garage, only for him to reveal that he's built the RAD BUG, a modified VW Bug that... basically can fly faster than a fighter jet. RADICAL.They teleport into the Zordon-cave, where Zordon gives an exposition with a single line about what the Power Eggs are. Some dudes called the "Morphin' Masters" hid a "universe of power" in those eggs. Oookay. Any explanation on who these masters are, Zordon? Are you one of them? Are they the predecessors to the Power Rangers? No? Yeah, okay, the episode's entering the third act and we got to have sentai fighty-fight.
So we get the Power Rangers riding the RAD BUG to the cave, where they fight Goldar and the Chunky Chicken, and with absolutely no preamble the Power Rangers just form a human pyramid (WHAT!) and chuck the Power Eggs into the ocean, which is just so apropos of nothing it's genuinely hilarious. If you think this episode can't get more insane, Rita Repulsa abandons the battle to, uh, ride on a random penny-farthing bike in the sky to chase down the eggs in the sea. What!The cast then teleport around sets a bit (in a far more jarring sequence even compared to episode 1 and 2), leading to the Chicken holding the little girl by a rope suspended over the ground, and chops the string. The Megazord shows up to save Maria from plummeting into her death, and we get the aforementioned costume-lookalike scene. Which, of course, isn't perfect, but eh, the effort's there. More importantly, though, is the fight against CHUNKY CHIKKIN, who fights with a massive pair of shears that... allows it to seemingly cut through the fabric of space-time itself to teleport around the battlefield. It is a fucking chicken with scissors, what the fuck!
Of course, the Megazord only struggles with this complication and power for like twenty seconds before it unleashes the lightning sword and vaporizes the fat chicken, but man, that thing's memorable. They return Maria to her family, and I guess she's going to be extra-receptive to her father after the talk early in the episode? Frankly I couldn't care less, "Big Sisters" has been so utterly insane with every single plot detail other than Maria herself. I love this one. It's so batshit crazy. And somehow, this was not the episode that the writing team decided to shrug off and pretend it's a dream.
Oh, and Bulk and Skull only appear at the end, just for Bulk, trying to enjoy his ice cream, to get dunked in the head with a bowl of "vegetarian chili". I swear, poor Bulk and being pelted in the face with pie or whatever... he's a bully, I know, but sometimes you gotta feel sorry for the big guy, y'know?
Episode 8: I, Eye Guy
I like eyeball monsters, and Eye Guy is a pretty cool eyeball monsters, but compared to the charm of the Pudgy Pig and the sheer batshit insanity of "Big Sisters", this episode just felt... like it's just there. It's not terrible, and I enjoyed watching this episode, but it just feels so... mundane, y'know? And that's me calling an episode where a robot made out of transforming dinosaurs wielding a lightning sword fighting a giant monster made out of eyeballs and able to access a pocket dimension 'mundane'. That's how Tokusatsu goes. The civilian plot for this one is pretty mundane, although it does give Billy some rare focus where he's not a geeky loser (as is what he was in "Different Drum" or "High Five"). Billy helps out his protege Willy to compete in a science fair, and because this is a 90's children's show, the science fair is ridiculous! Willy's project is essentially a VR roller coaster via a combination of 3D goggles and those old-fashioned animation spinning wheel, which is neat... but the other science project things we see later on is a lot more insane. Bulk and Skull predictably try to bully the nerds showing up with their inventions, but among the inventions they dick around with includes a gun that vaporizes pants (but not underwear) which has got to break like a lot of common decency laws, and a little booth that's able to strip Bulk and Skull down and dress them in women's clothing. And... (cross-dressing jokes that didn't age well aside) apparently everyone but Billy and Willy are like Gyro Gearloose levels of inventors, but they focus all their brainpower on making inventions that revolve around stripping clothes forcibly.
Anyway, we got to have a monster of the week, and Finster suggests that Rita unleash Eye Guy, a monster they previously used on Rigel II. This allows the MMPR adaptors to basically use a clip from Zyuranger where Eye Guy zaps a Japanese girl with a baseball bat to represent an earlier conquest where Rita and her monster army wiped out another planet's population. Which is actually neat! Eye Guy himself is neat. I mean, obviously it's eyeballs on strings that are puppeteered and replaced with the monster suit, but I do like the little bit of effect we got of the Eye Guy disassembling and reassembling. Also, he makes a lot of eye puns. Eye eye, ma'am.
Anyway, the two plots eventually intersect. The jerk teacher disqualifies Willy for a mess that is totally Bulk, Skull and arguably the Power Rangers' fault, and Willy runs off only to get his fool ass kidnapped by Eye Guy, whose central eye is able to teleport Willy and trap him in a random dimension where he's stuck to a giant gyroscope. (Rita wants to kidnap Willy for... reasons?) Which is insane, but not quite Chunky Chicken level of insane. We then reach the point of the episode where the fighty-fight happens, and it's... pretty formulaic, although the random CGI eyeball beams (and I mean beams made out of flying eyeballs, not beams coming out of eyeballs) are neat. Eye Guy falls quickly, though, being jabbed by Billy with his trident, and his attempt to go giant is met with the same thing by the Megazord. Anyway, after beating the Eye Guy and his puns, the Power Rangers and Willy return to find that the jackass teacher (and Ernie) like the VR program so much that Willy got the main prize, although I bet that's mostly because the other competitors are probably being given a stern talking-to by a psychiatrist and being registered as sex offenders. Oh, and we get another Bulk-and-Skull humiliation joke as they stumble into the room in... gym towels? And their clothes shrunk? Eh.
Anyway... one that's very enjoyable because of the Bulk and Skull antics, and the Eye Guy puns, but otherwise kind of is there. I really do kind of want to look up the Zyuranger version of this episode to find out what's up with that little girl with a baseball bat.
Episode 9: For Whom the Bell Tolls
This episode's weird, but it drops the ball by randomly pulling the "oh but it's just a dream" card on us. As my high school English teacher drummed into my head, any story that ends with "oh but it's just a dream" is kinda meaningless since it sort of means you got the audience super-invested in whatever story you make, only to handwave it all aside because you can't think of a conclusion. The episode starts with another Saturday morning cartoon plot, the show-and-tell. Pretty standard fare, really. Zack brings a surfboard and 90's cartoon slang (cowabunga!), Jason does some bo-staff tricks, Billy brings one of those science fair volcanoes (instead of the RAD BUG, smart kid my ass), Kimberly does handstands on the teacher's table (presumably because she forgot to bring anything), and Trini shows up with a bunch of dolls. We go from some neat cultural dolls like a Japanese one... straight to oh-god-what-is-that hideous troll-gnome-muppet thing called "Ticklesneezer" (what) that Trini inexplicably claims is her favourite. Apparently, the Ticklesneezer comes with its own tie-in book that talks about how it can shrink things or some shit. Rita, of course, is spying on this, and when Trini goes to sleep at night in a room full of dolls, Squatt teleports into Trini's room. Is the evil space ogre-alien about to choke a sleeping, helpless Power Ranger? Nope, Squatt steals Trini's favourite doll and goes back to the moon to hand this over to Rita... and somehow, Rita is able to bring Mr. Ticklesneezer alive, but he's... he's a goober with the perfect voice for a character like him, and he's a lot less creepy as a monster than he was as a doll. Ticklesneezer somehow also has the ability in Trini's storybook of being able to shrink anything, and Rita basically sort of forces him to wreak havoc.
As Trini and Billy go driving around to retrace Trini's steps and look for the missing doll, Ticklesneezer goes around shrinking random things, like a motorbike, and Billy and Trini's car (they'd probably be fast enough to escape if they were on the RAD BUG), a bullet train and, uh, the Tokyo Tower. Okay. Everything gets stuffed into bottles as Ticklesneezer just randomly wanders around. A short cutaway to the Youth Center where Jason is doing karate and breaking boards with his bare fists and Bulk fails to karate chop a cake (cakes are the bully's mortal enemy, according to this show), and the three remaining Power Rangers get summoned by Zordon and deployed to stop Mr. Ticklesneezer. We get a pretty cool sequence of the Power Rangers fighting on top of trains and stuff and a bit of tossing around of the bottle containing Trini and Billy, and a pretty cool bit where the Pink Ranger suit actually interacts with the MMPR actors. We don't see that a lot.
Anyway, Rita, Goldar, Squatt and Baboo show up and hang around a random apartment building's stairwell as they oversee the fight, and the expected gigantification happens. Giant Mr. Ticklesneezer just shrinks the Megazord down into a bottle, though hilariously, the way they get out of this is by abusing stock footage and summoning the Megazord Sword -- which, as we know, comes down from the heavens and nearly turns Ticklesneezer into a shishkebab.In a pretty neat scene, the Megazord grabs Ticklesneezer's bottle, and threatens to suck up Rita and her cronies until they teleport away. Notably, Rita is able to withstand the attack with her magic staff, while her cronies either grab on to her or nearly get sucked in. Nice to see that Rita's still played up as kind of a badass even if she's more of a hands-off villain. Anyway, the villains escape, Zordon and Trini insist that Ticklesneezer's a good guy, and the magic of bottles returns Tokyo Tower and everything else to where they were stolen.
(Also... there's a random giant child next to the Megazord here. Okay?)
And... uh... then everything is just a dream. No, really. Trini wakes up and finds the doll on the floor, having dreamt up everything that happened int his episode, despite your average Mighty Morphin Power Rangers episode being far, far more ridiculous than anything that happens here. And even if this is to make sure that no one questions why Team Moonpeople doesn't send Squatt and Baboo to murder the teenagers in their sleep... it's freaking Rita, no one's going to bat an eye at her doing something stupid.
There's also the ending scene, where apparently show n' tell extended for another day, and Bulk and Skull's flea circus escapes and is attacking the poor teacher lady, and everyone laughs at this like it's some kind of a joke. The poor woman is suffering, you assholes, she's being attacked by fleas!
Anyway... this episode was dumb, and not in the good way that the others were. Just not a fan of this one. There were some neat bits for the Rita gang, and the action scenes are nice, but Ticklesneezer's just too bland of a character, and the dream ending bit really makes this episode become even more inconsequential than it already is.
Episode 10: Happy Birthday Zack
I feel like this is the sort of episodic plot I've seen like a dozen times in like, shows aimed at pre-teen and teenage students. Like, a bunch of friends tries to throw a surprise party, and then acts all nonchalant and pretend that they forget the birthday during the day itself, driving the birthday boy/girl into depression. And... I dunno, maybe it's different in the U.S. of A, but surely the most effective strategy is just to go "oh yes happy birthday" while simply not mentioning anything about the surprise party, without raising suspicion or making your friend feel like shit? Because that's exactly what they do to poor Zack in this episode. And it... sort of plays through the expected beats. Jason, Trini, Kimberly and Billy set up a surprise party in Ernie's Juice Bar, and they have to contend with Bulk and Skull being massive dicks and tearing up the banners and stuff (one of the few times in these early episodes that their karmic embarrassment was fully justified -- we also have one of those rare times where the bullies are clearly trying to hit on the girls in a sleazeball way), and having to hide the party from Zack a couple of times... and eventually driving Zack so angry and frustrated that he sort of goes off on his own to mope in the mountains, causing Rita Repulsa to demand Finster unleash a monster of the week, the Nasty Knight. Who's... a knight. Okay, that's... that's kinda lame, and it has a pretty lame name. Certainly nowhere as radical as the Gnarly Gnome.
Apparently, Rita used to deploy this exact monster when she attacked the planet Tarnac-III, and the Nasty Knight totally beat the champion of that planet -- actually footage from Zyuranger of the Black/Mammoth Ranger's human form fighting against the Nasty Knight, which is a neat way of making an unusable-in-MMPR fight work. Also, uniquely, instead of just shoving a clay doll into the wacky monster oven, Finster and the other two dumb goons go into a cave and spends a while forging a sword with a hammer-and-anvil, and Rita uses a magic spell to create the knight to wield the sword. Okay! The time it takes for Rita to discuss this with her minions and for them to craft the blade is apparently not enough to get Zack out of his funk, leading to a 1-v-1 as the Nasty Knight fights the Black Ranger in the random patch of wilderness. Apparently, the Nasty Knight has the ability to cause all their fancy power weapons to rust, disabling Zack's weapons, and doing the same thing to the other Power Rangers when they show up. Even the Megazord's sword-from-the-heavens isn't safe from it! They kind of get past this ability very quickly, though, and I had to rewind the episode a couple of times to catch the explanation. Apparently they, uh... reflect his energy back, but add more? I dunno. Either way, they blow up the Nasty Knight with some glowing lights, and huzzah. And then they surprise Zack with the party, proving that he's not unloved and the angst he's been having throughout the episode is unfounded.
Overall, kind of a bland, weak and formulaic one, I feel. The actors do try their best, but the base conflict of "let's throw a surprise birthday party" is pretty weak. The concept of Rita's cronies having to go through all this elaborate thing to create the Knight's sword is very interesting and different, and while the battle does have the twist of the weapon-rusting ability to it, it ends up basically being resolved almost immediately.
But, hey, one dud among an episode filled with wacky-ass shit like the RAD BUG and the Pudgy Pig and the Chunky Chicken and Eye Guy? I certainly don't mind it all that much.
Random Notes:
- There are a couple of different episode orders depending on the DVD listings (and Netflix listings) or the air-date, and I'm following the former.
- I don't mention them a whole ton, but I really do appreciate Finster, Squatt and Baboo (particularly since the MMPR staff apparently has access to the latter two's costumes!). I do so enjoy incompetent villain sidekicks. Goldar's a bit too serious and one-note for my liking, although I understand he becomes an actual character later on.
- I also enjoy Finster a lot, and so much of his interactions with Rita gives the feel that all he wants to do is to sculpt wacky monsters that he likes, but Rita keeps telling him to rush things or make the Pudgy Pig (a creature Finster literally had to dug through a reject pile to find).
- Less impressive, though, is the 'disappearing' effect for the main lackeys that's just pretty dang low-budget even by Tokusatsu standards. What, they couldn't spare a smoke bomb or flashy glitter light for whenever the goon squad teleport away?
- It can't be helped sometimes, but in the Eye Guy fight, a Japanese girl that's the victim-of-the-week shows up being protected by the Blue Ranger -- particularly egregious because you can see her earlier as an inhabitant of "Rigel II" or whatever. The Ticklesneezer episode also has a giant boy show up randomly holding the Megazord's shoulders. What?
- I ended up googling Pudgy Pig's Sentai counterpart, and apparently all the Zyuranger monsters are based on Western-style mythological monsters. Pudgy Pig is specifically based on the Greek legend of the sorceress Circe, who turned a bunch of soldiers into pigs. Okay, definitely wasn't expecting that!
- Bulk and Skull are accompanied not only by the lady punk from the pollution episode, but also by a fourth dude in "Food Fight", presumably to make said food fight more epic.
- Thanks to the teacher in episode 9, we learn that Bulk and Skull's real names are Farkas and Eugene. Okay!
- I do think that while I've been mostly ignoring the rather... jarring cuts that the MMPR and Zyuranger scenes could be sometimes, "For Whom the Bell Tolls" has a particularly odd one when the Red, Black and Pink Rangers are deployed to randomly jump around on top of a train. Which is surprising, considering that between the Pink Ranger interacting with Trini and Billy; or the whole scene shot in Trini's room are all genuinely well-done.
- All of this talk about the Rad Bug, by the way, is made more insane by the knowledge that the Rad Bug is basically just a random wacky Volkswagen that the character-of-the-week that Zyuranger's episodic equivalent to this one was driving, and that they wanted to really use the scene when the giant Megazord lowers the little girl to enter the VW Bug. And thus was born the RAD BUG.
- In episode 10, in the conversation that Ernie has with Jason and Billy while setting up the surprise party, Ernie fanboys about the Power Rangers and talks about how they'll do to Angel Grove "what Batman did to Gotham City". Of course, he could simply be talking about comics, but I prefer the interpretation that Gotham City and Batman exists in the MMPR universe.
- Squatt and Baboo went down to earth just to film the Nasty Knight beat up Zack. What glorious dicks they are!
- Throughout episode 10 there's the whole Cake-o-matic device that malfunctions and shoots Ernie, Bulk and Skull with way too much random cream to be believable that it was ever meant to be a 'cake' at all. It's sort of typical 90's era gross-out humour with goop or cream thrown into people's faces, but feels particularly dumb and redundant, and I pity the actors that had to deal with that joke.
- I don't think they ever explained how they fixed their weapons from Nasty Knight's rust-blade, but they're of course fine later on.
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