We're near the end of the season, and, knowing what I know heading into season 3, it's easy to see that the showrunners feel secure in their audience to show less and less filler episodes. Most of the episodes for the remainder of the season are multi-parters, with the occasional standalone episode sprinkled in as a break between storylines. Just looking at the episodes we have in this episode block (37-45), we have a huge change in the villain department and an episode that deals with the fight we never thought would be possible. This was sort of a hit and miss section of the season, with the showrunners throwing ideas at the wall to see what stuck. But the saving grace is to see this new team begin to bond more and interact together to where you could believe they've been a cohesive unit for a long time. Even something as simple as splitting them into threes, utilizing at least one new ranger and one older ranger into the mix helped get viewers used to the lineup. Have Adam go scuba diving with Tommy and Kimberly. Have Rocky and Aisha teamup with Billy in a scavenger hunt. Stuff like that. Eventually, the older viewer will have Jason, Trini, and Zack completely phased out of their memories, right? Right?Episode 38- Forever Friends: Here's an episode that I seriously question owning on VHS as a kid. It's another "girl power" episode, but it really doesn't focus on the "girl power." An old friend of Aisha comes to town for a gymnastics competition against Kimberly and gets kidnapped by Goldar. Meanwhile, the Rangers face a monster based on a saw. Huh? Something doesn't work there. The focus is immediately taken off the main episode plot once the monster comes into effect. And this was chosen as an episode worth releasing on VHS? I just don't see it.
Episode 40- Rangers Back in Time Part 1: So Lord Zedd turns back time so the Rangers become children. It's a clever idea to see many of our favorite characters as children, including Bulk and Skull, but it just has too much cutesy stuff added to it. Like there's a scene where the kids use a dodgeball to defeat a squad of Putties. Again, it's clever but way too cute.
Episode 41- Rangers Back in Time Part 2: The Rangers transform back into their normal selves and save the day. That's about it. Maybe it's because Zedd will revisit and perfect this idea down the road, but this 2-parter just feels flawed and I think a lot of that boils down to the fact that children have to be the main focus. Children on the show are usually horrible actors, so maybe there's a stigma there. These child actors are fine enough, but some are better than others at convincing me they could be the younger versions of the Rangers.
Episode 42- The Wedding Part 1: Now here was a first part episode with some promise. The Rangers are on some kind of field trip to Australia (mainly because that's where the actors were filming Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie), when Rita makes her return. She slips Lord Zedd a love potion, has Finster infect Alpha with a computer disk, and has the Rangers teleported to an abandoned theater where their powers won't work, and then ambushes them with a hoard of monsters from the past. If you were a kid watching at the time, your jaw probably dropped. First of all, ZEDD AND RITA IN LOVE?!?!! Gross. Evil Alpha is actually kind of hilarious, messing with Zordon's energy tube with a bunch of special effects. And the Rangers are finally put in a situation where they have limited powers and are outmatched by a group of monsters. This is a great cliffhanger to leave the episode on. Let's see if they mess it up.
Episode 43- The Wedding Part 2: This second episode really doesn't seem worth it. It drags way too much, just like "The Ninja Encounter." Here's how it should have been done, in the form of 2 episodes. Part 1, Rita returns and gives Zedd the potion. Alpha is taken over by evil and forces the Rangers into the abandoned theater. They have to fight the monsters and they find out their powers don't work, ending Part 1. Part 2, the Rangers save the day while Rita and Zedd have their wedding. This isn't that hard to do. This entire 2nd part revolves around the Rangers trying to escape the theater while battling 2 monsters.The usual zord battle and everything is stretched out to meet the proper runtime, making it a pretty big indicator that you should trim this multi-parter to only be 2 episodes.
Episode 44- The Wedding Part 3: The conclusion to this episode has a lot of fun bits, mainly the wedding of Zedd and Rita. We even find out that Zedd is Jewish. That's just hilarious. The Rangers save the day, obviously, with a very disappointing stock footage zord fight against a bunch of monsters. It really makes you wish they had the zord and monster suits to have them fight all the monsters at once. If you're an older viewer, you can easily spot the editing tricks they're trying to do in order to make it look like one scene, it just doesn't work. Why would they have one monster at a time charge the Megazords? That's just nonsense, even by Power Rangers standards.
Episode 45- The Return of the Green Ranger Part 1: OH MY GOD! YES! I'm just going to get to the good stuff, we finally are going to get what we want: the return of the Evil Green Ranger! How? An evil clone of course. Why didn't they think of that earlier? Who cares, we are getting the Green Ranger vs. the White Ranger. Hooray! The two come face to face and...Part 1 is OVER?!?! NO! NO! NO! NO! NOOOO!!!! Dang it! Well, it looks like we will have to wait until next week to see how this epic showdown concludes. Oh yeah, and the other Rangers are sent back in time to a Colonial period in Angel Grove's history. Yeah, that's a weird thing to tie into this, but again, it's the Green Ranger vs. the White Ranger, we aren't really caring what happens to the other Rangers as long as we get to see a memorable fight.
Character Spotlight: Aisha Campbell, played by Karen Ashley
Season Spotlight: The Villains
Lord Zedd was a real step in the right direction for creating a memorable villain for a kid's show. Just look at that design. That is a costume that would put fear in the hearts of children watching all over the world. And it did. And the parents of the world complained. So they decided to have Zedd marry Rita to tone him down a bit. Yet another example of how parents know how to ruin a good thing. I also really enjoyed the Z Putties more than Rita's Putties. Yes, hitting the Z was a very big design flaw for Zedd, but it helps show his vanity as a flaw in his plans. Plus, after a while, they started doing some weird interpretive dance moves whenever they arrived. I'm not sure why, but seeing the different dances they were doing was hilarious to me. Zedd also created his own monsters, leaving characters like Finster completely useless. And I also thought Goldar fight better in the evil general role with Zedd than Rita, but that might have to do with Goldar showing up in more American footage this season than last. The villains are one of the strongest improvements in quality in this second season, and a lot of that does come in the form of Zedd taking over. But once Rita returned, the evil dynamic was really watered down for the last 12 episodes.We have 8 episodes left in the season, so come back for Part 6 to see what ideas they thought would be the best to end the season...
Mighty Morphin Power Rangers and images are copyrighted by Saban Entertainment
No comments:
Post a Comment