view from the present

an extended meditation on presence (we also have chickens)

rewatching Mighty Morphin Power Rangers because my inner eleven year old said to and i have thoughts

Title says it: Over the winter break, I rewatched Season 1 of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers because my inner eleven-year-old wanted to, and I wanted something that required absolutely no thought or insight. Win-win.

I was obsessed with this show when it originally aired in the US. More precisely, I wanted to be. We didn't have a television, so I could only watch it when I managed to get over to friends' houses at 3:00 p.m., which almost never happened. I did catch a few episodes in my later teen years, but by then I'd lost sight of the allure: every episode seemed exactly the same.

I'm rewatching it now for pure brain candy. Every episode does seem almost exactly the same. But now, having read the Wikipedia entry on tokusatsu, I at least understand that a bit better.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokusatsu

Anyway, some random thoughts:

• A thing I never would have admitted as a kid: Rita reminded me of my aunt Sheila. A thing I'll admit freely as an adult: Rita still reminds me of my aunt Sheila.

• Why does the Yellow Ranger's costume not have a skirt like the Pink Ranger's costume does?

• This annoys me in EVERY EPISODE: Kimberly is shown entering her zord separately, but she appears in the shared Megazord cockpit when it's in tank mode. Yet her zord doesn't hook up with the rest until Megazord enters battle mode. MAKE IT MAKE SENSE (yes, this is the "make it make sense" hill I will die on)

• Also, why is the Pink Ranger's zord clearly red, not pink?

• I always thought I had terrible clothing taste in the early 90s. I did not. It was the clothes that were terrible.

• The Green Ranger's "flute" has the keys of a clarinet, is the size of a piccolo, and sounds like a MIDI trumpet.

• Is the monster-making machine AI? It always seems to know exactly what powers to give the monsters, even though they're just little clay figures. Also, where can I get a monster-making machine? Are monster-making machines protected by the Second Amendment? Do I have a right to bear monsters?

• Pissed me off as a kid and still pisses me off today: "Dragonzord" is not a prehistoric creature.

• (Or maybe it is, but we've burned all its remains so we can keep driving our oversized pickup trucks to Costco to buy water stored in plastic wrapped in more plastic.)

• Maybe this is just my formative years spent on He-Man talking, but: The introduction of new weapons/zords/zord combinations seems suspiciously timed to match the production workflows of toy companies. I'M JUST SAYING.

• Why is Jason the only Ranger who has powers, but not a personality?

...This show is more fun now that I am too old to take it seriously.

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