My Blog In the Middle of Your Net

Over the first season, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers has grown quite a lot without having really grown at all.   It is still all about the monster fights from the Sentai shows being broadcast to American audiences in a way that doesn’t involve the Japanese stories.   That hasn’t changed.   And the show is still as goofy as ever in terms of the storylines.   What has changed is that the characters mental states aren’t being changed as much as in previous episodes. Near the beginning of the show’s run, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers had stories that involved personality changes and body switching.   It involved the characters acting like completely different people.   That has all but disappeared at this point.   Now it is the characters having problems in their everyday lives, and Rita picking up on these problems.   She uses them to plan her attacks, rather than attacking their personalities and hoping something comes from it. I don’...

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers is a show about high school aged teenagers fighting off monsters sent by a woman who lives in a castle on the moon.   That’s a pretty crazy idea in itself, but having watched this far into the series, I am used to it.   It’s routine for me at this point.   A monster comes down, the teenagers fight it, everyone moves on with their lives.   Few things really stick around in the story of the series.   Most things that happen are simple, dumb, episodic fun. This episode doesn’t seem like it will be any different.   Any change that happens in Mighty Morphin Power Rangers usually happens in the multi-episode story arcs.   Those stories usually carry the weight of the series while the single episodes bring the mindless fun that the series is known for.   They bring in cheesy stories that work well alongside the cheesy fights.   Everything blends together as one and is self-contained in the episode in which i...

After an extended break, I’m finally making my way back into the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers episodes with this post.   This is the first episode after Return of an Old Friend and will likely dive right back into the monster of the week storylines that I have come to expect of the show.   The episode probably won’t bring anything new to the series’ overall story, but it will at least continue the show’s trend of being entertaining.   Unless it’s a Trini episode.   I think it’s a Billy episode, though, so we’re all good. Another thing I expect of the episode is for the story to be ridiculous.   Why would I expect that?   We’re into that part of the first season where all of the Japanese footage is original footage shot solely for the American series.   The American adaptation of the Sentai series was longer than its Japanese counterpart, so extra footage was needed to fill the later episodes.   The footage from the Japanese show had ...