It’s always interesting to see early appearances of characters we know and love. Superman’s chest symbol evolved for several years before turning into the stylized yellow fishies we all know and love, Spock was seen openly smiling in ‘The Cage’ and the Thing was a lumpy clay beast for quite some time. Though Power Rangers/Sentai as we know it started a couple years earlier, the first Super Sentai series was Battle Fever J, a show notable for a few of these kind of inconsistencies, notably an Orange Ranger and a full-helmet wig for the Pink Ranger (which, frankly, always gives me a case of the screaming heebie-jeebies.)
The MS-QOTD (pronounced, as always, “misquoted”) always thought that the skirt costume on Star Trek: TNG’s male crewmen were fair play for the ladies, asking: What are your favorite examples of not-quite-finalized premises in pop culture?
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Pretty much anything from the early years of Super Sentai, Kamen Rider and Doctor Who.
I always like to look at the changes made from some of my favorite long running TV shows. If you compare the first season of Scrubs/Family Guy/Big Bang etc. to the last or most current season they are extremely different in the way that they handle character development, writing and in some cases production quality.
South Park. Watch the early episodes and compare the “finished product” to today’s. Remarkably different.
You know, Toei retroactively added GoRanger and JAKQ to the Super Sentai lineup in 1995. Battle Fever has Kenji Ohba, though, and for that alone it deserves preferential treatment.
In some of the earlier (season 1 & 2) eps of MST3K, Joel is almost casually cruel to the Bots, doing stuff like deliberately knocking off Tom’s dome or ripping off one of Crow’s arms to teach him a lesson. Compared with his later mellow father-figure role, it’s very odd, yet I find it oddly amusing.
And that Miss America sentai helmet is freaky. Brr…