In this episode of the Major Spoilers Podcast, Stephen attempts to discover why the Power Rangers are so appealing to Matthew, while Zach shares some thoughts on Barney the Purple Dinosaur.
[podcast]http://traffic.libsyn.com/majorspoilers/msp446.mp3[/podcast]Contact us at podcast@majorspoilers.com
A big Thank You goes out to everyone who downloads, subscribes, listens, and supports this show. We really appreciate you taking the time to listen to our ramblings each week. Tell your friends about the podcast, get them to subscribe and, be sure to visit the Major Spoilers site and forums.
14 Comments
Loved Rodrigo mentioning Mazinger Z. Highly underrated show that did really well around the Caribbean/Latin America. I’ve been collecting the series for years now (it’s very hard to find).
My kids grew up during the Barney golden years. I still wake up at night drenched in sweat muttering lyrics from some of its songs :) I wish I had imagined the whole thing…
Rodrigo’s ‘Dark Origin’ theory for Barney’s genesis (that the original kids manifest Barney to escape real life horrors) has disturbing evidence on the show.
The sisters Luci and Tina both appear with prominent physical injuries at times during the show. In a season one episode Luci, the older sister has a prominent black eye. Her ‘explanation’ is that she was ‘hit by a basketball’. The younger sister, Tina, wears a cast on her arm in 4 episodes in the second season, at one point she even has to sit out some activity due to her injury. I forget the explanation on the show, but I’m sure we can all figure out what was really going on…
Thanks goodness you stopped working for Sprout…
That wasn’t all automatic recall…thank god. I visited a Wiki for the details, but I remembered the sister’s injuries, discussing it with co-workers and how the basketball explanation seemed exactly like the excuse an abused kid might give.
As lame as “Power Rangers: Samurai” is, its Japanese progenitor, “Shinkenger,” is pretty awesome. GoKaiger and ZyuRanger are my favorites, though. Sometimes I’m embarrassed to be a grown man who watches this stuff, but it’s way fun.
I’d like to see Matthew host a monthly (or more frequent!) podcast about Super Sentai/Power Rangers, Space Sheriff and Metal Hero series. You could call it “Tokusatsu Today.”
Stephen Schleicher, I will have to STRONGLY disagree with you that Bulk & Skull were awful in the original MMPR. I will instead refer you to the definitive discussion on why they’re the only characters besides Tommy who got any real development in MMPR courtesy of Linkara’s History of Power Rangers season by season reviews.
No excuse for the Bulk & Spike detours in Samurai, however. I always watch that and feel profoundly sorry for all of the New Zealand actors trying so hard to pull off American accents that you can see it hurting their performances a lot.
You can always disagree, just do it nicely… still don’t care for them.
Besides, if Stephen watched Power Rangers, he’d have another series to fill his dwindling off-hours, and with 36 seasons worth, he’d quickly run out of storage space in his iPad…
Off -hours? What the hell are you talking about? I looked up that word and it sounds like crazy talk…
My favorite sentai is akibaranger. It is aimed at an older audience. It’s a spoof of genre and my favorite episode is the one where the rangers get drunk to try and get stronger.
akibaranger is about three nerds who transform through the power of their own self delusion and enter the world of the grand delusion. the red ranger is a sentai know it all (like abed in community). the blue ranger is an aspiring martial artist who dose not help in the role call and the yellow ranger is a cosplayer who likes to watch guys kiss.the villains in the series are an evil corporation. the monster of the week is a mid level manager( kind of like matthew) and the mooks are literally called mindless corporate drones. The Japanese weird is turned up pretty high so as the tag line says “Good little kids shouldn’t watch”.
So what Rodrigo is saying is Barny is Onslaught? Awesome! Can’t wait for the inevitable Sesame Street vs X-men cross-over.
I got into tokusatau a year or so back, and while I’m a bigger Kamen Rider fan than I am a super Sentai one, I still like the Sentai shows ok. I honestly think that the western shows are dragged down more by the creative choice to kiddify things, and thus do less work on adapting the show.
Take the current Samurai series of MMPR; Not only are bulk and skull… Sorry SPIKE back to take up screw time, but the fiver rangers are TERRIBLE actors! The stories are dumbed down from even the simple morLity tales of the Japanese version to being so whitewashed they lose all impact. Shingle gets cast was a great one, with all the characters being distinct in personality and motivation. It’s still for kids, it’s still goofy… But at least that cast and crew were there to put out a solid price of fiction. The show is t perfect by any stretch (I tend to fast forward the robot fights) but overall the product is take. More seriously by the creative teams, which lends itself to better results
May e you guys could do a viewing of the first 6 episodes of each show and discuss the comparison?
Anyway cheers for reading. Love critical hit, so giving major spoilers a try now :)
Craig
The amazing thing about Rodrigo’s theory is that something like that has supposedly happened in real life. It was called The Philip Experiment. I won’t swear that it’s true, but it’s at least interesting.
A couple of decades ago, a group of parapsychologists carried out an experiment in which they invented a person they called Philip. They gave Philip an appearance, a history, interests, and a various other things that a real person would have. The idea was to test if they could will Philip into existence through sheer single-minded effort. Seances were arranged, and after a couple of attempts they apparently made contact with something that indeed called itself Philip. The details it gave of its life matched the story the group had invented, but it could not seem to provide any information other than what they had previously bestowed upon it.