aaaahhhh... After Ten Thousand Years I'm Free!...It's Time to Conquer EARTH!

That simple line had a great deal of impact on me as a child. It's the opening line to a show that I watched every single day. Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers premiered in 1993 when I was about six years old and the original series aired until around 1996 when I was nine and then was repeated millions and millions of times. I have recently learned that the series actually continued after the end of the original 3 seasons of MMPR as Power Rangers Zeo, I am completely unfamiliar with all the different incarnations that followed the first but hopefully I will enjoy this project enough to want to continue through and start catching up with them as well.



Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers is the story of 5 teenagers with attitude who are recruited by big floating head ZORDON to battle the evil Rita Repulsa and her minions who are trying to conquer the earth. It was based on the long-running japanese "tokusatsu" series "Super Sentai." In fact MMPR features a great deal of stock footage taken from those original japanese shows. I didn't know that as a child but now that I'm an adult it does make Rita's voice not syncing with her lips make a lot more sense... Each week the Rangers would battle some evil monster that Rita's crony Finster would craft out of clay, often having to call upon the power of the "Zords" dinosaur robots that they would pilot and could combine to form the all-powerful "MEGAZORD"

It was possibly my first introduction to serialized storytelling. Each week there was a different monster, but there was also a continuing story which my friends and I would discuss each day on the playground. It was kind of like Lost on it made a bit more sense. It was fun, adventurous, exciting, action packed, funny and, as I would discover when I went back as an adult and started rewatching, incredibly ridiculous. Watching these old shows for the first time in 12 years makes me feel very nostalgic but it's strange because I keep expecting to think "why did I ever watch this?" but that never happens. In fact I think it's pretty obvious why I watched it. It's damn fun. Even though now I can see how lame and tacky a lot of things are and can find a million things to poke fun at I still feel nothing but affection for this weird show. So what I intend to do is sit down and watch each and every episode from the original series (for now) and write a recap of each episode. Hopefully they'll be entertaining to read because after writing one I can tell you that it was very entertaining to write. So get ready people...

IT'S MORPHIN' TIME!!!...



J





(can you believe I actually got married?)