Mighty Morphin Power Rangers

An incredibly bad television show, in the giant mechanical suit genre. Every single episode featured the Power Rangers being attacked by some big ugly monster. They would always start to lose, but then gain the upper hand, at which point the head evil person would make the monster grow to a huge size. The rangers would then get in their goofy looking giant robots, let the monster beat them up briefly, then combine the robots into one big robot, and kick some serious monster ass.

Needless to say, this got pretty old pretty fast, and the creators of the series did nothing to add interest to the series except to constantly add new characters and new robots.

Oh, and the costumes, special effects, and acting all sucked, too.

The stupid thing about this show was how those animal/robots would come out of nowhere whenever the Power Rangers needed them -- ostensibly to fight the mega-sized overgrown version of the same monster they had just been fighting.

If the Power Rangers had access to these robot/animal thingamajigs all the time, why didn't they use them to begin with?

ahh... thank goodness I went through my childhood whilst the first series Transformers (still my favourite cartoon of all time) were still all the rage.

Yup, MMPR is probably the worst children's TV show I've ever watched as an adult.

The actual "Power Ranger" and "bad guy" scenes were taken from a Japanese sentai television show--in the first season it was Zyu Rangers, afterward Dai Rangers. Since the Rangers are masked, it was easy enough to intercut the scenes with those of the American actors and pretend they were one and the same.

Saban claimed this was done to work around the awkwardness that results from dubbing Japanese actors into English, but others feel that their motivation was a belief that American kids will not identify with Asian heroes.

As Quizro pointed out, a lot of the action scenes were of the Japanese Rangers, a group that included only one female (the Pink Ranger). However, since the American group required more diversity to be palatable, they decided to make the Yellow Ranger be a woman as well (and asian at that for a "politically correct" racial mix).

Now the problem was the action sequences. They needed a flat-chested enough woman, so that the difference in the Yellow Ranger would not be noticable to the audience, but especially children (as if that was a problem anyways). This was actually a problem during casting, and thus that is why you wont see the Yellow Ranger's character wearing anything that would accentuate her chest. The newer ones actually have a female stunt person in the yellow suit, since some are now filmed exclusively for the US.

So if you ever catch an older one, keep a good eye on the Yellow Ranger. It's a guy.

Power Rangers actually did a clever job of explaining why the Rangers couldn't just start off in the Zords. When the Rangers were first given their powers, Zordon laid down some serious ground rules, namely:

1) They were never allowed to attack anybody first.
2) They had to keep their identities a secret.
3) They could never escalate any conflict unless their enemies did so first.

As such, on every single episode, they had to fight the monster in an inconclusive manner until it finally entered its giant form and shot lasers out of its eyes.

The show's premise was taken largely from Voltron, which was, frankly, much better. (amended) Because of Voltron's popularity, the concept of the show seemed a bit stale (unless you were in elementary school, of course).

And it's still on the air today, albeit in different forms. Power Rangers series over the years include:

Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers
Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers plus the Green Ranger
Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers plus the White Ranger, who was the same guy
Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers with the new Rangers, with Rita and Zed
Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers where all the original Rangers are children except Billy.
The Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers movie, a minor box office children's hit for FOX.
Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers in space (all new characters)
Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers where all the Zords are emergency vehicles. "Rescue Force" or something.

I watched this when I was eight, and it's still on. Mein gott.

And that's not even bringing up the villain that looked like Gwen Stefani and always wanted to go shopping.

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asterphage points out that the Voltron statement is ludicrous, and offers excellent evidence to prove it. Bravo, sir. It is changed. See sentai for some quality information. I do stand by the fact that Voltron is better than Power Rangers... but no one is arguing.