Auto Pilot: Mighty Morphin Power Rangers

We’re going to try and do a theme month for Auto Pilot in August and take a trip back to the 90’s with the various shows brought to us by Saban, starting with their biggest series, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.

Episode Title: “Day of the Dumpster”

Original Airdate: August 28, 1993

Did I Know Anything Going In?:  Are you serious?  Power Rangers could not have come out at a more perfect time for me to be utterly obsessed with it.  I played the game, wore the clothes, watched it every single day on Fox Kids and had the obligatory Power Rangers themed birthday party.

The first episode of Power Rangers kicks off in extremely bizarre fashion as a pair of astronauts on some unknown planet find a “dumpster” and open it to unleash Rita Repulsa and her group of baddies.  I have no clue who these astronauts are, where they came from or what planet this is, but it’s apparently one that is dangerously close to Earth.  Rita apparently has some sort of ritual where after she’s unleashed, she tries to take over the nearest planet, which is Earth, so she sets up an insane, Vegas casinoesque base on the Moon and starts building her army of Putty Patrollers.  Meanwhile, back on Earth, the Rangers, pre-powers, are, as usual, at Eddie’s Juice Bar doing their typical activities; Kimberly is doing gymnastics, Trini is doing Tai Chi, Zach and Jason are sparring in karate and Billy is getting ready to learn karate in Jason’s class.  We get the first appearance from Bulk and Skull, who are as delightful as I remember and make asses of themselves as usual when they try to get Jason to teach them karate so they can beat people up.  It was especially apparent during the Bulk and Skull segment but the sound effects are out of control in Power Rangers, it’s essentially a live action Looney Tunes cartoon at times and Bulk and Skull have their wonderfully goofy theme song to add to the cartoonishness:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jwup4ItqyNQ

Anyway, Rita starts to attack and causes an earthquake, which alerts Alpha 5 and Zordon.  In shockingly half assed fashion, Zordon asks Alpha to just find a group of teenagers and the Rangers get teleported to the Command Center and get a massive info dump from Zordon, who tells them they are now the sole protection for the planet.  He also somehow knows all their personality traits as he describes why they are getting their specific zords, even though he’s barely known them for 5 minutes.  Zack and Kimberly have the correct response and say, “thanks, but no thanks” and leave and the rest of the group follow but they are ambushed by Puttys and are forced to use the morphers, which Zordon just lets them keep even though they say no to being Power Rangers, almost exactly like what happened in the Green Lantern movie with Ryan Reynolds where he got to keep the power ring.  Goldar arrives and they Rangers have their first Megazord battle, which Goldar flees from after they call down the Power Sword.  It’s all so insanely rushed and there’s one line from Billy where he says “It’s like I somehow know how to control this!” and that’s the only explanation for how the Rangers know how to do anything with their Zords.  I do appreciate that they just said, fuck it, and just jumped right into the insanity.  I feel like my memory was that there was kind of a gradual build up where the first episode, they morphed, the second they summoned the Zords but just used them separately and so on until they formed the Megazord eventually but, clearly, that wasn’t the case.

Overall, Power Rangers is super cheesy, kind of a half assed but still a lot of fun.  The fact that every day there was basically a Godzilla style battle between a giant robot and insane monsters was the ultimate for 90’s me and the show is one of those things that is burned into my nerdy DNA.