Why I Should Write Power Rangers 2012

Not meant as a serious pitch (obviously, since I'm posting it on the Internet rather than sending it to Saban), but just a sort of speculative suggestion a la Christopher Bird's Why I Should Write (blank) series.

If all else were to hold even, Goseiger, Super Sentai's 34th season, would be translated into Power Rangers' 20th season. (It would be the series' 19th year, I believe, but if we're going to arbitrarily define things, it might as well be by Saban's arbitrary definition of what the 19th season is [Power Rangers Samurai].) Thus, it deserves to be something of an "event" year.

Unfortunately, Saban is currently going with the whole "just imitate the guys who wrote it the first time and it'll turn out serviceable" idea. This bothers me because Goseiger was merely an okay season of Super Sentai, but I think it could be used for great Power Rangers.

Specifically, imitating Super Sentai too slavishly would probably create something rather cringe-worthy. The Goseigers call themselves angels, for crying out loud! This could cause a negative reaction from mainstream America, to the point where I could see Saban skipping it in order to avoid a backlash.

So why don't we dodge it in another way, with one of Power Rangers' own old mainstays, "space aliens?" I even have a suggestion that I think would work very well, both calling back to olden days and simultaneously opening up new possibilities: Eltarians.

The problem with using anything from Power Rangers' past is that it's fraught with major expectations, and there wouldn't be a sentai-footage based way of supporting the connection. Here, that's not necessarily a problem. Why? Because it was never truly defined just what makes an Eltarian an Eltarian.

Sure, the primary Eltarian we know of, Zordon, was a head in a tube. This was pretty well defined, but doesn't it strike you as unlikely that this would be what all Eltarians were like? If they were tool-users, they had to have hands at some point.

There are also semi-apocryphal references to the idea that Zordon had once had a more humanlike body, and had been more proactive. Here we have our crucial element: What if these hypothetical "alien rangers" were Eltarians of a similar sort to the pre-livin'-in-a-tube Zordon?

Specifically, like the Goseigers, a team of youths in training who get stranded with only limited guidance on Earth. They're indistinguishable from humans except on occasions wherein they sprout wings in moments showing greater potential or some such. (Granted, associating Eltarians with such imagery has a good chance of becoming rather uncomfortable, but it's not like Eltar doesn't potentially have this problem already, what with having "El" in its name. I can't imagine that was completely unintentional, as Superman has the same "El" in his "real" name.)

This gets around problems associated with those few other probable and known Eltarians-Zordon and the Phantom Ranger-because Zordon had no body and if the Phantom Ranger never showed wings, perhaps it was because he didn't want to risk being widely identified as Eltarian, or maybe he'd lost his powers, or maybe he was just a guest on Eltar who used some of their stuff. (It's not like we ever got a reveal, darnit.)

Power Rangers: Eltarian Guys

So here's my starting pitch:

A group of young Eltarians (possibly six, although I could imagine not being allowed to kill off Green, so I'm going to say five) have been brought by their mentor (at least loosely equivalent to Master Head, and let's call him Zoltar) and his robot assistant (roughly equivalent to Datas, let's call him "Alpha 3000") to Earth in order to observe a world that has been quite important in Eltarian history.

(These individuals would likely have been children during the great war on Eltar from PR:T through PRiS, and would probably have vivid memories of being told that Rangers from Earth had been instrumental in saving them from Dark Specter's forces.)

When they are close to Earth, they get attacked by an enemy force, heavily armed bug aliens, and are thereby stranded on the planet's surface when their ship is downed. (They probably hang out with some humans and thus have domestic antics, but the humans are probably young adults, because really, guys, kid appeal things of this type have been done to death and back.)

It turns out that these bug aliens know the importance of Earth to Eltar as a symbol and stuff like that, and so they have come to destroy it. One of the enemies is a mysterious blue creature that seems to know more than he should about Eltar, and though he is subservient to the leader of the bug alien band, he seems to be whispering in his ear. (This individual is quite obviously based on Bladerun, and if you know anything about Goseiger, you probably can guess vaguely about where this is going. I guess I'll call him Bladerun for convenience.) Using their Eltarian Ranger powers, the youths manage to defeat even the enemy flagship, but Bladerun manages to survive and escape, and somehow a new foe is awakened.

The new foe, Ivan Ooze (derived from Makuin's appearances, because it's too perfect an opportunity to pass up the idea of a creepy purple slime-based ham villain being used as a preexisting and otherwise quite different creepy purple slime-based ham villain) and his ally, some big dumb brute guy, join up with Bladerun, who has now taken on a different shape. Bladerun shows even more mysterious and inexplicable knowledge of Eltar, most troublingly his ability to tap into old powers and weapons from Eltar. Ooze and his partner are suspicious of him, though, and eventually use the Rangers to seemingly defeat him. Eventually, they manage to defeat Ooze, possibly using their repaired ship-which, if this were the case, would be their last new Megazord, not counting combinations. I like the idea of the "Gosei Wonder" being recast as an Eltarian spacecraft, if only because of its vague resemblance in ship mode to the Delta Megaship.

(Probably, Gosei Knight would effectively be repurposed as a Ninjor type-a powerful helper who also teaches them combat techniques, since Alpha 3000 and Zoltar would be unable to do so by conventional means. Perhaps his training would allow them to use their golden power armor.)

Another mysterious new foe appears, however. I might play them as survivors of the Machine Empire (basically a version of the history I came up with for Venjix, as that never was established in RPM), as they match pretty closely in terms of aesthetic and general nature. This foe seems to be using Bladerun as a puppet against the Eltarian Rangers, and this comes to a most troubling head when he somehow manages to negate their powers (albeit temporarily). His treachery results in the destruction of the mecha faction, and he soon after reveals himself as...

Zordon of Eltar! (Did you see it coming? Cue flamewars.)

Somehow, Zordon came back, but he came back wrong. Not because coming back is something that turns you evil, but because all that good that was in the Zordon Wave got used up. Zordon was the goodest of the good, the Big Good of the entire galaxy, but even he couldn't do what he did in "Countdown to Destruction" without ultimately being changed. And now he's as evil as he ever was good.

Now, here's where details get a little fuzzy. Will he be redeemable, or is there no coming back from the dark side?

So what do you think? Good, bad, completely ridiculous? All three?

-Signing off.

Modern Issues

I noted in the previous post that I found the handling of the subject of children with parents in the military rather offensive.

It was actually thoroughly okay until the point where the Red Ranger unleashed his wish fulfillment magic.

Why does this bother me so darned much?

Well, it took me a bit to suss out just why, but...

-It may have made the kid feel better, but it didn't actually change a darned thing. (If the kid's dad had somehow miraculously come back, that actually would have been better, if unrealistically rosy.)

-It's creepy wish fulfillment.

-It's creepy wish fulfillment that's being worked by a near-total stranger, and the visuals are eerily reminiscent of when an antagonist would stealthily hit a protagonist (such as is often seen in Power Rangers) with harmful magic spells.
-When my sister asked if I would be bothered by kids carrying around cardboard cutouts of their distant parents and taking photographs of themselves with the cutouts nearby while on trips, I thought about it, and then said, "No, because that would be the kid's choice." This was sent upon that kid with no warning or permission, and considering that he just had a bad encounter with a monster who tricked him into giving up reasonably valuable possessions over his dad, I'm more inclined to think that he would have freaked the heck out and started screaming.

-It's pandering. I can put up with a lot; you can annoy me, you can bore me (sadly, since this is pretty heavily retreading Shinkenger, that's what's happening here so far), but don't frikkin' pander to me. (Well, you can pander to me about nerdy things, but not emotions. Emotional pandering is worse... for some reason.)

Although I can't be all down on the episode. It was mostly a surprisingly accurate retelling of the appropriate episode of Shinkenger, but they handled a lot of it better than I expected. Also, the Nighlock remarking "Monsters can do anything" was easily the best line in all the episodes I've seen so far.

-Signing off.