Interesting Comments by Cmdr Crayfish

[Kamen Rider Decade]

Originally posted by Gold ranger@Oct 8 2005, 10:51 PM
ryu I need your help!!!

He can't help you.

[Ryu Dairenjaa]

Originally posted by Gold ranger@Oct 9 2005, 02:51 AM
ryu I need your help!!!

What do you need help with

They are insulting me!!!!

[Ryu Dairenjaa]

Originally posted by Sky tate@Oct 9 2005, 05:28 PM
They are insulting me!!!!

What???

If you didn't just say what because you just said what what would you do if you didn't say what?

I am just imitating bridge.

[Jack landers]

Like I said I was just imtating bridge.

[Ryu Dairenjaa]

And i understood

[Jack landers]

good or was it not good to the good good good


it's buttery!!!

[Ryu Dairenjaa]

Originally posted by Jack landers@Oct 10 2005, 08:53 PM
good or was it not good to the good good good


it's buttery!!!

MMMM. Buttery!!!

[Kamen Rider Decade]

More from Crayfish

It's an issue of scale as much as anything. True Blue to the Rescue, Shell Shocked, Always a Chance... They successfully pull off the one-part teamup by understanding what it is people want and don't want from them. Shell Shocked didn't bother having any significant character growth for either side, it was "wouldn't it be cool if the Power Rangers met the Ninja Turtles? And the Turtles had been BRAINWASHED, and BEAT THEM?"

There's something really neat about this brand new Ranger team, still not gelling as a unit, caught unawares and BEATEN by the Turtles. Forced to evacuate their base. If the Turtles hadn't been depolarized, Astronema would have won within the first five episodes. That's shockingly ballsy for any show.

True Blue is a little addendum to Turbo, and has almost nothing to do with the Space gang growing or changing or learning. It's the story of a boy who goes to bed and gets whisked away on a giant adventure with some old friends he thought long gone. It's freaking Little Nemo. Plus, Lionizer is one of the best monsters of the day in the entire run of the series. The MGM Grand Lion with a bazooka. Genius. Shame the Megazord fight involved Mega V-5 of all things.

Always a Chance isn't an Adam episode, it's a Carlos episode. Carlos is the one who grows and changes, and Adam learns his own lesson in parallel to that. Adam takes an incredible risk in the hopes of helping someone, and Carlos learns you can't be sidelined by your own doubts. It's a great morality play for kids, and it was an awesome chance to touch on their own relationship from Turbo.

An Adam who's comfortable teaching someone else, giving them advice, and eager to talk about his doubts and insecurities when he first joined the team is worlds apart from the shy boy we met in season two. These were awesome, almost SURGICAL episodes. Very low budgets. Tinted quarry fights, standing sets, and some stock warehouse/power plant sets. It's the same schtick PRiS had down perfectly.

And then there's Time for Lightspeed, the one-episode teamup that's Carter-heavy, doesn't use any of the others very much, and jumps all over the place with locations, fights in public places, jump-cuts to big crowds... No wonder they shot the showdown with Quarganon in the middle of an airfield. No wonder they skimped on the explosions when Vypra and Quarganon blew up.

This episode was shot inside and outside of a museum, with permits for squib use. An abandoned subway station (squibs), the park, the beach, the wharf, the airfield (squibs)... People wonder why Time Force cost so much money on the whole, this is it. In-city fights LEECH money out of the budget as you pay for permits and cordon off busy sections of downtown Los Angeles.

PR belabors under the belief in order to attain some mythic "legitimacy" as a program it must do what the Sentai does. Lots of locations, lots of "big" stunts/sets/effects... When in fact, PR had an almost perfect system in place for its first six years. They could do a show MUCH wider in scope for much less money. PR used to be able to do everything -- and not it can't do much of anything.

"The SPD Rangers can't go to space every week."
"Why not?"
"No money."
"Shoot in a quarry, color tint the film, and matte-paint the sky. Space did this EVERY WEEK."
"That looks cheap."
"It looked cheap in 1998, it still works better than most of Lost Galaxy's lavish FX."
"Can't edit the Megazord fights as someplace else."
"The villains are attacking Earth to KEEP the Rangers from staying in space, so they have to keep flying back for the Megazord fight."

PR is SCARED to go big and high concept anymore. PR wants to be safe and predictable, like Sentai. No innovations, no originality. Sentai takes an idea and milks it dry, all the while avoiding having to actually DO anything pertaining to that theme. This was less evident prior to the fall of the Japanese Action Club, but it got worse when Sentai was effectively reduced to "PR's Asian farm league." When Sentai existed primarily so Toei could make the REAL bucks off next year's PR adaptation.

Now when Sentai does something cool and new it's... Battlizers for the entire team. Emulating surface elements not from past Sentais or Tokus, but PR itself. All the while not understanding the underlying mechanics. Argh.

Man, I watch The Power Transfer, and awful as it was... The Abandoned Planet FELT like an abandoned Earth-like planet. Some shots of downtown LA, Dai footage of Serpentera attacking Tokyo, and assorted Roman statues all over the place. Just color tint it, and bam. Works. That's INSANE. This is the biggest difference between Sentai and PR. PR EMBRACES BEING AN AWFUL SYD AND MARTY KROFT SHOW, IT JUST DOES IT BALDFACED.

We deride Lost Galaxy (rightfully) for committing the cardinal sin of VR Troopers and going way the fuck too ambitious with the scope and scale in proportion to what the source material would allow, but dammit... They tried. And by the middle of the year they'd actually sold us on the implausibility of that gigantic space ark loaded with lots of generic locations to drop in Gingaman footage.

That doesn't mean it was a GOOD idea, but they'd still managed to convince us it was the location for this season. Were that PR could be that ballsy again.

There was a time when PR understood if you just teleported everywhere you didn't have to deal with shooting cumbersome transitions or drop-ins. You leeched some narrative tension out in exchange for introducing new and different kinds of conflict. You dealt with the giant expository device that was Zordon by making him a manipulative bastard who doled out all explanations in dollups only when the situation was truly dire.

PR used to not be afraid to just send the team off to another dimension as a function OF THE TELEPORTATION SYSTEM. "Oh, and you may or may not get back. Good luck." Now... You'd have to do some cumbersome explanation which eats up the whole first act to accomplish routine crap like "going to another dimension." PR didn't used to be afraid of how immense and busy its universe was. Billy casually tosses off a reference to "other evils we can fight" in Doomsday, without even being aware of Zedd. It was just IMPLICIT in this universe that there'd be other villains to fight, and we were only seeing one conflict in a much, much larger timeline.

PR used to have awe. It's not even that PR used to be good (although Clippy's Allstate parody IS hilarious), it's that PR used to be filled with awe at its own universe and the vast palate they were given to paint with. And now PR is just paint-by-numbers with stock patterns Toei provides.