Anime Spotlight #79: Go, Go, Loser Ranger
a.k.a. The Animeister.
I intended to include this Anime Spotlight in last year's Superhero Ani-May as a companion piece to my review of The Red Ranger Becomes An Adventurer In Another World, but I got anxious from waiting for my new phone and work pressures, and I forgot how to count, so I put this review on the back burner for a year, put the Anime Spotlight on hold until last August, and saved the fiftieth Spotlight (that would have gone to Red Ranger Isekai) for my big update on My Hero Academia (which just got a Final Update last week, except that I just learned that Eri is getting her own epilogue spinoff, so I'll have to go back and Thunderbolts* that post when the new series/short/OVA/whatever comes out).
But for now, I'd like to bring you an edited reprint of my intro to the Red Ranger Isekai Spotlight as we head into my thoughts on Go! Go! Loser Ranger!
I failed to realize that I had fewer Mondays than Fridays to work with last May, and so had planned to make Red Ranger Isekai the 50th edition of the Anime Spotlight to close out Superhero Ani-May. The previous week's review was supposed to be Go! Go! Loser Ranger!, but since I wrote the Red Ranger review first and Loser Ranger was currently airing its second season, I chose to still end the month of my birth on a high note with the finished review of a promising new anime that was inspired by Super Sentai and Power Rangers.
You may remember from my Chio's School Road and Gridman reviews, and my responses to the passing of Kevin Conroy and Jason David Frank, that I grew up with Power Rangers. I was even a mark for VR Troopers, Masked Rider, and Big Bad Beetleborgs when those shows came along, despite the ridiculed footnotes that they are today. I began my viewing in an era of reruns, and so didn't get to see Mighty Morphin Power Rangers in broadcast order, but what I saw hooked me immediately. I didn't care that my target demographic classmates thought the show was, quote, "gay," and of course, in a pre-internet world where I was just a kid, I didn't know that a greedy businessman had bought a Japanese show, filmed a high school sitcom around it, and underpaid American actors to dub in new fight dialogue to save money. We didn't have the visual fidelity to notice that the Yellow Ranger was a guy despite the out-of-suit character being female (which is the kind of thing that would make modern internet scumbags bitch about their own transphobic views and "chick-washing" and tarnish Thuy Trang's legacy by calling her a DEI hire or some stupid shit like that—not that David Yost was treated kindly on set in the 90s, mind you). It was a cool show with mostly good writing and one of the first long-form, serialized narratives I had ever gotten invested in as a kid, at a time when episodic storytelling was the norm for televised media. Even when the second season ended abruptly and went into reruns to make room for the movie; even when season three also ended abruptly after introducing a new villain and power-up only to turn the cast into children and bring in an entirely new cast of Rangers; even when Zeo ended abruptly and Turbo gave me whiplash by replacing a Ranger with a child and giving the Rangers car powers out of nowhere because I didn't know the second movie was canon (and I still haven't seen it), I stuck with Power Rangers all the way through Lightspeed Rescue. When I couldn't be home to watch episodes, I tuned into an FM radio station that was just Fox in audio form and listened on my Walkman (I'm 42 now, remember?). I played the games, and had all six original Ranger figures and a few monsters, the complete Thunderzord system, Shogun Megazord, Falconzord, and a few of the Zeo-era toys that I hung onto until about fifteen years ago when I moved to another state.
I lost interest a few episodes into Time Force (which everyone says is one of the best seasons) because of the cute mascot, cheap-looking, over-designed villains, Matrixploitation, and CGI. The acting and CGI turned me off to Wild Force (though I did happen upon the "Forever Red" episode, which was cool), and tuned back in for Ninja Storm, watching continuously until a few episodes into Mystic Force. I don't remember watching much of Power Rangers after that beyond noticing that Skull was in Samurai and giving Megaforce a few episodes before the acting got to me. Dino Charge managed to keep me interested all the way through, but Ninja Steel lost me at "famous country singer becomes gold cowboy ninja," and Beast Morphers was interesting for awhile. I can't remember why I stopped watching it, but I hear the final twist was amazing if you've seen one of the seasons I skipped. I haven't seen any of the final seasons or the special, and I don't plan to, but the ride was fun while it was fun (onscreen, at least), and I still check out content by fans and critics of the franchise (Linkara was a big one, but more recently, I've been following Conner the Waffle's "Weird World Of..." retrospective series and MistareFusion's "Mighty Morphin Zyurangers" and "Oh, Zeo" comparative series).
And of course, I'm always up for anime like Love After World Domination, The Red Ranger Becomes An Adventurer In Another World, and today's title.
When a saucer-like sky fortress appears over Japan (because the plethora of existentially terrifying things that happen to fictional Japan is preferable to the past decade of real-world American history) populated by godlike Boss Monsters (Executives in Japanese, based on Zodiac animals) and nigh-immortal, alphabetically differentiated Fighters (a.k.a. Dusters), five color-coded "heroes" with overpowered weapons show up to supposedly kill the Bosses and force the Dusters into an indentured servitude agreement as perpetual foils for their weekly televised hero antics (the true machinations of which the civilians and low-level Rangers are completely ignorant of), sort of like if Vince McMahon bought his rivals and forced them to put his own wrestlers over before firing the WCW and ECW talent, just with more death and bloodshed. Oh, wait....
Said Dragon Keepers (so named because they have a suspiciously cute dragon mascot and I'm speculating that their magic Soylent weapons secretly derive their power from the Dragon Executive, but I could be wrong because the manga is ongoing and Haruba-sensei's health hasn't been that good as of late, plus I don't read manga) take strong design inspiration from Mystic Force/MajiRanger, with a bit of Zeo/OhRanger, Time Force/TimeRanger, Megaforce/Goseiger, and Super Megaforce/Gokaiger thrown in. Pink is a paraplegic former Monster cultist with a brocon fetish. Yellow is a sociopathic mad scientist. Green is a second-season reveal too good to spoil (and probably the only normal Keeper). Blue is a former organized criminal with a loud mouth (but otherwise a well-meaning, macho badass). And Red is...Homelander. Fame-obsessed, short-tempered, casually kills people in public with his bare hands. Yeah; he's just Homelander.
So, with heroes this fucked up and being allowed to recruit their own private armies virtually unopposed, enter Fighter D (Zeno Robinson in the dub, going more Garfiel or Jabber than Hawks with his performance), a Duster who's gotten sick of being enslaved by
the Keepers and decides he's going to infiltrate the Ranger training program with his mimicry skills (he can take the shape of any person or object he's seen once, even replicating voices) and destroy his mortal enemies from the inside. But the more time he spends among the Surface Dwellers (humans), the more he begins to individualize his philosophy and view his human pawns as friends (though his nature won't let him admit it), and the more he comes to realize just how out of his depth he is (and how little he cares about obstacles) when the Boss Monsters are revealed to be alive and he has to witness the Keepers and their lieutenants in action. Throw in a few double agents and a rare female Fighter, plus some compelling teases from the huge supporting cast about their motivations and backstories, and aside from a couple of instances of "wait...how the fuck did we get here?" near the end of the season, Loser Ranger is a well-animated, easy to watch underdog story with incredible suspense, comedy, action, and characterization that begs attention at every turn without overloading the audience's capacity for foreshadowing.
Following his prematurely terminated macho-off to the death with Blue Keeper (at the hands of the Rooster Executive), D is suffering an existential crisis from not getting the chance to see their fight through to the end and deliver the finishing blow himself. Meanwhile, he (in the form of Pink's brother, who is off doing his own thing to achieve coexistence between humanity and Monsters) and his fellow recruits have been split up and promoted to colored Ranger squads, and despite the increased focus on character and action, the second season cribs heavily from Haruhi Suzumiya (specifically the much-hated "Endless Eight" arc) and the second worst My Hero Academia movie (World Heroes Mission) by spending too many episodes devoted to a time loop plot that I solved in less time than it takes to say the show's title, followed by a prolonged series of fights where a bag-headed Executive and a Monster otaku (who kidnapped and brainwashed a girl into being his daughter so he could preserve his Cat Executive girlfriend in her eye, because anime dads are the worst) plot world domination
Although the editing can be confusing and the second season gets painfully derivative, I enjoy Go! Go! Loser Ranger!, I'm a sucker for mixed-media animation, and the opening and ending songs for both seasons are bangers.
"Next Time Preview"/"Preview Of Me"
"Don't Need the Right Answer"
by Akari Nanawo
"It's Really Five Seconds Before the World Changes"
by Orange Range
I even kind of wish the second ED was a real game."True False" by Fukurow note
Also, I'm incredibly close to a twenty-thousand-view month (thank you for continuing to be awesome by the daily thousands!), so Stay Tuned as I begin a new Era of Goj-Year-ra, and things get Red. Let's keep moving the goalpost, and please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, leave a comment at the bottom of this post and any others you have opinions about, help out my ad revenue as you read because as the second Blue Keeper says, heroism doesn't pay the bills, and follow me on BlueSky, Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and LinkedIn to like what you see, receive the latest news on my content, and get me closer to that new twenty-thousand goal and every goal beyond.
56
Animeister,
Out.
Comments
Post a Comment