YOPR: 37. Clean-Up Club
On April 19, MIGHTY MORPHIN POWER RANGERS: ONCE AND ALWAYS premieres on Netflix. I’m writing about all 60 episodes of MMPR’s first season in the lead-up to that premiere.
If you’d like to follow along on this rewatch, entirety of MMPR’s first season is available for free (with ads) on YouTube.
One-sentence synopsis: Still protecting the planet in more ways than one.
Why it matters: Environmentalism and Power Rangers are married at the hip in people’s minds, but it’s been more than 30 episodes since an episode explicitly championed the cause. That incongruence is interesting – is there something of a Mandela Effect at work, or was this particular episode that impressionable? It does serve an overdose of anti-litter propaganda, crescendoing to a rarity: an unmorphed fight in which the Rangers have donned matching shirts that don’t match their assigned colors (don’t worry, their pants make up for it). This doesn’t seem lost on the action unit, whose stunt work is particularly on-point – like they wanted to make sure all of the Rangers fought well while wearing their “Clean-up Club” threads. It’s a nice message to send to kids: You can save the world in more ways than one!
Episode: Bulk and Skull. The interplay between Paul Schrier and Jason Narvy is solid from the series’ jump, but over the last half of the show we get to see Skull become more than a parrot of his big buddy, and the pair are much better off for it. By the end of this episode, a class documentary intended to highlight Bulk’s wonderfulness instead plays as a YouTube poop-esque blooper reel of their exploits over the last day or so. Skull’s slowly breaking out of his sidekick role and into more of an equal – partly through the degradation of Bulk, but also through his own commentary on episodic happenings.
A good quote: “Let’s bag ’em.” – Jason
Rating: 3/5 aluminum can pyramids
