Tendo City

<iframe width="640" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/5Otaq2tmNMM?feature=player_embedded" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

By the power of my key-tar!

The best show from the 80's that not actually a show or from the 80's.

So the goal is for it to be a fake '80s show? I guess it succeeds at that, yeah, but that doesn't make it good...

Sure it does.

It's supposed to be a parody ABF, not meant to be something you take seriously. As a parody, it captures all those old shows very well. Maybe you'd see all those perfectly captured ridiculous details a little better if you'd been allowed to watch anything but Transformers as a kid.

Remember that crossover comic they made in the early 90s with Space Stallions and the Awesomenauts? The whole thing was a thinly veiled Target ad, and that villian's plot to turn every planet's population into mind slaves that hated Target was so bizarre.

What the hell, it was all intro and no story? What the hell just happened!

It was a student project.

Dark Jaguar Wrote:It's supposed to be a parody ABF, not meant to be something you take seriously. As a parody, it captures all those old shows very well. Maybe you'd see all those perfectly captured ridiculous details a little better if you'd been allowed to watch anything but Transformers as a kid.

We didn't own a television until mid 1990, remember. I wasn't watching TV in the '80s apart from on vacation.

That doesn't mean I didn't watch any '80s shows -- I certainly loved the Ninja Turtles and watched a lot of the original Inspector Gadget show, to name a few -- but stuff like this, with groups of characters like that? No, I didn't watch those. Ninja Turtles was as close to that stuff as I got. Ninja Turtles, Inspector Gadget, DuckTales, some other cartoons I remember watching sometimes in like 1990-91 like BraveStarr or Count Duckula, not to mention the older classics like Tom & Jerry or the Looney Tunes... that stuff I watched. (And on that note, the Looney Tunes are unquestionably the greatest animated series ever, in my opinion; I've probably said it before, but I still believe it.)

Even with He-Man and Transformers, I liked the toys, but hadn't watched more than a bare minimum of episodes of the TV shows as a kid. I didn't watch the Transformers movie until my first year of college, for instance, and still haven't watched much of the TV series. But I did have some of the toys when I was little, and He-Man too, and liked them for those at least... Transformers toys were cool. :) The few episodes of He-Man I watched more recently weren't that great though...

Anyway, returning to these "group of heroes" shows, similarly, in the '90s, I had pretty much zero interest in the Power Rangers. I thought they were lame Ninja Turtles knockoffs but worse, pretty much. I also have never cared about superhero comic books. The few comic books I bought as a kid were mostly Disney comics stuff. Uncle Scrooge Adventures and Duck Tales were my favorite ones, I think. :)

Ah I see, that explains it. Honestly Power Rangers is a ripoff of stuff like Voltron way more than it is Ninja Turtles.

Well, let me explain this a little better. It's a parody of a LOT of stuff, from Silverhawks

<object style="height: 390px; width: 640px"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/mzAQu23t19A?version=3&feature=player_detailpage"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/mzAQu23t19A?version=3&feature=player_detailpage" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowScriptAccess="always" width="640" height="360"></object>

to Thundercats, Voltron, He-Man, and probably a few others. If you just watch the openings of those, you'll get an inkling.

Anyway, a lot of those shows, especially Voltron and Silverhawks, got REALLY melodramatic at times, between electric guitar riffs and life lessons.

Super Sentai [of which Power Rangers is a part] predates Volton and Ninja Turtles by several years, by the way.

Quote:Ah I see, that explains it. Honestly Power Rangers is a ripoff of stuff like Voltron way more than it is Ninja Turtles.

Apparently so, but when Power Rangers came out I'd never watched much of any of those shows, so Ninja Turtles was my main reference point. And Power Rangers was so stupid in comparison. (They are comparable in popularity, though, and that was part of what I was thinking too -- after Ninja Turtles faded in like '92-94, the Power Rangers sort of took that spot.)

Quote:Well, let me explain this a little better. It's a parody of a LOT of stuff, from Silverhawks

to Thundercats, Voltron, He-Man, and probably a few others. If you just watch the openings of those, you'll get an inkling.

I've never watched Voltron, Thundercats, or Silverhawks (Never seen Gobots either, on a maybe related note). Not sure if I've heard Silverhawks before, either. He-Man and She-Ra I have seen a few episodes of here and there though, and I did see some He-Man elements in that Space Stallions video, most notably the design of one of the main characters. Looks a lot like He-Man-inspired design.

Great Rumbler Wrote:Super Sentai [of which Power Rangers is a part] predates Volton and Ninja Turtles by several years, by the way.

True, in Japan. Here though, was there anything before Power Rangers? Is Voltron like that? As I said, I've never seen it.

Voltron is exactly like Power Rangers. Unlike something like He-Man, the 5 warriors are "chosen" in Voltron, get color coded suits and different giant lion robots that combine into a humanoid robot that defeats an evil space empire's monster of the week. The big difference is that the 5 characters on their own are basically regular humans. Voltron was an American release (though maybe not originally made here, as I keep finding out about all sorts of 80's shows). Heck I had some of the lion bots as a kid. In something like He-Man or Thundercats the warriors aren't exactly "chosen" except for the main characters Liono and He-Man.

To be honest aside from Thunder Cats I never watched most of those shows. I thought He-Man was dumb. Most of them had faded anyway when Ninja Turtles came along.

Anyway, I didn't think Power Rangers was all that dumb. I mean, yeah kinda but also there's giant robots fighting and ninjas. It had it's moments, even if the color coded chosen ones in that show had colors picked in... questionable ways... Black ranger african, pink ranger girl, yellow ranger asian (because apparently the "asian" part overpowers the "girl" part, blue ranger boy, and red ranger.... I got nothing. I guess red is just always the "leader" color.

Super Sentai and Kamen Rider were actually broadcast on the West Coast and in Hawaii during the 70's, so they weren't entirely unknown before Power Rangers in 1993.

Voltron was the American version of Beast King GoLion and Armored Fleet Dairugger XV, which were likely heavily influenced by both Super Sentai and Diaclone/Microman [which were popular during the early 80's, as well as being the basis for Transformers].

DJ, Voltron is the rip off! the japanese parent series of MMPR which started in 1976 & was so popular that it continues to this day.

Haim Saban basically bought the rights to make an americanized version of supersentai, which was a rather ingenious business decision since he saved money on production costs given that 50% of the show was recycled Sentai stock footage that only had to be re-dubbed & integrated with the new footage of an all American cast added on to it.

Quote:Black ranger african, pink ranger girl, yellow ranger asian (because apparently the "asian" part overpowers the "girl" part, blue ranger boy, and red ranger..

The actor who played the first Red Ranger "Jason" was actually half native American !
<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/wjzsA3WkbTo" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> :D

I only said that Voltron came before Power Rangers (and Ninja Turtles for that matter) and was far more similar to Power Rangers than Ninja Turtles.

Honestly I couldn't care less about the vast family of Super Sensei Big Bad Beetle Borgs or whatever. I'm honestly shocked there were THAT many of those types of shows.

There are 36 season/series under the Super Sentai banner and the latest just started airing less than two weeks ago.

Beetleborgs and VR Troopers were cut together from episodes of the Metal Hero franchise, which has 17 seasons/series. It fizzled out in 1998, though.

Let's not forget that the Beetle Borgs is about people given the power to turn into bug robots by some sort of Monster Squad in a haunted house.

... that was a really weird show...

Great Rumbler Wrote:There are 36 season/series under the Super Sentai banner and the latest just started airing less than two weeks ago.

Beetleborgs and VR Troopers were cut together from episodes of the Metal Hero franchise, which has 17 seasons/series. It fizzled out in 1998, though.

VR Troopers was originally gonna be titled Cybertron but Hasbro's threatened a lawsuit forcing a name change due to how close it was to the transformers I.P. The metal heroes stock footage was the most dated & aged Tokusatsu material they ever used to create a new show.

So here's a bunch of obscure shows... I remember the show about searching for the city of gold. What's so scary about a spiral?

<iframe width="480" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/ChOH18yKOdY" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>