From some posts on Rangerboard,it sums up my thoughts in the recent Teamup:
You had to go into this with realistic expectations, as they couldn’t get everyone back so most of the past rangers were always going to be background fodder.
Despite this, Grid Connection should have been foolproof to write. We’ve had five episodes of set up. And the Sentai Dino War contains 14 minutes of usable footage. That leaves more enough time for them to introduce Jason, drop a line to explain why the old teams are back, and pay off Goldar’s return.
Instead, the Sentai is mostly discarded. Gone are most of the team-based attacks of the different Rangers (including MMPR) fighting together. Out goes the final showdown between Jason & Goldar which renders Goldar’s resurrection mostly pointless. The Zords are edited down to a blink-and-you’ll miss it appearance. Seeing as this episode is supposed to sell the re-issue of all these toys, dropping the footage must mean they have something special planned?
Nope. Instead, the team up stuff is trimmed for a plot about the Morphin Grid attempting to murder Devon so it can give him a coin so Devon can make a phone call to summon Jason. Huh?
Still, at least ASJ’s return can save things? Nope, again. He barely does anything. They flew him around the world to film less than 3 minutes of footage, most of which is spent with the other characters going “OMG, UR JASON!”
Jason is the king of memorable one-liners (“You’ve had it bird brain!”, “I defy Zedd to grow his monster now”, “You’re monkey meat”). However, here he doesn’t have a single in-character moment save for a line about Serpentera which was cribbed from Tommy in Forever Red. You could swap out Jason (or Goldar for that matter) with any character and nothing would change.
And his acting…. He just screams all his lines. The final scene where he talks about the future of the Rangers, sounds like a blood curse. I know he isn’t the best actor, but that’s why we have directors.
To be fair the production crew had multiple problems to deal with. ASJ seemingly only had limited availability (even though he was spending 3 days in NZ?), they couldn’t get back the DTs and there was no footage of the dino teams interacting with BMs. So there were always limits on what they could do.
However, the lore had solutions for all these problems. Need to explain BMs absence from the Dino War footage? Put them in Goldar’s dark dimension dealing with the power candles. Can’t film many scenes with ASJ? Use a stunt double and pop him in Jason’s Zeo bandana disguise. (If Goldar is kidnapping rangers to his dimension, it would make sense that Jason would be incognito). Need to explain the DTs? Bring back Elsa (who’s actress you used a couple of episodes ago) and say she’s still good but now working undercover, pretending to be one of the reanimated villains. Then when she reveals her stratagem, splice her in the Dino War footage and make her the spokesperson for the DTs. You could even splice in a few fights with the BMs, so they feel like a part of the team-up. Can’t get Goldar’s voice actor back? Say this new Maximus is Goldar and Scorpina’s son, thus paying off what happened to Scorpina and why Goldar wasn’t around for C2D.
But that’s the problem with these anniversary specials. No one who works on the show cares about the lore. They just toss in a few actors and call it a day.
They couldn’t even give Jason a morph. Megaforce had a Red MMPR morph. Cheap-o web series Meow Meow Rangers had a morph. Yet, here nothing. Worse still, after shoving ‘Go Go Power Rangers’ down our throats for a decade, they suddenly drop it for Jason’s scenes.
What’s sad is that everyone who worked on this is different from the team who brought us Legendary Battle. And yet it’s the EXACT same mess: They had the footage, the resources, and the actors but blew them to do garbage.
And yeah, including the footage wouldn’t have made this episode awesome. But it would have at least been the bare minimum for a good team-up.
It’s seems that for Hasbro MMPR is not an action show, but a cheesy pseudo-comedy (which is the only way you can explain why they do a Mighty Murderin’ Meteor story in place of using the fight footage). Yeah, cheese is an integral part of PR, but there’s a balance to it. If Hasbro doesn’t understand this, then it does not bode well for their future MMPR-centric ventures.
The whole point of this TV show is to shill toys, and they dropped all the toy footage for nonsense. Unbelievable.
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It was a letdown, but honestly? I’m glad this arc happened. This show is so obsessed with not having real plot between the first two and last two episodes, so when we get an arc, especially one that is actually entertaining and lasts more than two episodes? Even if the payoff was kind of a letdown, I think the road there was worth it.
Something I liked that was probably unintentional, is that we got teams from all eras of the show. MMPR for Saban, Dino Thunder for Disney, Dino Charge for Neo-Saban, and Beast Morphers for Hasbro.
No funny meta joke about how Snide looks just like Zeltrax even though the Dino Thunder rangers are the ones to defeat Snide.
Another recurring problem with these team-ups, we get no insight to what the Rangers are doing these days. Jason gets nothing, the rest of the MMPR and Dino Thunder rangers get nothing. Why can’t they just give a simple sentence to what they were called away from? Operation Overdrive did this right and SPD did this right. SM, NS and BM all failed at this. We haven’t seen these characters in years and we want to learn what they’re doing after their season ended. Shouldn’t Conner have a large franchise of soccer camps by now? Ethan developed software that SPD uses, maybe Grid Battleforce uses it too? Is Zack’s hip-hop kido a widely accepted way of martial arts? Maybe Kimberly was in Coral Harbor for the Pan Global games? So many missed opportunities that only take a couple of sentences and a few seconds to work.
Summary of improvements:
- Meteor was a waste of valuable time that could’ve been spent on past Rangers and more kick-ass fight footage of the different teams fighting together.
- Jason’s introduction was confusing and could’ve been executed better.
- Bring Ethan’s actor back and have him represent the Dino Thunder team unmorphed.
- Even if you can’t do the above, still properly introduce the Dino Thunder team to the audience even if it’s very brief.
- Give a little insight of what the characters have been doing since we last saw them.
If the writers had personally come to your house punched you in the crotch while you were watching “Grid Connection”, that still puts it ahead of “Dimensions in Danger”.
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And I have to admit, I’m nominating “Devon, you will be hit by a meteor” for the funniest not-intended -to-be-funny line in this entire season. I actually laughed out loud at that.
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They have “Goldar” and Jason face-to-face after over 20 years and they don’t even use the footage of the MMPR fight Goldar…
These current writers still don’t know how to write for PR. Mandates be damned because of everyone has ‘em. We don’t have good writers and it shows.
Why would the Trex coin be inside of a meteor when he easily used it in FR? They REALLY cant decide on how rangers keep getting their powers back, huh? It seemed like such an asspull.
And here we go again. Devon’s regressing as a character for the sake of plot. Why does he still have the same flaws from season 1?
