PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *cosmological, psychological*
Though
I have an abiding appreciation for the sheer wackiness of the POWER
RANGERS franchise, I doubt that I’ll devote a lot more time to
reviewing its many offshoots. Still, I got a few cheap thrills out of
the MYSTIC FORCE incarnation, and so I took a chance on DINO THUNDER
as well.
By
sheer chance, I happened to choose one of the few serials that
attempts a sort of rough “continuity” between the various
Americanized adaptations, even if the original Japanese “Super
Sentai” shows may not have had any such linkages. One epidose even
provides a chronology between the various shows that had aired up to
that time, and there’s a crossover with the characters from an
earlier (and much duller) show, POWER RANGERS NINJA STORM. But DINO’s
main accomplishment is to bring back the character Tommy Oliver from
the original show, MIGHTY MORPHIN POWER RANGERS.
On
that program, Tommy was something of a “bad boy” who provided
contrast to the regular “clean teen” heroes. Since the actor
playing Tommy was in 2004 almost twenty years older, this time Tommy
appears as a member of the establishment, a science teacher who still
has a penchant for tecruiting promising Rangers. He starts out with
only three this time, two guys and a girl, who at first seem to have
a little of the “Breakfast Club” rebel-vibe of the American POWER
RANGERS from 2018. However, once the trio is called upon to defend
Earth from the incurions of Mesogog—a humanoid with a
dinosaur-head—the teens all get respectable jobs in a cyber-café
whenever they’re not busy fighting Mesogog’s varios monster
pawns.
As
if anticipating the villain’s theme, Doctor Oliver’s specialty is
paleontology, and all of the Rangers get various tinker-toy weapons
somehow related to tyrannosaurs and pterodactyls and whatnot. The
fight-choreography is adequate, but the main attraction remains the
goofball monsters. Indeed, one of the standout episodes of DINO shows
the three heroes watching on DVD an original (albeit dubbed) episode
of the very “Super Sentai” show which provided much of DINO’s
Ranger-footage. DINO’s scripts are also leavened with some decent
original humor not dependent of nutty men-in-costumes. The show’s
primary comedy relief, an ambitious girl reporter, loses her youth to
one of the monsters. As if knowing that this condition will be
reversible, she whines, “It’s not bad enough to be a woman in
this business; now I have to deal with ageism!”
I
don’t know how closely the English-language scripts mirror those of
the Japanese show, but someone evidently decided to follow the
template of MIGHTY MORPHIN, since DINO also has a “bad boy” who
starts out opposing the good Rangers but ends up becoming their ally
as “the White Ranger.” In addition, though in most of these
serials the older mentor-figure leaves the fighting to the teens,
Tommy, now “the Black Ranger,” battles alongside his students.
Usually the acting on RANGERS shows is no better than it has to be.
However, Jason David Frank brings a lot more dynamism to his
scholastic butt-kicker than one usually expects, and so Frank pretty
much blows the younger actors out of the water whenever he shares the
screen with them. Since there are some episodes in which Tommy goes
missing for awhile, and others in which he can’t get out of his
black armor, obviously Frank wasn’t available for the whole series.
Happily, he does come back for the wrap-up.
I
give this show’s mythicity a higher average rating of “fair.”
The show’s use of dinosaur-lore doesn’t register very strongly,
but in the psychological department, it does sustain an intermittent
“Jekyll-Hyde” theme, since, in addition to the two
“bad-boys-turned-good,” Mesogog just happens to be a scientist
who shares his body with a dino-creature.
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