True Teenagers With Attitude

Despite what little I think of Power Rangers now, when I was a kid, I was into Mighty Morphin'. I knew it was pandering, I knew it was hokey, I knew it didn't hold up to the Japanese Sentai installments I saw in the '80s, but I still liked it, recorded it, obsessed over it. And while I wasn't into VR Troopers, I still watched that, as well as Saban's coat-tail riding rivals put out by DiC, Superhuman Samurai Syber Squad and Tattooed Teenage Alien Fighters From Beverly Hills. (I didn't care about Saban's Masked Rider. That thing's always been an unwatchable heap of suck.) Of DiC's two series, I think Tattooed Teenage Alien Fighters From Beverly Hills is the more noteworthy, and the one I want to talk about.

Now, it's obvious that DiC's shows were shameless wannabes that just wanted to quickly capitalize on the crazy, unpredictable success of Mighty Morphin'. And it's obvious that the powers-that-be backing these DiC shows reallllllllly didn't want to put much money into them -- not that you can accuse the American-made footage in Power Rangers of being high-budget, exactly, but there's at least a variety in locations. But a big difference between Saban's show and DiC's is that DiC's shows were bolder in how they depicted the young heroes.

Another big difference? As super low-rent as DiC's two shows seemed in terms of sets and production, I remember being a kid and being impressed that I'd recognize some of the people in their shows. Syber Squad had that kid from Tales From the Dark Side and Mrs. Doubtfire! And the annoying twerp from Parker Lewis! And, holy shit, Tim freakin' Curry doing the voice of the bad guy! And some of these people can...act! Wow! Power Rangers gets people you've never seen before and probably will never see again. (Yeah, yeah -- I know it's because, for a while, a majority of them were martial artists, gymnasts or dancers, and not actors.) Tattooed's most recognizable performers are Glenn "Otho" Shadix as the voice of Nimbar, David "Squiggy" Lander as the voice of Lechner and Zsa Zsa Gabor cameoing in an episode as herself. Still...even these three are bigger names than anybody Saban's ever gotten in any of his shows.

Nimbar's oft-repeated line is meant to comfort the Tattooed Teens in times of doubt, but twist it and you can picture it coming from Shadix's Otho character, as well.

When I was a kid, I remember also being surprised that they said things like "hell" and "die" on Tattooed Teenage Alien Fighters From Beverly Hills. Like, nobody dies on the Power Rangers. The D-word doesn't even exist on Power Rangers! Even the villains survive and change their ways and start traveling the world as entertainers.

One of the many problems that continues to plague Power Rangers to this day is how goddamned square and magoo the characters always are. Unless they're just half-heartedly and lazily Xeroxing the Sentai plot -- like the case with Time Force, where heroes could actually disagree -- for the most part, the heroes are always on the same page, always lame, always sub-dimensional do-gooders. Since Tattooed Teenage aired only in '94, as a rival of MMPR, I'll just compare it mostly to MMPR, even though mostly all of the heroes of the PR franchise are sugary sweet goody-two-shoers.

The teens of MMPR are even squarer than Judd Nelson's impression of Anthony Michael Hall's family in The Breakfast Club. "Teenagers with attitude?" Yeah, right! The Power Rangers were kids who reminded the teacher they forgot to assign homework, who drank veggie smoothies (because fatty products are GROSS, ew!), who NEVER had a negative thought or beef with anybody, whose idea of a good weekend was volunteering at school functions or cleaning the park. School was cool, man. There's no awkwardness typical of the teen years, everyone gets along, and even the bullies are minor pests you can laugh at -- the bullies are so innocent and decent, even, that they go on to become cops. Power Rangers characters behave only like the teenagers that were ideal for the nerdiest of parents. The Power Rangers are all the offspring of June Cleaver and Danny Tanner. They have no individuality, no questions, no genitalia, no hormones, no fears, no blood, no negativity, no sarcasm, no sense of anything which one might attribute to a human being. Angel Grove is a Pleasantville of purity where everything is peachy, bad guys are barely even bad, no vices of any kind exist, and babies are delivered by stork.

And, fine, maybe the show just wanted to have these paragons of virtue. They're superheroes, after all. The way the Power Rangers are presented is no different than the way most Saturday morning heroes, like He-Man, had been presented at the time. But He-Man and his ilk are cartoons. (Then again even the Ninja Turtles had more variety of characters and "teens with attitude" than PR ever did. Look at that. The TEENAGE. MUTANT. NINJA. TURTLES. More realistic than the Power Rangers kids!) Power Rangers, by being one of the first live-action hero shows for kids, needed to have the heroes resemble human beings just a little bit; Power Rangers writers should have made more of an effort to diversify the characters beyond the superficial Benneton casting. The original Japanese shows have more diverse heroes. There's often an array of character types in those shows. I'm not expecting, nor do I want, superheroes who are evil pieces of shit like Walter White, or a team of teen heroes who are psychopaths like the Less Than Zero kids, but you want them to be somewhat human and -- this is a tricky word, too often misused -- flawed.

Here's where Tattooed Teenage Alien Fighters wins over Power Rangers. The four heroes of the show butt heads, don't get along well and kind of dislike each other initially. They're all in different parts of the conflicting high-school castes. While they might deep down come to have a liking and respect for one another, caused by their being brought together as a superhero team, they're not going to admit it, and it's not going to change the way they interact at school. (To bring up The Breakfast Club again, it's like when Anthony Michael Hall asks if they'll all remain friends, and Molly Ringwald just flat out nukes him with the truth that, no matter how much they all bonded in detention that day, things will go back to the way they were come Monday morning.)

If you look at MMPR, a lot of those character types wouldn't have been caught dead with some of the other characters. Jason might say hi to Billy, but would make fun of him to his friends behind his back. Tommy wouldn't take Trini to one of his heavy metal vomit parties, and would lie to his friends that he's sleeping with Kimberly in order to seem cool. Zack would have nothing to do with such corny people.

Tattooed Teenage addresses this. Laurie/Scorpio is the Kimberly-like princess, and it's only acceptable for her to be seen talking to Gordon/Taurus, the fellow rich kid who's been handed everything. (While I don't think PR's Jason came across as a shallow richie, he was without a doubt the popular jock-type of the class, the type of kid who everyone, even teachers, adored for reasons beyond your understanding...until you found out they had rich parents.) Swinton/Apollo is the Billy brain, and a dorky outcast, but he can be judgmental and initially thinks he's better than everyone. The real standout is Drew/Centaur, a character who would never exist on Power Rangers; an anti-conformist, wise-ass rebel with a contempt for the rules who can't stand most people. Before Joseph Kahn thought he was being so clever with his Power/Rangers short, this show in 1994 had Drew (and guest character Rick/Orion) questioning the idea of mysterious lifeforms forcing teenagers to fight their super wars. (JUST LIKE FUCKING SAIGON, EH, SLICK?!)

You'd never catch this on Power Rangers: Kimberly and Jason being competitive with one another, arguing who should lead (the answer being her); Jason feeling inadequate to Billy's smarts, pettily hoping Billy doesn't get into the same Ivy League school he wants to; Billy thinking his intelligence makes him superior to everyone else; Trini thinking everyone but Billy was a phony asshole; Jason thinking Trini, thinking everyone is a phony asshole, makes HER a phony asshole; the shallow, hormonal guys hitting on the heroines; the Rangers not getting along and acting petty or playing dumb tricks on one another. No, no. All Rangers get along and never fight or disagree, unless they're brainwashed, and even then, they'll issue a public apology and personally go hug anyone they wronged while under mind control. The Tattooed Teens are also allowed to hate or mock their teachers and principal, can be disrespectful of elders, and get detention for skipping so many classes to go off and be heroes. The Tattooed Teens are allowed to be sarcastic and often tease or insult each other.

I know I'm making the Tattooed Teenage characters sound like they're just obnoxious, but they don't really come across that way. Just...realer than Power Rangers has ever attempted. Teens can be self-centered and petty, but a lot of superhero media depicting teen heroes forgets this, and they're often just mini-adults and overly pure. And the Tattooed Teens are also meant to grow closer and understand one another more by being on the team. (The problem is the show, being a cash grab with most likely a fast as hell shooting schedule, really not having great continuity to completely pull this off. And it seems to me like episodes are presented by production number rather than actual episode number; sometimes the heroes react to a monster like they've already battled it, and then a few episodes later, the same monster will be treated as a new threat. And an episode like "The Cover Up," which falls in the middle of the series, definitely seems like it should be an earlier episode.) I do think the show needed a fifth character, maybe someone a little headstrong, a put-upon normal kid to pull everyone together and keep them in line, but that might interfere with what the show's trying to do with these teens from Beverly frickin' Hills (which translates as rich, entitled, privileged).

For an episode, the show does briefly get a fifth member, though -- Orion -- and he IS a little more of a straightforward hero. (Too bad he wasn't Red-colored, though. He's instead silver.) An alien whose planet has been destroyed by the villains, he bonds with Drew while on a quest to seek revenge. It's a somber kind of episode that reminds me of a Kunio Fujii type of tokusatsu episode, one that Power Rangers would never try. And since Orion is played by Syber Squad cast member Kevin Castro, it also reminds me of the way you'd be watching a toku and, hey, there's Blue Flash's actor as a guest-star in Maskman!

The actors aren't cringe-worthy, either. Leslie Danon and K. Jill Sorgen as the heroines are the best of the cast, with Sorgen's Drew being the standout of the show. (It takes a while for Rugg Williams to find a rhythm as Swinton, though he tends to be a bit forceful. And while Richard Nason can be funny and have good moments, his performance rests in one area of smarmy. He really needed to shake up his performance beyond doing someone's impression of David Spade's impression of Alex P. Keaton.) At any rate, you can tell the cast is having fun, even if their characters can be antagonistic, and even if the show is throwing insane stuff at them.

The villains are generic, but main villain Gorganus is sadly probably more menacing than the villains Power Rangers offered at the time. He's always angry and always smoking the subordinates who fail him. Rita just always whined about a headache and Zedd would just make Goldar go stand in a corner for five minutes. The monsters of the week are often recycled, with mostly weak designs. (Though I like Slaygar, Octodroid and Ninjabot.) But the show at least comes up with better dilemmas-of-the-day for their monsters to perpetuate. Even just minor, typical villain stuff like tampering with the weather or causing blackouts or targeting a water supply or causing pollution is more of a threat requiring superheroes than Rita sending a bee monster to attack the Rangers because Billy was, like, so totally depressed he got his first B on his test, and the BEE monster would remind him of it and, like, totally weaken the Rangers!

Gorganus: the bastard son of Hell Saturn?

So the show's biggest failing is not having a Japanese show to work off of. And, man, did they need it. Not only for the sake of having better realized villains and action scenes, but because the hero designs are WTF. WTF, in this case, meaning both "what the fuck" and "weird, terrifying, fucked-up." The Galactic Sentinels take everything scary about Battle Fever's Miss America and crank it to twelve. Who knew real hair would be stranger than a wig? That stuntpeople who were visibly confused by the material, making constant wide-eyes, would be creepier than just plastic eyes?

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! Pleasant nightmares, folks.

When the show was making its debut, I remember reading in a magazine (Wizard? Hero Illustrated?) that they DID want for it to be based off of a Japanese series, but Saban shut that shit down. For Saban Entertainment to step in and have any say and win, that says to me that they had obviously wanted and attempted to use a Super Sentai series. (Or, at the very least, one of TOEI'S shows. For all I know they could have wanted a Metal Hero, which Saban was already planning to stink up with VR Poopers. There's not a real team Metal Hero at that point DiC could have used, though.)

I've always wondered which show they would have used. If you go by the Galactic Sentinels' designs, you'd think they obviously wanted to use Battle Fever J, with maybe symbols of countries in place of constellations. (Especially note: Battle Fever is the only Sentai team to have noses on their masks, as the Tattooed Teens do.) I kind of doubt this, though, since Battle Fever J is unabashedly 1970s and disco, and definitely wouldn't have flown in 1994, even if they were hoping to take the piss out of it. Lately, I've kind of wondered if maybe Liveman was considered for use. The colored constellation illustrations remind me of Liveman's colored animal illustrations on their Twin Brace; AND there's a couple of monster similarities. And I think animal-themed Liveman, with its animal-shaped mecha and the team coming complete with a robot helper, would have been best for a Power Rangers competitor.

Both of DiC's shows have their fanbase, but people seem to talk more fondly of Superhuman Samurai and I think that's probably because it's the one that was based on a Japanese series. (Not that Gridman was exactly a winner for them to have pulled, but, still...it had more action, more of that inventive superhero action you can pretty much only find in Japanese tokusatsu.) So, a Japanese series would have greatly benefited Tattooed Teenage and maybe have let it be seen differently. Because the action and superhero side of it is lame, and kind of a letdown considering what the rest of the show is going for, which is "teenagers with attitude...for real," while also having a self-awareness that points out how insane a lot the situations superheroes find themselves in can be.

The way the action is presented seems so disconnected with the rest of the show; it's a big problem I have with the Ultraman franchise. The giant monsters, the Ultraman, the big battles -- they're all done separately. There's something so impersonal, disconnected and intangible about it. In Super Sentai or Kamen Rider, the majority of the action is small scale -- it involves the actors more. Those franchises go to great lengths to make you believe the actor becomes the hero. With the Tattooed Teenage Alien Fighters, it's hard to feel like they actually become the 'roided out heroes they're meant to become. The way I never feel any of the Ultraman protagonists become Ultraman, I feel that disconnect with the hero action in Tattooed being so cordoned off on its own. They really needed to involve the actors in some superheroic action. Superhuman Samurai is very much the same way, and that's because it's modeled after its source material, Gridman, which had the Ultraman format. Tattooed Teenage was a Super Sentai show using an Ultraman format, which doesn't work so well.

And the thing also needed a better title. I know they were trying to be funny and reminiscent of too-long titles like "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" and "Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers," but it's just too much. Too dumb. They're called Galactic Sentinels on the show, and that's a better Power Rangers-wannabe name to me, and a better show title. (A song on the show also refers to them as Teenage Gladiators...another better show, and one that would have also rode on the popularity of the American Gladiators.)

The show also needed money for more sets, man. It gets tedious spending time at the same four sets. (Villain lair; coffee shop hang out; Nimbar's lair; Drew's poolside; school hallway; soundstage where the fight takes place. Even Power Rangers has more variety, including OUTSIDE SHOOTS! Holy shit...that's money. Power Rangers has the money, they just don't want to spend it on making it a good, quality show, it seems. Sad that, for as much money as the property makes him, Saban doesn't want to put any of that into the show. Cheap! He's Don Dolnero.) Between the same sets, the same monsters, and reused fight scenes, the show often reaches Uchuu Keiji-levels of tedious repetition. (Little known fact, which you can go add to Wikipedia, kids: an alternate reading of the kanji for Uchuu Keiji means "stock footage.") Like, the soundstage where they'll battle is often supposed to represent different parts of the world, sometimes galaxy! (That's right: this show has the bad guys attacking the entire world, but it doesn't have the budget to pull it off.)

And, hey, I know some people will look at this show as a failure since it was a superhero series and failed in delivering good superhero action, and I'm not saying that this is some great, brilliant and lost show. It's very low budget, very formulaic, light on plot, and difficult to get through for those reasons. I just wanted to point out some areas of this strongly disliked show that I thought were successful in its approach over the popular Power Rangers. It's sad that the knock-off rival shows by DiC had more guts and actually TRIED to write something more interesting for their original footage than Saban's gang ever tried. (And, no, the pathetic attempt at being "edgier" in the new movie wasn't done well and didn't last. They were just as do-goody, jokey and dumb as ever.)

Saban's basically lucky that he's the one who ended up with the Super Sentai footage. It's insane to me that he's a billionaire, basing his empire off of the work of others and never having an original idea of his own. And it's kind of sad that he and his staff have no respect for Super Sentai, the superhero medium in general, and viewers (of any age) that all they want to do is the bare minimum and have the Sentai footage bail them out. Because Power Rangers doesn't lift the bar, it leaves it on the floor. Japanese henshin hero shows have been around since the '60s, there's a pride and dedication in their work, they know how to make these premises work, they invented the unique style of the action, they can make these shows in their sleep (and I think they might at this point). Saban's shows benefit for it, and it's crazy that he's a billionaire for wrapping his lousy product in other people's better work.