Time For Movie Madness

I hate these episodes. They'll instantly kill my watching of the show for a while. They're just dumb and try too hard, and are never as amusing as they think. These are meant to be "funny" episodes, but it's one of those things that it's obvious that it was more fun for the people making the episode than the poor saps watching the episode.

Time Force has been good at taking Timeranger multi-parters and condensing them into one lean, jam-packed episode. Here they take a goofy one-off of Timeranger's and stretch it, pointlessly, into TWO parts. (It was most likely made into a two-parter to justify the money spent on raiding the production company's costume department, but, still...don't torture us for that, man.)

The Timeranger episode was simple; Shion sleeps once a year, and this time he happens to have a crazy dream wrapped up in the movie he was watching. Since it's a dream, the craziness can go as far as it wants to, the characters can behave as wildly and out of character as you want them to. In Time Force, the Rangers are sent into a dimension based on a different movie genre, and it's an excuse to have characters behaving silly for the sake of "comedy" and it's just lazy. (It would have been better to ditch Timeranger's movie-related scenario and send the Time Force Rangers to the actual time periods the movies are depicting, further utilizing, you know, time travel.)

Even Timeranger had the sense to not include Naoto into the goofiness, but Time Force doesn't, so it ends up making Eric look stupid. (Either Southworth hated these episodes or is extremely in character, because he doesn't look like a happy camper.) Eric's sent to a Tarzan kinda movie, and it's all done so cheaply, it will make you think of when Rocky's filming that commercial for the cologne that makes you smeel mainly in Rocky II.

The worst part is Ransik taking part in this episode and looking dumb. All of the villains are in pure Goldar and Rito mode in this episode; I don't care if it's lighthearted, and, yeah, I know the regular actors get a kick out of episodes like this that shake things up for them, but if it don't work, don't do it. And this don't work. (I know fans get a kick out of Ransik dressing like actor Vernon Wells' character from Mad Max 2, but whatever coolness that might hold -- it means nothing to me, I don't like the Mad Max movies -- is immediately undone by him putting on a dress.)

It's really out of character for Jen to be so gung-ho over some Jackie Chan rip-off and into those types of movies, and she takes being stuck in a kung-fu movie with an ease that's not like the character. I guess at least she makes the most of it and kicks every monk's ass. Lucas gets stuck in a swordplay flick. (What, no Cannonball reboot?) Katie gets a musical she says she enjoys, but looks scared shitless to be a part of. Wes and Trip's stuck in a Western, which might make you think of Back to the Future 3... So it's funny that the bartender at the saloon they enter is played by Buck Flowers -- aka Red, the mayor-turned-bum, from the Back to the Future movies. Yeah, it's probably unintentional and a coincidence, but that's sadly a big-time guest by Power Rangers standards.

How do people from 3000 know so much about movies, anyway? Every Star Trek says that television and movies are, like, so passe and useless that the future doesn't need or remember them.