Time For Time Force (intro)

When news of Timeranger hit, it sounded like it could be cool -- time traveling cops. Cops from the future, teaming up with a modern guy to chase criminals from the future who might contaminate the timeline. Sounds awesome, right?! Well, it wasn't. That is, when you finally found out by watching the show. Nowadays, a new toku episode airs and you're probably getting to download and watch it that same day. Back in the time of Timeranger, you had to wait for some dude to get enough episodes to fill a VHS tape and then they'd sell it to you for an absurd price and MAYBE take a month or two to get it to you on top of it...

Didn't matter how long it took, but when I finally saw Timeranger, I didn't care for it. It was complete false-advertising. Not very cop-y, the villain designs were atrocious, its attempts at being Matrix-like a laugh. I hated the cast, the background music. That a premise so cool is wasted on a show that had ZERO interest in utilizing it, wanting to instead be a sub-Degrassi sobfest with a bunch of unlikable people skulking for half an hour each week in an uninspired apartment set. Whoopee!

Not entirely Timeranger's fault, but I spent the majority of 2000 and 2001 kinda out of tokusatsu. (Before Timeranger came along, GoGoFive's final episodes had disappointed me. I thought Kuuga was unappealing and looked homemade. There was a blip in early 2001 when I checked out the Timeranger special and the first few Gao; the special was underwhelming and I HATED what I saw of Gao, so the toku freeze-out continued. I've wrote before that it was Gaoranger VS Super Sentai, in late '01, that began to reignite my toku spirit.) Since I liked GoGoFive so much, I didn't really want to see what Power Rangers did to it, so didn't bother checking out much of any Lightspeed Rescue in 2000, and skipped Time Force in 2001 entirely...

But then in early 2002, ABC Family (or whatever they were calling themselves that week -- that channel has had more name changes than I did as a kid joining Columbia House for free CDs) started to rerun Time Force from the beginning. For some reason, I decided to check it out. I've made it clear plenty of times that I've always looked down on PR; I'm what the PR fans call a Sentai Snob. So, while I was surprised to enjoy Time Force's premiere and the way they set the story in motion, I didn't think it would last. I figured it would slip into standard PR goofery. I never usually stuck with a PR show for too long, just enough to see what it did with the Sentai. But I stuck with Time Force for a few more episodes and found myself...enjoying it? Yeah, I disappoint me, too. But it did a lot of things I expected Timeranger to and I liked the cast and set-up more and I found myself taping episodes and then...well, my superhero focus in '02 ended up being devoted to Ryuki, which I'm now ashamed to admit I was a bit obsessed with. I didn't end up finishing Time Force for a while.

But, still, I enjoyed what I saw. It played around with time travel a little more. It felt more cop-like. The heroes were more believable as cops, and the cop theme was put to more use. The heroes were more likable than their Japanese counterparts, and the actors were better and making more of an effort than the Power Rangers actors usually do. Time Force makes an improvement to the whole Red doppelganger thing. Time Force has a face lead villain!

It's not all perfect; there's still plenty of the negatives associated with Power Rangers. While the actors are better than usual, there's still some cringe-y moments. Voiceovers are spotty, line deliveries can be stilted. Typical of PR, it's afraid to take itself completely seriously; they fall back on humor that even kids roll their eyes at. The show could use a wee bit more money. The music is atrocious, but then again, Koichiro Kameyama's Timeranger music mostly drives me up the wall. (It's as ugly to me as Eric Serra's GoldenEye soundtrack.) What helps Time Force is having game performers who are making an effort and using so many of the Timeranger concepts -- concepts which had potential, but for a variety of reasons never reached or attempted to reach those potentials. Time Force uses A LOT of Timeranger's material -- to the point where Yasuko Kobayashi and the rest should have received credits -- but often tweaking a scenario, often for the better.

It's strange... I'm not going to pretend to know everything about Power Rangers, but it seems to me like the most popular entries are the In Space through Time Force run. And that's when PR started to adapt the Sentai storylines more and more. My memories of In Space and Lost Galaxy are pretty fuzzy, but I remember those shows excising things that wouldn't work from their Sentai originals for production's sake or logistics. With Time Force -- and it could just be my dislike of Timeranger making it look like this -- it seems to me like the PR staff saw opportunities for improvement and tried to take them. I mean, the show is still very much indebted to Timeranger, it's nearly a Xerox, but...through some of the changes, through a more likable cast, the same material begins to take on a different form of life. (I like how the Japanese Wikipedia describes Time Force as "not as tragic as the original...[but] goes against the happy ending that's typical of American stories.")

Not that Time Force is the perfect version of that show I imagined Timeranger would be when the news first hit. It isn't and it can't be, not when it's building so much from Timeranger's bones. But it tries, it tries to make its premise and world feel a little bigger. (Timeranger's pretty insular; add to that self-centered characters, and the show doesn't seem heroic, it doesn't feel like there's a lot at stake.) The Time Force Rangers definitely feel more superheroic, while still all having their own personal problems. (That means they're not all so self-involved as the Timeranger. Well, maybe Lucas. Lucas would fit in with the Timeranger.) It's a Power Rangers show with more ambition than the norm. And I think it's kind of sad that, starting with In Space but really kicking into gear with Time Force, it was looking like maybe Power Rangers -- through sticking more closely with the Sentai material, but building from it and making their own tweaks -- was improving itself for the better and trying to aim higher. (Think of those early seasons that completely disregarded the Sentai material and did whatever bonkers, goofy, inconsequential stuff it wanted to -- forcing its square peg through Sentai's round hole.) It's funny to me, because most of pop-culture in the mid-to-late '90s was all about ironic detachment and irreverence and being pleased with itself and not taking anything seriously, but it's the Disney entries from the mid-00s that have a tone more like that; Power Rangers was actually in the midst of change, attempting to try to gain a little more substance by the late '90s...

But then Saban sells off the franchise and it ends up with freaking Kid Gloves Disney who set the whole thing back again -- and set it back even further by selling it back to Saban, and Saban's missing the good old days, so the new shows are now stuck in that unambitious, goofy Ninjetti-era style. (I haven't watched many of the Neo-Saban adventures on Nick, but it really does give off the stink of when MMPR was past its super-mega-popularity and it got stale and boring and dumb, but Saban didn't care about quality, as long as the piggy banks of America were still crapping major green on him. Sorry, I just read an interview with Austin St. John, and he confirms the suspicion that Saban is really Don Dolnero.) Who knows where the franchise could be or what it could have accomplished if it stayed on the path it was on in the days of Time Force?

And, hey, I know that Time Force is kinda the Jetman or Kuuga of the Power Rangers franchise -- the one that's always praised to the point where people are tired of hearing about it or have flat out turned on it. So why even talk about it? Well, it's coming from me, a Sentai Snob who actually enjoys it and maybe, just maybe prefers it to the Sentai original, which is shameful and traitorous now that I've typed it out. Oh, well. It's like...enjoying Timeranger's ideas, but with less emo-ness and zero Honami. (That alone sounds good, right?) Timeranger's a fan favorite with Sentai fans, and I feel like that me -- the Sentai Guy, the Sentai Snob, the one who ridicules Power Rangers and complains about Saban -- saying I like Time Force or prefer it to Timeranger puzzles them. So I've always wanted to talk about Time Force, really get into what I like (and, of course, don't like) about it, and maybe even shockingly there's some moments where I'll prefer Timeranger's take on something. Let's get going with this already. It's Morphin' Time! (I still don't understand how they passed up bringing that back.)