Great article!

I agree

It's so interesting that I can respond to someone nearly 4 days before they even left their original comment...

Haha thank you. My mouse work is pretty bad:P haha

But what do Japanese Sentai fans think of the American version?

"In the A-corner, a space witch and her team of gryphons, golems, goblins, vampires and leprechauns with annoying voices."

I would have to give bonus points because the guy doing the annoying voices turned out to be Bryan Cranston.

I was probably the biggest Power Rangers nut in my hometown between the ages of 8 and 11. My love for the show went beyond fanaticism. That said, I tried watching MMPR again last year (after stumbling upon the awesome theme song on YouTube). I watched everything up to and including The Green Candle episode. And, while some scenes were actually well done, on the whole I have to say that nostalgia can be cruel sometimes, hehe.

I can still enjoy all of the Disney Afternoon shows (TaleSpin, Darkwing Duck etc.) of the 90s today for what they are. Not so much with the Power Rangers.

What struck me most was that the yellow ranger in the original version was a guy. Everything makes sense now! Why the yellow ranger in MMPR didn't have a skirt in ranger form boggled my mind. Now I know! I'm actually curious to see some of the original material now. All I've seen is a comparison video (Red Ranger VS Green Ranger fight) between both versions. I'll admit the Japanese one was better.

>I'm actually curious to see some of the original material now

here you go :

http://www.grownupsinspande...

Good article, but there's one major thing that Tommy had going for him that Burai didn't.....

The most badass, one-man wrecking-crew theme song of all time.

http://www.youtube.com/watc...

Hell yeah! The Power Rangers had one of the best soundtracks ever!

Everyone who grew up in the '70s in Hawaii knew how bad a rip off the Power Rangers really were. We had a lot of Japanese TV shows airing on channel 13 back then. Gorangers and Battle Fever J were a couple of the ranger-type shows. You can get some of the more popular shows with subtitles at GenerationKikaida.

For me, the best sentai series is samurai sentai, shinkanger, and my favorite kamen ridiculously is kamen rider double. Both are fantastic. The American version of shinkanger is truly abysmal, though.

Now do the rest of the Super Sentai vs Power Ranger counterpart

wow...the awesomeness of this article,,,,such a trip down memory lane, had never seen the Japanese original, thanks for the clips. now I have "bandora song" stuck in my head...

Enjoyable article.

I've been watching Sentai since Akibaranger came out and got me interested in the stuff. So far Sun Vulcan's my favourite series.

how does that last video only have like 270 views?

Because the author of this article made it, and you haven't shared it with a million people

well that makes sense. but I did share it with a couple people.

I actually found a torrent of the original sentai series and loved it. I was surprised at how much mmpr suffered from localization especially in regards to plot. As much as I loved mmpr as a kid Im collecting the recent legacy toys more in homage to zyuranger than mmpr now. Plus campy Japanese kids shows are always a delight. Reminded me of a cross between Godzilla from the late 60s and sesame street and a daytime soap, in the best possible way. BANDORA!?

Great article--I love super sentai!! Wacky and campy and Japanese...still entertaining for even adults. I didn't know how cool super sentai shows from Japan were for a long while because I always assumed they were lame like I thought the Power Rangers were. I like your parody of that Zordon guy--for me, he was a big turn off to the show. I think Zyuranger is one of the best series!! And I also recommend Ninja Sentai: Kakuranger.

I think MMPR wins in the category of pure cheese though.
Also had some epic SNES games.

Predictable. That you would choose the Japanese version, that is.

Does liking Akiba Rangers Count?

Thanks for the article. I was a high school student when the original Power Rangers aired. While I was too old to enjoy the American characters and fight scenes, the use of Japanese ZyuRangers footage fascinated me and I was a regular after-school viewer for a few years.

A show of this type that I enjoyed more was "VR Troopers". The American characters and plot weren't half bad. The Japanese battle scenes (particularly the two male heroes) and villains were awesome. Reading the WikiSpace article on that show a few minutes ago it was interesting to me that they had to cancel the show because they actually ran out of Japanese footage. This also explains why the Power Rangers has to reinvent itself from the ground up every few years.

Zyuranger is pretty much THE reason I got interested in Japan. Like quite a few folks I went through a phase of being into Power Rangers in a big way. I never had any great nostalgia for it but finding out about Super Sentai peaked my curiosity and reading about Burai's story made me think that Zyuranger was more my kind of thing than Power Rangers (for some reason I also came to the conclusion that Sentai was for adults). I've actually not seen more than a handful of Zyuranger episodes but it did cause me to check out the other Sentai and Kamen Rider shows. From there I started checking out the odd anime and then, a couple of years after starting out, decided to take a Japanese class. I really ought to get around to watching all of Zyuranger some time.

That was news to me. Never really got into Power Rangers. I did rush home to watch Go Rangers, have always thought it was based on that. Miss those shows, Kikaida, Kamen Rider V3 and Raideen.

I can't believe they actually made "Black" power ranger black and "Yellow" Asian.

I think the Saban production company just didn't think things through for the first version of the Power Rangers. I know for sure that in the later seasons they mixed up the American actors' races and costume colors.

Wow, I used to watch Power Rangers all the time. I never knew it came from a Japanese show. Thank you.

Just had a discussion with someone about this very thing a little while ago eerie and super cool to know! Actually, it was exactly what I wanted to know dun dun DUNNNN. Thanks for doing the research; even comparing rangers. ((o^_^)bｸﾞｯｼﾞｮﾌﾞ♪

I'm TRYING to like Super Sentai, but it's difficult (especially when I still have a twenty-season backlog of Kamen Rider to get through). I only actually LIKE one of them (Go-Busters, which is a bit more plotty than most), and I can tolerate about four of them. But Zyuranger is not one of those four. If it hadn't been loosely connected to a beloved childhood icon that I never watched (though my wife did), it wouldn't even register on my radar.

The current series does the dinosaur schtick much more believably, even though they're so transparent about being a blatant toy commercial that they use the actual toys in the show... plus, cute dancing toddler montage at the end.

Depends. There's a huge stylistic shift between the Shouwa and Heisei era series, and between the earlier and the later Heisei shows as well. The Shouwa shows are more like the 1960s Batman serial, only with about half the budget and three times the violence (I've only seen two of them, but they were pretty much the same). The early Heisei shows are really dark, mellowing out a bit in more recent years.

Of all the Heisei shows, Kiva and Fourze are probably the ones most approachable for a Sentai fan. Kiva is creepy and gothic, but also ridiculously funny (and is probably the best written of all the series, but it can be hard to follow because it traces two simultaneous timelines twenty years apart). Fourze is basically a cross between Buffy and the Jetsons.

Wizard is fairly well-balanced between plot, monster-of-the-weekness, comedy and melodrama, and is my favorite (which, of course, guarantees that REAL Kamen Rider fans hate it). It's also the one I started with, so I may be biased.

Kuuga is regarded as one of the best series of either era, but it's also rather vicious and horrible (with a civilian death toll approaching a thousand). It's also a bit slow developing, and there's a point in the series where you go 'wait, did I miss an episode' because the events that happen immediately prior to it occur offscreen without warning. But it's also got the best overall story of all the ones I've seen.

I haven't seen it, but apparently the best of the Shouwa series is Black.

I only have one complaint about this: the localization of the names. I'm a big toku fan, but have you noticed the names in them (especially bad guys)? Most of them are just like their American counterparts; they only sound better because I'm not Japanese. A good example would be Go-Onger's villains.