Kyouryuu Sentai Zyuranger (1992)

It's Morphin Time

Your enjoyment of Zyuranger will depend on how much you can stand the child cast as most of them cant act and their constant screaming of "help me" will quickly grate on your nerves, when several are repeating it in unison its like listening to nails on a chalkboard. Even during the main plots you cant get away from a child in need of saving thankfully though those ones are usually in the hospital and quiet.

anyway onto the plot.
an evil witch wants to destroy the earth and an old wizard releases 5 warriors from their stasis sleep to fight her, its as basic as you get lol but then when it comes to sentai show, that's all you really need.

The hero's
Geki - Our red for this series and the only character with any kind of development and story arc, Mostly revolves around his brother Burai, i enjoyed seeing him struggle to come to terms with hi brother being a villaina nd having to find a way to defeat him, his conflicted development in episode 32 over trying to find a way to save Burai and episode 43 is a really good one with him and Dragon Ceaser.

Goushi - our Black and the only other character with any real development, he gets episode 15to hismelf where we learn about his sister and its just a very good episode, the rest of his focus episodes tend to focus on whatever child of the day needs helping instead, episode 25 is awful and episode 44 with the chimera is pretty good, I enjoyed the swordfights.

Mei - our Pink and only female for the series, gets a few episodes to her name, only episode 27 touches on the past but its not her past just her kingdoms and is pretty forgetable. her standout episodes are Episode 13 where bandora poisons her with an apple, episode 26 where she's turne dinto a punk with Dan and Episode 38 where she basically has a one on one with Lami utilising a variety of disguises. Her episodes where the most fun imo.

Dan - Our Blue who doesn't really do much, he shares episode 26 with Mei and gets turned into a punk, his other episodes are episode 7 which is rather dull and as an incredibly irritating child of the week, thankfully the monster is rather unique, he gets another one during Episode 33 which is a pretty good even if the stoen spirits voices can get real annoying. His standout epsiode is actually a plot relevant one in episode 28 where he gets a job and winds up stumbling onto a Bandora plot.

Boi - is our yellow and just like Dan he has no development and probably has the weakest focus episodes, episode 16 is really badwhile episodes 23 and 35 are not bad but they're just very forgettable at least the plots revolved around a monster with a fun gimmick and ninja's so they're worth a watch.

Burai - our Green and first ever sixth ranger and boy is he underutilised. Unless the episode is written by Nobuhiro then dont expect him to do anything, in fact he might not even show up at all. His only focus episode is episode 34 where Bandora tries her best to run down as much of his time as possible and its probably the 3rd worst episode in the entire show after 11 and 25.
Seeing him run away from a spinning wheel is boring. He doesnt fight a single Dora monster a sthe dragon Ranger, he only ever fights with Dragon Ceaser for the mech battles. He's such a wasted character after his introductory arc in episodes 17-22.
His reasons for hating Geki and being evil make no damn sense either lol


The Villains
Bandora - played by the late and great Machiko Soga is easily at her best here, you really believe that she hates children and her song is surprisingly catchy, unfortunately she's backed up by a pretty dull and boring group of "Generals" so she has to carry the scenes on her own.

Grifforzar - really didnt wnat to mention Power Rangers but for this guy is have to cause he sucks compared to Goldar. He';s just a big boring brute that shows up to fight on occassion, he gets no kind of rivalry with any of the heroes and doesnt even get a final fight never mind an interesting one.

Lami - Grifforzar's wife and the only other General thats actually capable of fighting, she's probably the second best villain in the show and thats probably cause she's got a human actor, her disguise battle with Mei in episode 38 is really good. But other than that she just tends to fawn over Grifforzar and when the costume cant really express anything back to her its hard to buy into the relationship.

the other 3 I cant remember the names of but i'm sure you know who they are, they do nothing and are just kind of there.

Outside of the focus episodes other great epsiode include our opening 2 parter and episodes 3/4 which involve a quest for legendery weapons through a maze with a minotaur monster, its great.
Episodes 28-31 are very good, Bandora realises that the Zyuranger keep getting stronger and so she has to up her game and then in the last 2 episodes we get introduced to a threat bigger than Bandora. We actually get to see Burai interact with the team and work together with Geki too.
Episode 39 is enjoyable with a unique situation for our monster of the week.
And episode 46 where an evil Zyuranger team show up is great too.

as for the bad episodes unsurpringly they tend to revolve around a child of the week.
Episodes 9 and 10 is a two parter that introduces the dinosaur eggs to the story and unfortunately the child actors just cant hold it together, theyre boring and honestly the prince and his people are idiots and deserved what they got.
Moving onto Episode 11 where a bunch of kids find a magic lamp, this one is just boring and Bandora should have probably won in this episode.
Episode 14 had an interesting premise but then ruined it by making the child of the week grow big and fight Daizyujin.
Episode 16 has a brat that cant play well with teams start kicking balls of sneezing powder at people and thinks hes doing nothing wrong.
Episode 23 involves a monster that makes people fall in love with the first thing they see, the monster sucks and the loving inanimate objects thing just annoyins me.
Episode 25 is the second worse in the show, i just did not care about the stupid statue or the kids, at least the monster was cool
Episode 40 - 42 are main plot episodes that revolve around Burai and would involve too many spoilers but lets just say its a convoluted mess and the outcome is easily preventable in fact the gods seem to just want to mess with the Zyurangers here and deliberately gives us the bad outcome.
and finally episode 45 its just a protect nature episode that beats you over the head with how important nature is and must be protected

There's plenty of good in Zyuranger to be enjoyed and a few bad, its a middle of the road series for sure but it's definitely one every sentai fan should watch at least once.

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Mild spoilers ahead:

Everything the show did well:
-Really cool semi-fantasy setting.
-Really great practical effects that look really well for the time.
-Consistently amazing action in both inside the mech and outside stunts.
-The red ranger Geki and the extra hero DragonRanger are entertaining and memorable overall.
-For the most part really entertaining monsters of the week.
-Some cool world-building here and there.
-Lami and Bandora are really entertaining villains, the latter basically hardcarries the show. (Her theme song is also really catchy.)
-Decent team overall.
-Interesting dynamic with the mecha being a God, the show does a proper job at making him feel as a larger than life entity.

Everything the show did bad:
-The show is too red-centric, it gives way too much focus on the red ranger Geki at the cost of the other rangers' screen time. The one from the core team to get the second most screen time, the yellow ranger Boi, gets the worst episodes and pretty much the few times the monsters of the week aren't entertaining. The rest become pretty likeable by the end but really don't have enough screen time.
-Prior to Lami's introduction, Bandora is the only great villain. But at least after Lami's introduction the other main villains become more active.
-The true main antagonist despite being kinda menacing and having done some horrible stuff to the cast, still manages to be kinda generic overall.
-Barza and Gnome trying to seemingly kill Ryota feels really weird, but it's only 2 episodes so it doesn't matter that much.

Reasons for the show's strengths:
Main writer Noboru Sugimura wanted to create a fantasy setting partially inspired by the Dragon Quest series to make the show stand out from other tokusatsu. Burai and Bandora backstories were also inspired from Dragon Quest. While dinosaurs are a pretty overdone theme now, it wasn't back then. The staff took inspiration of the original Jusrassic Park novel and decided on the theme, this gave path for future shows to have more concrete motifs in the future. The main producer Takeyuki Suzuki wanted to give more characterization to the main mecha which resulted in it being more interesting. This show introduced the concept of extra ranger, it was supposed to be a one-off inspired by Mad Gallant from Juspion but due to high popularity the concept stayed in future seasons.

Reasons for the show's problems:
Due to being inspired by Dragon Quest and other fantasy RPGs, Sugimura decided to make the red ranger Geki the main protagonist and more focal than other red rangers from previous seasons in order to emulate how in those RPGs the protagonist serves as the POV and takes the main decisions. But one cannot really adopt this style of writing with Sentai resulting in the rest of the cast being shafted.

Overall:
It's a great show overall, but it's really dragged down by the cast taking too long to become proper characters due to the show focusing too much on Geki, Burai and Bandora. But still by the end most of the cast while not impressive manage to be likeable at least and this show has some amazing practical effects that makes it stand out from other Sentai seasons. So would recommend to Sentai fans that are interested in a more fantasy-themed entry in the franchise.

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