How About That Thing?

It’s time once again to dive face first into the rubber monster madness of Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers. Last month, we covered Terror Toad: a monster that genuinely gave me nightmares, and apparently gave some people a boner. Side note: the internet was a mistake.

This week, however, I decided to talk about a monster that was a different sort of memorable. A monster idea that’s so stupid, it somehow managed to be awesome. A monster so incompatently slapped together by idiots, and yet, it managed to come closer than most to actually beating the Power Rangers despite it all. A monster that I remember quite vividly, all be it for mostly the wrong reasons.

What monster am I talking about? Why, none other than this guy right here.

This is Shellshock: pure unfiltered hurr durr at its absolute finest. He was created when Rita Repulsa, after binge-drinking her sorrows away after being on the losing end of the epic Green With Evil mini-series, is sleeping one off. Squat and Baboo find themselves with two options: hang out and watch the Power Rangers play basketball, or make a monster of their own. After standing out in the park, out in the open, and basically telling anyone who’ll listen the plot of the episode in an absolutely pointless and unnecessary sequence, they go with plan 2.

SIDE NOTE: it probably speaks volumes of how desensitized everybody is to monsters at this point where one of them is literally standing out in plain sight, announcing “ME MAKE MONSTER!” as loudly as fucking possible, and yet nobody seems to notice. Or care.

They head to Finster’s workshop, and I guess Finster himself is out taking a piss, because I have a hard time imagining him letting these two dumdums do anything in his workshop. I like to imagine he gives them pottery glaze to huff in exchange for leaving him the fuck alone and letting him work. But that’s probably just me.

Baboo keeps hyping up the monster he’s created as the greatest invention since the bass-O-matic, while Squat ends up echoing the audience’s sentiment of “Hurry the fuck up and show us the fucking monster already!” And after hyping it up for way too long, he reveals…

…A clay turtle with a traffic light stuck in its head. The nautical tons of hurr durr on display is so baffling that even Squat is in disbelief.

“What are we supposed to do with a turtle with a traffic light stuck in its head?” he asks.

After the two of them throw out some hilarious ideas for monster names, they settle on Shellshock, and put him in Finster’s magic monster oven. It’s a bit cliche, but I guess it works. Although part of me kinda wishes they’d stuck with Gretta.

And thus, we get the monster of the day: a turtle who fires laser beams from his traffic light. If you get hit with the green light laser, your body just starts moving uncontrollably. If the red light laser hits you, your frozen in place. There doesn’t appear to be a yellow laser, at any point, though.

Along with the traffic light laser, he has a baseball bat and a cannon. The cannon makes sense, but the baseball bat? You know, I’m pretty sure they were playing BASKETBALL before Squat went back to the palace.

Looking back on this monster, I don’t know what’s more absurd: the fact Baboo and Squat just sorta slapped a bunch of nonsense together and hoped for the best, or the fact it worked. You could make a claim for other monsters coming pretty close to defeating the rangers, but those monsters, despite being full of terrible puns, and having some weird voices (IE, Fang sounded suspiciously like Booberry upon rewatching this show thirty years later), but those monsters were made compatantly. There was a design choice that went in that made sense. Terror Toad was a giant toad with a horn and a long tongue. Lizzenator was a buff lizard with super durable skin, and enough strength to probably benchpress Megazord. Hell, even some of the dumber monsters like Pudgy Pig at least fit the theme Finster was going for.

By contrast, Shellshock was just the physical embodiment of “lol random” if it happened to be a Power Rangers monster. There’s no rhyme or reason to Shellshock. Shellshock simply is. And yet, he single-handedly sent the yellow ranger on an impromptu marathon with the green light, froze the black, blue, and pink rangers with the red light, and was actually able to hold his own against The Dragonzord, and the red ranger’s tyranosaurus zord. Something this slapdash, this insane, this… I know I say it a lot in this article, but something this hurr durr, has no right being this close to handing victory to the bad guys.

I kind of jumped ahead there, I know. Let’s back up a bit.

Rita throws her staff, and make this motherfucker grow.

“Ha! Wait till those teenage mutants get a load of a grownup turtle!” Shellshock declares.

I know, I heard it too. Look, the zord fight coming up is actually one of the more halfway decent ones, so hang in there, bud.

So how does Shellshock get beat, and his curse reversed? Maybe something to do with science? Maybe you have to destroy Shellshock in order to reverse it like with a lot of other monster-related curses? Well, as it turns out… You need flowers.

I am so not making this up. While off on her infinite jog, the yellow ranger is sent to pick flowers, and then use the unlimitted magic of literal flower power to beat the monster and reverse his spells. And somewhere in my subconscious, I can hear the sound of my mom taunting me and my love of this stupid show by singing the theme song of her favorite parody. I swear, I can still hear the echo of “Go go flower strangers!” in the most intentionally nasally singing voice possible, done knowing full well it drove me insane with rage… But I digress.

So yellow ranger waves flowers, monster goes kablooey, and Rita, in a genuinely funny moment, declares out loud that she should have her head examined for putting any sort of faith in Squat and Baboo. Not going to lie, that one still gets a chuckle out of me thirty years later, watching this on YouTube and trying to get screencaps.

So yeah, that’s pretty much Shellshock in a nutshell. Proving once and for all that sometimes, the dumbest idea imaginable can sometimes be more effective than a dozen brilliant ones. Just look at text messaging. Look at Twitter. Look at Replika. These are all ideas that, years ago, sounded like the dumbest shit you ever heard of, and now, they rule our culture despite how dumb they all are. Shellshock probably would’ve won that battle against the Power Rangers if he didn’t have flower allergies. And maybe a stearing wheel on his chest. Makes about as much sense as everything else that went into his creation.

“Go go Flower Strangers!”