How About That Thing?

You know, I really didn’t want to do a Christmas special on this website.

For starters, I’m a Baha’i. The closest thing to Christmas we have is probably Nahrus, and Nahrus is in March. Also, it’s really more of a big feast kind of holiday than an exchange gifts and pretend like we’re decent people the other 364 days of the year sort of holiday. While Baha’is respect the teachings of Jesus Christ, and consider him one of the divine manifestations who came before Bahaullah, we don’t really celebrate Christmas. Or at least not the Jesusy parts. Maybe some put up a tree and talk about Santa Claus, but not me. Not because of any holier than thou attitude, but because in that period of time after I was confirmed as a Baha’i, and before I got married and moved in with my wife, I just didn’t have one. Nor did I have any real desire to get one.

More than anything, though… Well… I have to confess something. I have really grown to hate Christmas over the years. Sorry not sorry, I just can’t fucking stand the sugary sweet sentiments, the cheerful atmosphere, the hokey as hell Hallmark movies, ninety different versions of the same seven songs playing on the radio on loop, the rampant and unapologetic commercialism that fuels our selfish consumerism… But the biggest sin came somewhere around the 2010s, as all recent historical mistakes and bad moves often do, when Christmas decided it didn’t need to stay in December.

I have no idea what decision was made where, but somewhere around 2010, I noticed that Christmas music was playing on radio stations as early as the week of Halloween. Furthermore, Christmas decorations were out and about the local target at the exact same time. Hell, it’s like Thanksgiving never even existed. And every year since, it seems to get worse and worse. It was enough of a slog when it was only twenty-four days long. But when it starts in October? That’s two whole months of holly jolly diabetes being thrown my way, and I, for one, am sick of it.

But I guess I got to do SOMETHING for Christmas. It’s, like, content creator law or something. So fuck it, let’s do another Power Rangers episode retrospective, shall we?

Honestly, though, the only Christmas episode of Power Rangers I know of is several seasons beyond where I currently am in my Power Rangers scripts, all the way up there in Power Rangers Zeo territory. I suppose I COULD track down that VHS exclusive from season 1, but for the life of me, I can’t find it. Meanwhile, this episode from Zeo showed up right away. So screw it: we’re jumping ahead several seasons, and covering an episode from Power Rangers Zeo.

BACKSTORY: Power Rangers Zeo is what you get when the rangers obtain the five fragments of the Zeo crystal, and put it together. Ironically, they were the ones who destroyed it earlier on in season 3 of Mighty Morphin’ in order to keep Master Vile from going after it over and over again… But we’ll get to that another time. When it was assembled, it gave five of the six rangers new zeo powers, which basically means they decided not to go the Zyu2 route anymore and purchased the rights to that year’s Super Sentai stock footage. They have new costumes, new colors, new zords, sort of new music, new villains, and so on.

Up to speed? Good. Let’s begin!

The episode begins with Tommy narrating about the atmosphere of Christmas. He talks all about the smell of pine, the taste of peppermint, the sounds of that horrendous Mariah Carrey song Gen-Z practically masturbates to every year…

Oh yeah, I fucking went there. FIGHT ME!

Anyway, we’re then greeted with this.

Yip, Tommy apparently has a grandson somewhere down the line. And whew boy is this kid terrible. I really do try not to harp on child actors these days, because hey, we all got to start somewhere, right? But holy monkey, this kid makes the kid who played Anniken Skywalker in The Phantom Menace look Oscar worthy.

Tommy tells his grandson about this one time when The Power Rangers were helping out with this holiday festival.

Yes sir, all the rangers were helping with this epic holiday feast. Tanya: the newest ranger, token black character, and the one whose mere existence in the present day is a major time paradox we apparently just glanced over because “screw it, it’s for kids”, explains how Kwanzaa works. Tommy has Chanuka and the menorah explained to him by… Uh… Some guy I don’t remember being part of the show till now, but in my defense, it’s actually been ages since I’ve seen Zeo. And Katherine brings in shrimp, because AUSSIE AUSSIE AUSSIE! OI OI OI!

No seriously, Katherine actually says that in Australia, Christmas is in the summer, and they celebrate by barbecuing shrimp. Now I don’t know much about Australia, outside of the obvious stuff like kangaroos, Fosters, dingoes, didgeridoo, and the fact England used it as a place to dump its unwanted citizenry back in the day, but my gut tells me this is bullshit. I think someone on the production team knew even less about Australia than I did, and decided to stretch that whole “shrimp on the bahbee” thing to its limit.

A lot of these explanations of different customs and different celebrations feels kind of heavy-handed to me. Yeah, I know it’s a kid show, and I probably ought to lower my standards, but cripes, guys! There’s injecting a lesson into your episode, and then there’s beating you over the head with it. And right now, my doctor is discouraging me from sleeping while I recover from the concussion this attempt at a lesson is giving me.

All that being said, I have to confess, I actually didn’t know what Kwanzaa was until I saw this episode back in the day. If you think I’m dumb now, I also didn’t know Juneteenth was a thing till Donald Trump threatened to crash it that one time. Sue me: for the first ten years of my life, I lived in Kansas. And not the more liberal Kansas City, either. We’re talking the whitest part of the state, second only to places like Utah or Idaho. The fact I even knew what Chanukah was was nothing short of a miracle..

Getting back on track, it’s looking like holiday cheer is in the air. Even Zordon and Alpha are getting into the holiday spirit in the command ce… Uh… “power chamber”. Excuse me.

Not going to lie, the little gift exchange between Zordon and Alpha is actually kind of adorable. I think it’s only the second time I’ve heard Zordon actually laugh. As I said in the Pumpkin Rapper article back in October: I kind of wonder what a show with nothing but Zordon and Alpha between monster attacks would look like? This would definitely be the Christmas episode.

But not everybody is having a good time during the holidays. Specifically…

This is King Mondo and Queen Machina: the royal family of The Machine Empire, and the main villains of Zeo. I’ll talk more about them when I get to them… But the one thing I will say for now is that, honestly, The Machine Empire kind of felt like a step up and a step down at the exact same time. They definitely made a pretty impactful first impression, bombing the crap out of Zedd and Rita’s house the moment they arrived… But then you actually get to MEET the royal family, and yeesh. More often than not, they just lack that sort of menace early Lord Zedd or Master Vile had whenever they were on screen, you know.

That being said, they’re still better than Divatox.

King Mondo finds this holiday spirit concept absolutely repulsive, and with the help of Machina, he devises a plan. Simply put, he’ll use the rangers’ various differences to turn them against each other! While they spend the holiday season at each other’s throats, they’ll be too busy to notice any REAL threats lurking in the shadows. Hurray for neoliberalism!

King Mondo sends his son, Sprocket, down to Earth to hit the rangers with his new weapon: a mind control ray he refers to as, and I swear I’m not making this up, the bias blaster.

I know, I heard it too. I guess the insensativitator was taken.

Under the influence of… Ugh, the bias blaster. The rangers begin acting like complete and total dicks to each other.

Meanwhile, somewhere else in the episode…

Of course, it wouldn’t be a Power Rangers episode without Bulk and Skull. Throughout Zeo, they work for a private investigations firm. Unfortunately, it’s a kid show, so aside from the weekly monster attacks, Angel Grove is absolutely boring. Bulk and Skull often find themselves with very mundane cases. Case in point, this week, they’re searching for missing fruit cakes.

While Derplock Holmes and Watsimpleton go on this wild goose chase, Mondo decides having the rangers bicker among themselves isn’t enough. After Sprocket makes the long trek back home to… Wherever mom and dad are stationed, he gets sent right back down to collect all the “trinkets” associated with the holidays. So Sprocket goes back down to Earth, and swipes the menorah, the Kwanzaa candles, the shrimp, the christmas tree (I think there was a tree involved anyway)… The whole damn lot of it.

It’s here you’d think Mondo and Machina would take advantage of the discord they’ve sewn, and send a monster of the day down to fuck up Angel Grove. After all, the rangers are too busy fighting amongst themselves to ever cooperate and form this season’s version of the megazord. Hell, send down some giant robotic Christmas tree, or evil reindeer with a laser nose, or a robot Frosty the Snowman with a deadly Kung Lao esque hat. I’m surprised they didn’t take all of the goodies they swiped and make some sort of horrifying robotic Lovecraftian horror! Hell, at this point, I’d take a platoon of cogs in Santa hats!

SIDE NOTE: cogs are Zeo’s equivalent of putties. As far as evil minions at the bottom of the pecking order are concerned, they’re probably my favorite. But I digress.

Nope, this is pretty much the extent of the plan: turn the rangers into jerks, steal all their crap, and laugh at them while they’re still fighting amongst themselves to notice. Take that, forces of justice! VICTORY IS OURS!

Christ all mighty, this is like something Professor Chaos from South Park would come up with! Except at least then, it’d be funny on purpose.

But wait! There’s one thing Mondo’s brilliant plot didn’ anticipate.

That’s right, ladies and gentlemen. Mondo’s dreaded bias blaster’s one weakness? A little girl with a poster. And a song! A really, really, really bad song. Seriously, I fast-forwarded through this song when I rewatched this episode.

With the power of songs and posters, the spell over the rangers is broken, and Mondo is left with no choice but to beat the shit out of his manservant, Clank, in order to feel better about his inability to ruin a fucking diversity banquet.

And as for Bulk and Skull, they do figure out what happened to all the fruit cakes.

Yip,that’s a big ass fruitcake all right. And who could’ve done such a thing? Why, none other than…

Yeah, there’s this whole thing about how Rito Revolto and Goldar somehow bungled the theft of the Zeo crystal, and wound up with amnesia, forgetting they’re supposed to be the bad guys and end up becoming Bulk and Skull’s friends and occasional co-conspirators on cases. As memory serves, it was dumb, pointless, and I’m pretty sure it didn’t go anywhere in the grand scheme of things. Seriously, even for Bulk and Skull, this whole fruitcake thing was dumb.

That being said, I thought it was funny when Goldar pointed out their original idea was a giant cheese log.

The story ends, but not without one last glimpse into the future, where we see…

Yip, somewhere down the line, the will-they-won’t-they forced romantic interest angle between Tommy and Katherine gets resolved at some point, and they do. I’m sure SOMEONE found that forced romantic interest stuff interesting. Unfortunately for them, I, an eleven-year-old boy, didn’t.

They imply pretty heavily that the kid’s older brother inherits the mantle of power ranger, and we go to credits. Where in we are treated to some outtakes where the girl playing Tanya REALLY struggles with her lines. I always love the outtakes. In fact, I think the reason I watched as long as I did was for the outtakes. But I digress.

And that’s it. No monster fight, no zord battle… Shit, they couldn’t even get Billy to show up for this one. Though I think by the time this episode had come out, they’d written Billy out of the show entirely… But still, this was actually pretty god damn awful.

Look, I understand that the Power Rangers franchise comes with an understanding of things being silly, low budget, and a bit heavy-handed. Really, I think all that ended up adding to the overall charm, and it’s probably why I stuck around as long as I did. However, this episode… Well, I guess someone’s heart was in the right place, but more than anything, this episode felt unnecessary. Seriously, ninety-nine percent of the “legasequels” we’ve been getting this decade (IE, Top Gun 2, Ghostbusters: Afterlife, Bill and Ted Face the Music, Goodburger 2, etc.) didn’t even feel this unnecessary. It had nothing that made Power Rangers the tour de force it is now, and instead, we just got a bunch of randos in multicolor sweaters telling us about how diversity is good, and how being a bigot is bad in one of the more unsubtle ways I’ve seen since Santa Inc.

All and all, you can definitely afford to skip this one.