Brian’s Exploratory Christmas Endeavor 2016: 2/25
This was the longest 23 minutes of my life.
Since I was a little boy, the production values of Power Rangers have vastly improved, and the almost sickeningly wholesome messages in the show are still there, which is good for the kids. Nothing that’s wrong with this kids’ TV special has to do with the Power Rangers gimmick itself or even bad writing; rather, it turns into a clip show for some reason to fill out the greatest part of its runtime, and some of those clips are just montages of seemingly disjointed clips from the show with no real relation to each other, or to the theme of this episode which is supposedly about Christmas.
The Power Rangers have a pal called RoboKnight who, being a robot knight, doesn’t understand Christmas. So he seeks to study it by standing in a toy store for 24 hours, and is confused with a bunch of donations meant to go to Africa, packed up, and shipped off to, ya know, Africa. As kids’ shows go, this isn’t a bad premise for an episode. But once RoboKnight arrives in a small African village where children are handed out their toys, he sits down and just…starts talking about the Power Rangers with them. And he re-caps his entire history with the team over a fire. And that’s about it. After they all fall asleep and he powers up their new Christmas tree with enough juice to last through the night, he turns into a big lion head thing and flies off, thanking the sleeping children for helping him understand the Christmas spirit. Only they didn’t help him learn anything as far as I could tell; he told them a bunch of stories about Power Rangers, friendship, and protecting the planet and the environment, and learning why humans hug their children, and that was about it.
As Christmas specials go, this really isn’t one. I at least expected a new monster, to threaten Christmas and have its ass beaten by an escalating series of Ranger maneuvers culminating in a big robot using a super move on it, as is the case in every episode of the show ever produced (roughly), but instead, it was just a clip show with some Christmas decor in the background and about 2 minutes of actual Christmas theming in the initial setup.
So, inoffensive as it was, it wasn’t really a Christmas show, and thus it gets only ★☆☆☆☆ from be, with a final rating of:
UNWATCHABLE
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