Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Why Dino Thunder is not a parody of MMPR

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Power Rangers Dino Thunder is often criticized by Power Ranger fans as being a poor attempt by Disney to Parody MMPR. While I personally am not a fan of the direction that Power Rangers went under Disney ownership (especially during the Bruce Kalish era), Dino Thunder is one of my favorite PR incarnations, and I view this as a misconception. Sure, the series does poke fun here and there at MMPR, but some of the similar elements are not Disney's fault. To start off, Disney and Doug Sloan (who was one of the main producers in both MMPR and PRDT) are only dealing with the hand they are given by TOEI, the company that owns Super Sentai. Some of the similarities between PRDT and MMPR include a dinosaur theme (even more specific the Red Ranger drawing powers from the Tyranosaurus, Blue Ranger drawing power rangers from the Triceratops, and the lone female ranger drawing from the Pteradactyl), an evil power ranger (in this series the white ranger), and even the Dino Thunder logo that looks similar to the original Green Ranger power coin. These similarities that I listed above are all in Dino Thunder's Super Sentai counterpart Abaranger. The white ranger in Abaranger (called Abarekiller) fought against the other Abarangers for excitement before ultimately joining with them to fight a common enemy. This is the source material that Disney was given and had to adapt to. Also, Mesogog is vastly different from Rita or Lord Zedd, and there is no equivilant of Zordon in Dino Thunder.

1 comment:

  1. I've never heard of people criticizing Dino Thunder for "parodying MMPR," but that's quite an interesting. Nice post. ;)

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