Unofficial Sentai Akibaranger Season 2 - Discussion Thread

Nice post!!
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The episode was to showcase Zyuranger, show the awesomeness of Zyuranger, and to SAVE Zyuranger - not Power Rangers, and I think that's a point you're missing because it also made some jokes, some, yes, at the expense of Power Rangers.

I don't agree that homaging Zyuranger was the point. If Zyuranger alone was the point, then there would be no reason to bring up Power Rangers at all. I mean, Gokaiger didn't, when it homaged Zyuranger.

The episode is clearly about the relationship that exists between Power Rangers and Sentai. Even the episode's title references that, not anything from Zyuranger. The plot concerns what happens when that relationship's perceived status quo is upset, and suddenly Power Rangers is the original while Sentai is a derivative. Most of the episode is spent talking about the loss of Sentai, not just the loss of Zyuranger.

So the ending isn't just about reinstating one specific series, as it was with Dairanger. It's about reinstating Sentai's primacy as a franchise. Yes, they do so during the climax through the means of reinstating Zyuranger, which goes back to the fact that the first PR season used Zyuranger footage. But the "happy ending" isn't just Zyuranger being back, it's that Sentai as a whole is back.
 
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[HIDE]Yeah, so I'm going to play... not Devil's Advocate, here, but I'm going to point something out. Akibaranger 2 is written by Naruhisa Arakawa, and he is apparently going to write every episode. In tokusatsu, that usually indicates a work is particularly personal to the creator, and the best seasons written by a single writer tend to be viewed as masterworks that express a given writer's point of view. If you consider what Arakawa's point of view on Power Rangers is likely to be... well, it suddenly makes perfect sense that the PR episode turned out this way.

IMDB is by no means a perfect site, but you can find pretty exhaustive-looking lists of credits for the various Power Rangers seasons there. Naruhisa Arakawa also has a fairly long English IMDB page. And you know what's not on his IMDB page? A single Power Rangers credit. The man has written for Sentai for over twenty years. There is no way that Power Ranger has never used any of his scripts (in translation) or ideas, yet PR has never seen fit to credit him even once. Not even for Abaranger, the season where he was head writer, the season that famously dubbed a Japanese script. The original writer of that dubbed script, Yoshio Urasawa, does not appear to be credited in any way in the equivalent Power Rangers episode. The episode is instead credited only to "Steve Slavkin," even though it's, in theory, about how Japanese writing is strange. How does that make any sense?

If I imagine that I am Arakawa, and I am told to do an episode to promote the Zyuranger figures that mentions Power Rangers... well, I'm already probably not very happy about Power Rangers. To me, it probably seems like Power Rangers has spent my entire career ripping off my work, laughing at it, and not paying me a red cent for the pleasure. I am probably in a pretty fucking bad mood, and I'm going to use my little obscure satellite show to vent a bit about those arrogant dumb Americans who won't even let me have a screen credit. And honestly, in this case, can you really blame him?

By the way: if you think all of the PR references in Go-Busters were surprising, think again. They came after Yasuko Kobyashi probably knew she was receiving a writing credit for almost every single episode of Power Rangers Samurai, which means she maybe even got paid something for use of her scripts!! If Arakawa had ever received the same courtesy, this episode of Akiba would probably would've turned out much more affectionately. And given that Michiko Yokote is getting no credit for the first half of Megaforce, I very much doubt they'll give Arakawa any credit for the second half... even though the second half of the season is, quite pointedly, using more ideas from Gokaiger.[/HIDE]
Now my opinion of this episode just went from "misguided tribute I really have no negative or positive emotion towards" too "American's are useless and I should hate myself" I mean the way you put it I can get why Arakawa might not care for Power Rangers but to go out of his way to bash it instead of just doing a Zyuranger episode makes me sad. Look at that Dino Thunder episode. Connor didn't like Abaranger at first but by the end of the episode he loved it. That whole episode was about how something different can still have value and be awesome. And to see a show like Akibaranger that constantly shows countless weird things that aren't the social norm but can still be awesome to a nerd draw the line at it's American counterpart just makes me sad. I know the majority of PR is just a copy of their Sentai counterpart but most of us wouldn't even care about Sentai if it wasn't for PR. That's got to count for something.

And I know this could just be Arakawa's views and not everyone that works in Sentai. I mean Sakamoto works for Sentai and if Sakamoto hated PR then...I guess I just don't understand the world anymore. So there has to be some people behind the scenes that like PR and I know for a fact that there are Japanese viewers who watch PR, groups that sub episodes, and sites that talk about it. Even if it's a small minority I guess I can take solace in that...
 
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By the way: if you think all of the PR references in Go-Busters were surprising, think again. They came after Yasuko Kobyashi probably knew she was receiving a writing credit for almost every single episode of Power Rangers Samurai, which means she maybe even got paid something for use of her scripts!! If Arakawa had ever received the same courtesy, this episode of Akiba would probably would've turned out much more affectionately. And given that Michiko Yokote is getting no credit for the first half of Megaforce, I very much doubt they'll give Arakawa any credit for the second half... even though the second half of the season is, quite pointedly, using more ideas from Gokaiger.

That's really quite interesting (that Kobyashi received credit for PR Samurai). Do you know why there's this difference between her and the other writers?
 
The new Tendou Souji
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In tokusatsu, that usually indicates a work is particularly personal to the creator, and the best seasons written by a single writer tend to be viewed as masterworks that express a given writer's point of view.

Except if it happens with Faiz, then it's a diaper pile of stinky. :loltongue:

and this is coming from the guy who used Akiba's first season to take jabs at the Japanese government's slow response to the Tohoku earthquake.

Pardon my ignorance but, when did this happen?

They came after Yasuko Kobyashi probably knew she was receiving a writing credit for almost every single episode of Power Rangers Samurai, which means she maybe even got paid something for use of her scripts!!

IIRC, Daisuke Ishibashi got a credit in Samurai too when they used a script from one of his Shinkenger episodes.
 
CRETINS! ALL OF THEM!
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One thing to note is that the Powerful Rangers appeared because of Luna's wrong perception altered the Delusion World... so if you think about it, the Powerful Rangers are what Luna thinks American sentai warriors would be like based on nothing but the toys she saw Spielburton play with and her own subconscious image of America...

So in other words, blame the little trollop!
 
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One thing to note is that the Powerful Rangers appeared because of Luna's wrong perception altered the Delusion World... so if you think about it, the Powerful Rangers are what Luna thinks American sentai warriors would be like based on nothing but the toys she saw Spielburton play with and her own subconscious image of America...

So in other words, blame the little trollop!
I really don't think that's how writing works.
 
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To me that argument just comes off as rationalization. We do see an indication that there's a "real" Powerful Rangers that exists in the fiction, but we don't see any inkling of what it's like. In a world where Ninja Captor is a vintage moe anime, the "real" Powerful Rangers doesn't have to be anything like the Power Rangers that exists in our real world. It could very well be exactly what we see onscreen, and we're given no evidence to the contrary in the episode itself.

The first time we see an image of the Powerful Rangers in the episode, when Luna looks at a picture of the red ranger in a smartphone, he looks identical to Tyranno Ranger - no blue and red strips on his collar, unlike the Dellusion Powerful Rangers. What you've said about Arakawa's negative perception of Power Rangers makes a lot of sense though.
 
Let's Morphin
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I noticed the Powerful Rangers mimicking some of Hulk Hogan's moves. :patriotic:
 
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