Emerje wrote:Lucky Logician wrote:Rated X wrote:Ewww...power rangers. The biggest Voltron rip off in history.
For the record, Super Sentai (Himitsu Sentai Gorenger) premiered in 1975. Beast King Go Lion didn't come around until 1981.
On the mecha side Super Sentai wouldn't introduce combining robots until 1981 themselves with Taiyo Sentai Sun Vulcan.
Neither were the first to introduce the concept, there are plenty of older examples in Japan including the stuff Takara was cranking out under Diaclone in 1980 or the series World Events intended to make into Voltron, but got sent the wrong "the one with the lion" show instead of GoLion,
Future Robo Daltanious from 1979.
Emerje
I think a lot of people misinterpreted my comment so let me be more specific on why I call Power Rangers the biggest Voltron rip off in history....
First of all remember im from the US. I dont know anything about Japanese cartoons that pre-date voltron. And as a child we here in the US knew it as Voltron. It was the brand. As a 7 year old thats all I knew. Hell I didnt know Diaclone either. All I knew was those after school and Saturday morning cartoons. Thats it.
Now lets fast foward to the early 90s when power rangers came out in the US. I was not into cartoons or toys at the time. I was in high school. But they were so popular you couldnt help but notice them. Naturally I watched the show a few times out of pure curiosity.
My biggest issue with the show was live actors (actual humans rather than cartoon) And to make it even stupider they were ninjas. So it was a ku-fu fest of brightly colored leotards with motorcycle helmets. After 15 minutes of foolishness each episode would climax in a voltron style battle with a zord and some kind of monster. It was so stupid because after watching nearly 20 minutes of saved by the bell humor mixed with horrible kung fu scenes, all of a sudden it becomes killer robot combiners from outer space.
So the reason I call it a voltron rip off is because you have a team of 5 pilots that have adventures and then combine their vehicles to form a giant robot to battle a different monster every episode. But at least in voltron the pilots were just pilots, not ninjas. And at least in voltron, they stuck to animation rather than switching from human actors to metal costumes, stop action toy sequences or whatever they used to do the "zords". It was just really stupid. I mean really stupid. It was a rip off of voltron with live actors and a TMNT twist because ninjas were more popular that robots by the 90s in the US.
Horrible show, just horrible. Even captian power was better.