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Last year our award-winning series took home an Emmy in broadcast excellence for our expose, "Adam West: Crotch of Ages." This year we're turning the kind of investigative journalism you've come to know and love from the Internet on the dramatic rise and tragic fall of America's first ethnically themed anti-terrorism unit, the original five members of Saban's Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers. In each episode the Power Rangers taught adolescents valuable lessons about cooperation, sharing, and other ideals viewed as socialist bullshit by today's red state standards. But behind the spandex lurked a much darker side of karate stardom. Sooner or later the clock to every ranger's morphin' time strikes midnight, and the descent into alcohol, pornography, and death is as sure as the Velcro supporting their unisex onesies. To better put this into perspective, imagine you're Tobey Maguire. You're fresh off the filming of the most eagerly anticipated superhero sequel of all time, Seabiscuit 2: Rise of the Seabiscuits. You realize your career has peaked, there's nowhere to go but down, and now the only thing left to jockey for is the corner stool at the bar. Do you persevere, or do you collapse under the weight of your own fame? Unfortunately, the Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers sank like a shot of Jager into that oh-so-sweet pilsner abyss, and now only this article remains as a warning to future rangers of their varied, individual failings. Use the handy trading cards to help keep track of your favorite ranger's celebrity dysfunction, even on the go! Let's begin. Zack
Only by raising a Theo Huxtable to the nigh infinite Eddie Winslowth power can we begin to calculate the amount of blood Zack shed during his wrist-slitting sissyfits. When Zack wasn't being repeatedly rejected by the same girl over and over, the only other African American in Angel Grove, he spent his time developing his own fighting style, "hip hop kido." Hip hop kido combined all the unnecessary movement of dancing with rhythmic flailing. It wasn't quite karate and wasn't quite the truffle shuffle, but to be fair Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers aired before Chuck Liddell showed us that the human arm is really just an assault rifle disguised as a pic-a-nic basket full of knuckle sammiches.
Trini
Trini's main power was the power of petition, and she exercised it daily at the juice bar. Unfortunately, evil space witches and God have one thing in common - no matter how many people sign letters of protest, they're still probably going to end up fucking things up for everyone in high school. Trini was just handy enough with the English language to translate Billy's craaaaazy 8th grade vocabulary words into a series of grunts and push-ups that Jason could understand, and she was just breast-baring enough to stand behind Kimberly. Otherwise she was useless in every facet. Even Zordon knew this - that's why he gave the other rangers weapons like swords and axes and Trini got two daggers. I don't know how many of my readers have faced the eternal hordes spawned from an elderly Dutch dragon's pottery kiln of evil, but only a handful of these monsters even had a throat to sneak up behind and slit. Bringing daggers to a full frontal assault is about as useful as useful as wielding two shields and an appendix that explodes on command. Trini couldn't suck any harder if she had vaccuum attachments instead of hands and pissed Hawking radiation.
Billy
Billy was given a lance and the Triceratops Zord. This is the spiritual equivalent of being promoted to Aquaman and being told, "Congratulations, master of the seas! Now go forth in your brand new Fiat and kill the dark threats of space!" Working for McDonalds and working for Zordon are pretty much one and the same. Upon being hired you hear the same speech that everyone else hears about how hard work, dilligence, and sticking with the company will net you big promotions over the years and advancements to management, but after ten years of tenacious fry vat manning you notice you keep hearing the same speech. "Rodrigo Lo sentimos, su patatas francés son tan nítidas como un Tequila Sunrise, pero no tenemos espacio para los avances. Sin embargo hemos gastado su póliza de seguro de salud para comprar una placa de oro y un UNICORN ZORD!"
Jason
Kimberly
Maybe Zordon should have looked for more than just "attitude" in the teenagers he abducted, or maybe Zordon should have been a big floating head in a wheelchair. I'm not saying that he should have been fired from management for being retarded, but maybe corporate should have occasionally dropped by for a visit to check up on things. Zordon gave Kimberly a power bow without any power arrows, so when she ran out of artillery that she stole from Jason's wigwam in the only episode in which she actually used it as a ranged weapon, it became the very essence of Kimberly, a curved stick wildly swinging around between cartwheels. Giving the girl who can't fight a gun without ammunition isn't necessarily a bad idea if you have the right casualty insurance, but putting the same chick in charge of a multi-billion dollar pterodactyl robot? That's just irresponsible, espcially considering there was an entire episode dedicated to how she couldn't even fly a propeller plane.
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Zack was the black ranger and token black guy, but the producers never bothered to tell him that. He certainly dressed the part, though. In every episode he dressed like what would happen if Rhythm Nation fucked the Nation of Islam, but beyond that the only thing black about him was his crybaby emo heart. To put the enormity of Zack's angst-trodden vagina into scientific terms, here's the math formula astrophysicists gathered via evidence from the Hubble telescope to calculate its dimensions:
Trini was the best Asian girl on the team, which in this case is like Bigfoot winning a medal for World's Hairiest Bigfoot. This analogy may seem one dimensional on the surface, but Trini's other major contribution to life was being an environmentalist, so she just may have been the one thing standing between a proud, prize-winning Bigfoot and a hunter's deadly scope.
As the stereotypical nerd of the group, Billy was always fixing the command center's supercomputers and creating teleportation watches. In one episode he even invented a machine that caused him to swap bodies with Kimberly. This may seem like a roundabout way to see a girls tits, but when you're a 24 year old high school supernerd you may as well be a Nancy Drew villain, because you're one step away from chloroforming teenage girls and still not knowing what the hell to do with them. This episode also introduced the world to Billy's most lasting invention, vaginal dryness, as a natural defense mechanism to his awkward prodding.
You may think that Jason being selected as the Red Ranger had something to do with the savage fury of the Native American heart, but mostly it's because as the leader of the team he possessed the same tactical prowess as the British Colonial Army. Jason couldn't lead Trini to a casino, even if he himself built it upon upon his grandparents shrieking remains. The only reason the Power Rangers ever won their battles is because someone else always came up with a strategy to defeat the god damn monster, and even then they had to adapt their plans to fit into Jason's schema of a throaty, full frontal assault. The only thing that saved the rangers from Jason's idiocy was Rita's inability to craft monsters whose weaknesses didn't possess the same irony as their strengths. Maybe her orders just got lost in translation somewhere between the Japanese that was crossing her lips and the English that came out of her throat, who knows, but Rita couldn't even create a pig that eats everything without it being susceptible to Montezuma's revenge.
What happens when you take the condescending air of unwarranted accomplishment from a valley girl? Myspace's user base becomes as lowly numbered as Tila Tequila's T-cell count! Haha. Just kidding, internet, it's Kimberly from the Power Rangers! Kimberly's weapon was the power bow, which would be fantastic except all of the rangers had guns that they also never used. Maybe if Rita ever sent a gigantic Steve Miller to Earth to head a posse of ornery space cowboys on laserhorses to do battle then, you know what, nevermind. Both history and the power of rock have already taught us the outcome of that struggle.
