Beast Morphers: It's Kind of Beautiful

[Music] hello Internet I'm the Disney brain and be smart first season one is a strange set of episodes it's this odd amorphous structure of a thing there's a very wonky way it goes about resolving plot points assuming they even resolve them and the tone can change on a dime with neither rhyme nor reason adding to that there's at least 10 implications per episode and in any given episode you might see two of these acted on at most so then why do I think Beiste morphers is not only a good Power Ranger season but one that succeeds on its own terms my basic thesis is this beast war Ferrer's genuinely does not care about their implications and instead they focus on progressively making the show more fun by whatever means they make up episode 2 episode and sometimes seem to seem it's hard to describe the plot of beasts morphers beyond just saying what happened during beasts morphers mayor daniels approves the morph x project and then all hell breaks loose as he predicted but you wouldn't know that from observing literally anything he does after the fact so instead of answering the types of questions you might expect from a different type of show we get news outlets ironically more concerned with marketing the Rangers as extreme bikers that's not even so much a critique as it feels like a hilariously unintended last gasp for Saban brands a divisions so focused on its namesake but they end up using the Rangers as a marketing gimmick in universe 2 so then later on steel shows up and completely steals the show for five episodes or so a focus that really highlights my aforementioned thesis they understood what they had in Steel and just let him run wild and in doing so he produced some of the funniest moments of the show even when he wasn't necessarily trying to be funny and all the while the villain faction is just a constant party of camp and creativity leading into a finale that finally acts on one of the many many loose plot threads in the beginning the casual disregard for convention that beast more furs embodies was distracting mainly because everything episode 1 set up promised something a bit bigger but as time marched on its true nature became clearer and its actual focal points grew on me and thinking about it that way made me realize that this show has a lot more going for it than a more traditional rubric of grading katella's not that anyone should feel beholden to traditional rubrics when it comes to art and visual mediums anyway the biggest example of this is the anomaly that is blaze and Roxy beefs morphers isn't very concerned with whoever their parents might be in a show that bends over backwards to focus on the existence of parents to the point where even Ben and Betty have a very present father beast morphers isn't concerned with the fact that they're catatonic states are presented the first of great battle forces many great failures failures that are never really punished or even highlighted and beasts morphers doesn't find it the least bit strange that Ravi likes to paint his unconscious ex-girlfriend while nobody else is watching or maybe they do and that's why they did it I can only hope but despite the myriad of character concerns here it never really stops the pair themselves from being wonderfully captivating in their own right and that's the thing this season gets right with a great deal of consistency early on they were fairly standard milquetoast antagonists and then once the show figured out how to use them they regularly challenged and push the Rangers they were always creating interesting plans and thoughtful schemes even against fellow villains in ways that felt organic when juxtaposed against how tech driven this season is it most embodies a much sillier take on Borg collective astronomer who also ended up developing pretty solid fairly patient plans to wipe out both dark Specter and the Rangers and you see that here with schemes such as copying the beasts powers and that's to say nothing of the whole larger objective being in and of itself a long game featuring an RPM mask season closer blaze as a counter to Devon is not written anywhere nearly as well as the last time two feline themed super soldiers but a whole season fighting but as far as being an evil avatar built to be sassy and absurd I liked him just fine and loved Roxy even more the way they find their footing by adjusting their strategies on its own make them or the craftier villain pairs but my biggest takeaway here and the bigger reason I coulda genuinely loved them is something a lot simpler than that the thing I adore the most about this pair is that as time went on they became more and more and more fun to watch act on these plans Roxy has this my indescribable villainous swagger about her that just commands your attention all while truly commanding the cyber dimension and blazes just derpy enough with a touch of unsecure to make his second fiddle roll adorable coincidentally it is funny that this occurs during another transitional period for the franchise because I think the Jin Jackson toxic a comparison is an almost appropriate one it never quite hits the emotional highs and lows that come of that beautiful and underrated pair but as far as being evil and embracing that camp wholeheartedly blaze and Roxy have it down to a science and having scroll around and then Varga later on only adds the wonderfully entertaining villain dynamics here really the only glaring weak point is the big snake himself who has only ever allowed to play diabolical straight man in this merry band of lovable crazies I usually don't start with the villains in these seasonal reviews but this time around it just felt right because this colorful cast of conniving comrades ended up being fantastic in ways my initial thoughts video never could have predicted when episode 4 aired I couldn't help but feel weird about the fact that Roxy's avatar recalling the good in her was used exclusively as a ploy and not a plot point a ploy which made it abundantly clear there was no gray area with her villainy so naturally that intertwined arco sorts ends of Ravi losing his damn mind and cathartic ly killing his avatar ex one of his finer moments honestly but looking back on that now it's very clear that beast morphers wasn't interested in reinventing Tenaya sevens arm sans the sister part so instead of banking on internal conflict they bet the house on Roxy's biggest strength her charisma and they never really looked back and it ends up creating a situation where Ravi's turmoil while inconsistently displayed is much more affecting even jarring Lisa Roxy wasn't just going through the villain motions she was having fun ripping Ravi's heart out and she knew in the end that she could still work her charm and distract him from his mission and by that point Harvey even hesitate to wiper out like that's pretty big he doesn't hesitate to kill a grow who looks exactly like his former flame between his odd interpretation of date night and his initial bout with deception it seemed like they were surprisingly intentional about building up to this moment on an emotional level as well as a story level Ravi is a weird dude the writers seem to know that and because of that I find him far more interesting now than I did back when he only had a single expression all this to say that Ravi was pretty excellent in the later stages of season one it took him a little longer than the others but he really did settle into his role there is really not too much to say about him beyond how his ROTC connection pans out but he served his purpose just fine they gave him a lot of moments the shine after Steele gave up the mid-season spotlight and I think he kind of did at least more so than Zoe whose big thing was standing around and being nervous about how much she wants to get inside Nate's lab lab but because of that squandering her potential as a character he is harder to overlook because they didn't actually replace it with anything so I still hold to the idea that she would have come off a lot better had she firmly embraced the towel girl mentality from episode one it bears repeating from a previous video that if Roxy was picked over her it should take an added amount of effort on Zoe's part to stand up to her or any enemy for that matter I just don't think that starting off not at all ready for this and then becoming ready for this is ever a bad way to go and PR makes that article of pretty seamless when they want to do it but you guys are already well-versed on my thoughts regarding underdog Rangers so this stance likely surprises nobody Devin on the other hand does feel like a more standard Ranger archetype clearly inspired from the good old days of dads existing but for real all that stuff is pretty good even if it feels like a studio mandate in direct response to the NiO Saban era more than anything else and even then it mostly comes off as a sparsely utilized compromise between mr. Collins and Dana Romero anyway we get the expected but still fun little moment of mayor Daniels getting to be proud of a son but at the cost of the mayor's very clearly important job meaning absolutely nothing in the and scheme of things so depending on which side of the Red Ranger father fence you clung to during the last five years your moms might vary on how resonating or even how necessary all this ended up being especially since a lot of what works about Devyn as a character has very little to do with his father and more to do with him being allowed to act not terribly different from how I viewed Tyler Navarro except Devin has this amazing episode where he gets addicted to power and damn near murders Ravi which to give even more credit to the villain ease this go-round was another fun and clever bit of Roxy deception I spent an entire video talking about Nate and steal a few months back my thoughts on the pair haven't really changed since then so I won't repeat myself too much here this is mainly because Steel is just as amazing even without the heavy focus he got immediately after his introduction weave steel what you see is what you get and it happened to be exactly what I wanted so he easily became my favorite Ranger out of the bunch and reading a lot of the build-up to the season finale through him all while taking care of best boy spot until his untimely end and damn near dying for the cause yeah that was just about the best thing ever I'm the gold Ranger side of the coin Nate and Zoe being maybe official doesn't end up meaning anything for the time being so there's not really too much to say about Nate other than he is also pretty great if you like your tech wizard Rangers allow the Billie's in camps of yesteryear Nate plays his part admirably except for his really really awkward and systems on having a biological brother specifically it's another one of those odd implications that this season doesn't really care to explore but while we're talking about Nate I wanted to highlight sound and fury for just a minute this was one of a handful of season highlights for me that didn't come by way of acting or characterization the idea here is that this new grid battle force employee Megan is up to no good in typical Megan fashion I like this one because Megan is presented as so unapologetically cutthroat that she's almost too real a depiction of desperate jobseekers granted Beiste more furs isn't really making any intentional statements on that but I appreciated that they didn't try to soften the blow too much here Megan lies and gets called out for it and instead of coming clean perhaps taking the nation's OE thing to her grave and maybe even making amends have been and Betty who she insults she digs in her heels on this blackmails them and gets fired for it but she still walks away feeling like the victim here she's so obviously wrong and everyone understands that except her I appreciated that because situations like this don't tend to resolve cleanly or amicably and it didn't here there was no lesson learned per se just a bad situation dealt with because sometimes the antagonists aren't the villains as I mentioned in my previous videos the foundation of beefs morphers is rarely one that gets built atop of they find themselves content with abandoning that project arbitrarily to focus on smaller more whimsical ones on the one hand it's not great writing to have your mayor running unopposed and then critiqued for re-election after lord knows how many robot battles have raised his city not to mention the copious amounts of morph X swiped because he signed an agreement he had severe doubts about but on the other hand I don't mind that too much because what we got in exchange for that wonkiness is fun episodes carried by fun characters beasts morphers isn't really trying to address its problem areas so much as it seeks to put it all into its greatest aspects and on that front I think it succeeds on that front beast more furs ends up being kind of beautiful beast war first season one has all the clear signs of being the Saban Hasbro halfway house that it is it's an uncanny amalgamation of concepts and narratives that get easily thrown off track and maybe on occasion find their way back home which is understandable you have writers who are used to working on a ranger episodes teamed up with former transformers story editors so the push and pull doesn't really shock me we come in with the understanding the show hit the ground running as a Saban brands product well before Hasbro officially took the reins talks and plans were of course ongoing well before the finished contracts were signed but we can still clearly observe the influence of Saban brands on what we see where said influence starts and ends is harder to pinpoint because who's to say when H free to form Hasbro PR season will even look like yeah we could postulate that perhaps Hasbro is looking to get really into expanding this universe and by extension the brand the myriad of insinuations lore shutouts and - cameo seemed pretty indicative of that even if season one seems almost contractually obligated to ignore all of that for now in the comparable positioned Wild Force we saw a similar internal confusion of sorts with hashing out an identity for that season because it ended up being a weird mix of relatively better executed implications and hilarious nonsense depending partly on how much any given episode took from gal Ranger I still love it wholeheartedly but I mean they had no clue what they were doing of kite slash animus this in direct contrast to the fully sub on air at time for us just a year before that what absolutely wild of the implications of the American exclusive rancic despite being even closer to its Sentai counterpart in many respects so between that and lost galaxy slash Lightspeed Rescue being slightly more mature and thoughtful takes on the range of formula it's clear that Saban would have probably continued to leave the 90s behind had you retained the rights it's really how the unofficial posts are an era operated with the death of the Ranger patriarch the franchise felt the need to grow up mostly literally but also narrative Lee to varying degrees of effectiveness but once Disney fully took over we got Ninja Storm and Dino Thunder back-to-back two seasons that placed implications much lower on the proverbial totem pole than Wild Force era go by low Thor being part of the once an odd a family feels like an afterthought and my Tommy having helped create the threat feels again like an afterthought during those two years Doug stone and Austin and their team heavily favored an engaging cast of characters who are easy to want to follow so their executive producer run had both a different and a more defined identity and what came immediately before them so all of this is the same that Hasbro is still very clearly working on forging PR into their own image I think they fully understand the value of the franchise they spent multi millions to purchase and I think they'll be able to better carry out their vision for it in the coming years because for as much as I enjoyed beast or furs it's still very clearly a product of what the Neo Saban era could pull out on its best days which adds up when you take a look at how many series writers were carried over from Ninja steel and Dino charge and there's something of a last hurrah for that dubious and heavily divisive era of storytelling it gets the job done in might've never having the clearest understanding of how they want to do that job oh and while we're talking about production staff random but cool behind-the-scenes detail for all of you guys so the method directed the most episodes of beast more first so far goes by the name of Oliver driver who also directed my favorite episode of ninja steal among other things but you all might know him better as master swoop in closing beasts morphers works for me because it isn't a show content of just rehashing MMPR or just rehashing go busters but rather it comes to us from a school of various PR influences and it does so in any way that's easy for younger fans to latch onto while throwing the old guard a few nods every now and then that balance is more or less Hasbro's blueprint for unlocking the potential of the brand's they've already been managing and I suspect that Hasbro will lean on that mentality even more now that their ranger trial period is ended and a lot more avenues are open to them I just hope that when they do so whether it's out in space or on a train or maybe they really throw us a curveball they don't forget about all the good things they already gave us so yeah I like where Rangers is right now I think I'll enjoy where it's going and hopefully you guys do too either way let me know your thoughts on beasts morphers down below and speaking of letting me know your thoughts it's time for another viewer competition featuring my recently completed story chronic storm 2 and hopefully it works out a bit cleaner than the last time I did it so the way you enter is just like the first time read that sequel story that I poured my entire being into and leave an awesome review on Wattpad and if you're willing to star the chapters as you go that would help me out a lot and grant you my undying love also instead of having just one winner and several runner ups here there will actually be three winners the three contestants who leave the best reviews and by best I'm talking about doing for my stories when I tend to do 4 Ranger stories will win the grand prize of their pick of any lightning collection figure that's out as of recording this the only one that doesn't apply for is the lost Galaxy 2 pack because you know that costs a bit more and any awesome reviews that don't win will still get a mention from me in the results video about 5 weeks or so from now where I'll tell all of you guys about why I love what you had to say so while you beautiful people get to reading I'll get to finishing part two of my four is a review and until then thanks for watching

Channel: The Disney Brain

Views: 132,263

Rating: 4.9229221 out of 5

Keywords: beast morphers, steel, andre black nerd, linkara, super sentai, kamen rider, tokusatsu, review, season 1, doctor k, rpm, jason scott, season 2, time force, wild force, lightspeed rescue

Id: OyHzmFPfc1Y

Length: 17min 59sec (1079 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 28 2019