thedarlingone (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
thedarlingone) wrote2025-03-06 01:09 am
thedarlingone) wrote2025-03-06 01:09 am
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have been farming seasonal diys in animal crossing (for november, i am a great time traveller in the animals crossing), and because this is a process that involves standing in one place staring at the sky on my switch screen for hours and spamming a button once every 5-30 minutes to pop a balloon when it comes by, i have also been watching a tv slightly more involved than my usual youtube streams of video games i'm already intimately familiar with.
specifically, i am watching "tokusou sentai dekaranger" because leia likes it very much and keeps using the characters instead of ocs whenever we need a sequels-era x-wing squadron for a star trek fic. super sentai is the japanese show that gets recut with american actors and dialogue to become power rangers; like power rangers (at least after the first few seasons), it tells a self-contained story with different characters each season.
dekaranger is the season that became power rangers spd, which stands for (i think) special police department? something like that. the ranger team is a group of future cops protecting earth against alien terrorists. like power rangers, it's a kids' show, so it's relatively uncomplicated in its morals and tone, but what really strikes me -- i wouldn't say i've seen many japanese cop shows, i have in fact seen two, this one from 2004ish and a miniseries from 2017 that was a spinoff of lupin iii. both were... pretty blatantly copaganda, and so the thing that keeps striking me about them is how *different* the aims are from american copaganda. it's a lot more... it's a lot more andy griffith show? but not quite. let me try to articulate.
modern american copaganda boils down to "cops should have unlimited power because the alternative is Bad People Doing Things, you don't want that". old american copaganda like the andy griffith show was more "cops are Good People who mean well and you should trust the system even if you encounter one who seems bad or stupid because the people further up in charge are good and virtuous".
dekaranger, and also the zenigata miniseries, have the "cops are Good People who mean well and you should trust the system", but with both a complete lack of barney fife -- characters can fail in order to learn better, but they don't stay incompetent or clumsy for long, because that would reflect badly on the force for keeping them around -- and an extra layer of declaiming on the topic of What Being A Good Cop Is All About, usually with a focus on putting others first, protecting civilians, etc.
and they're extremely careful not to portray or glorify police overreach, according to their lights. at least in, as i said, the two examples i've seen. dekaranger has the police doubling as executioners, but makes sure to run a whole clip every time explaining that the supreme court of the universe which resides outside of time has held a fair trial and found the villain guilty before issuing the death sentence. or occasionally not guilty / issued a lighter sentence.
(since most of the villains of the week are, you know, power rangers villains with rap sheets like "destroyed 79 planets for the lols", the show is uninterested in debating the death penalty. big robot go boom. but only after, as the narrator declaims each episode, JUDGMENT TIME. trying to kill a criminal before trial is explicitly and repeatedly forbidden/punished.) the other season i've seen part of where the rangers are cops has them popping all the villains into suspended animation to serve their sentences, which is... somewhat less final but really no more rehabilitative.
but anyway! point was. it's still strikingly different from american copaganda which has evolved to just "we're better than the alternative". this interests me.
(dekaranger is also a season that messed with the formula in ways which allowed it to tell more complex stories. usually, super sentai is a 22-minute show and roughly half the runtime is taken up with the morphing and robot combination sequences, which are reused across episodes, so you get maybe 10 minutes of story per episode. dekaranger does a *lot* of two-parters and also cuts the morphing and combination sequences way, way down when it needs to, so it can fit in more character work. so it is seriously complex for a sentai season.)
i think... i think in some ways it reminds me of stargate sg-1? both dekaranger specifically, and this broader pattern of, how do i put this... so you rightly don't trust the us military, even in 1997 or whenever sg-1 started airing, but you trust jack o'neill to not take military propaganda seriously, and you trust general hammond. hammond fills kind of the slot in sg-1 that wedge antilles does in rogue squadron, the guy who will do the Right Thing and who will shield his underlings from bad orders, no matter what. and both of the japanese copaganda shows i'm discussing here have a department head who could absolutely stand side by side with hammond in the "hello, i have both gravitas and morals, and you the lead character in the jack o'neill role may annoy me but i will defend to the death your right to also have morals, even though expecting you to just follow orders would be much more realistic for a leader in my position". a hardass who will not put up with any corruption, but who does put up with the loose cannon for having a heart of gold.
(dekaranger's department head is the show's most obvious nod to "we don't want to just have good humans vs bad aliens, that's kind of racist, let's get some good aliens in here". he is a blue-furred wolfman, well over six feet tall, with the most epic long tailored coat you have ever seen and the truly astounding name of doggie kruger. the narrator assures us this is his actual name. tokusatsu, the genre that encompasses power rangers and other japanese live-action shows wherein people in spandex and giant robots hit each other in various combinations, has been around since the 1970s, and there are people who make whole careers as toku suit actors -- performing fight scenes and less commonly non-fight scenes in full-body costumes, from rangers to robots to the occasional sentient lawnmower. a character like doggie kruger will be played by at minimum two people, the suit actor inside the wolfman fursuit and the voice actor who does his dialogue, who is generally a professional voice actor and also works in animation or whatever is going. and my point is that a good suit actor combined with a good voice actor -- and, in doggie's case, a few recordings of what i'm pretty sure are actual dog/wolf growls -- can absolutely bring the presence and subtlety you'd expect from a single human actor.)
anyway, i was expecting this diy farming to take about 32 hours of staring at the sky on my animal crossing island. for the first ten or twelve hours, i made a lot more progress than expected, but the rate has slowed down and i suspect i'm in for some bad luck to even out the good. (this is not me being, like, superstitious. there's a datamine. i'm supposed to get roughly 6 balloons an hour of which 15% should be diys i don't have, or a little less than one per hour. i've been getting a solid two diys per hour for almost twelve hours of farming. there's no way that kind of luck was going to last. and then i didn't get a single one for two hours, so it has in fact stopped lasting.)
anyway my point is that i only have about ten episodes of dekaranger left so i am pondering what to watch next. i might watch carranger again. that's the parody season they did for the 20th anniversary back in the '90s, where instead of being a dedicated heroic military-esque group of badasses like most sentai teams, the rangers are five losers who work at a random garage because the ranger mentor couldn't find anyone better in a hurry. it was the first season leia showed me, and i'll probably get a lot more of the parody humor now that i've seen some of the normal seasons.
specifically, i am watching "tokusou sentai dekaranger" because leia likes it very much and keeps using the characters instead of ocs whenever we need a sequels-era x-wing squadron for a star trek fic. super sentai is the japanese show that gets recut with american actors and dialogue to become power rangers; like power rangers (at least after the first few seasons), it tells a self-contained story with different characters each season.
dekaranger is the season that became power rangers spd, which stands for (i think) special police department? something like that. the ranger team is a group of future cops protecting earth against alien terrorists. like power rangers, it's a kids' show, so it's relatively uncomplicated in its morals and tone, but what really strikes me -- i wouldn't say i've seen many japanese cop shows, i have in fact seen two, this one from 2004ish and a miniseries from 2017 that was a spinoff of lupin iii. both were... pretty blatantly copaganda, and so the thing that keeps striking me about them is how *different* the aims are from american copaganda. it's a lot more... it's a lot more andy griffith show? but not quite. let me try to articulate.
modern american copaganda boils down to "cops should have unlimited power because the alternative is Bad People Doing Things, you don't want that". old american copaganda like the andy griffith show was more "cops are Good People who mean well and you should trust the system even if you encounter one who seems bad or stupid because the people further up in charge are good and virtuous".
dekaranger, and also the zenigata miniseries, have the "cops are Good People who mean well and you should trust the system", but with both a complete lack of barney fife -- characters can fail in order to learn better, but they don't stay incompetent or clumsy for long, because that would reflect badly on the force for keeping them around -- and an extra layer of declaiming on the topic of What Being A Good Cop Is All About, usually with a focus on putting others first, protecting civilians, etc.
and they're extremely careful not to portray or glorify police overreach, according to their lights. at least in, as i said, the two examples i've seen. dekaranger has the police doubling as executioners, but makes sure to run a whole clip every time explaining that the supreme court of the universe which resides outside of time has held a fair trial and found the villain guilty before issuing the death sentence. or occasionally not guilty / issued a lighter sentence.
(since most of the villains of the week are, you know, power rangers villains with rap sheets like "destroyed 79 planets for the lols", the show is uninterested in debating the death penalty. big robot go boom. but only after, as the narrator declaims each episode, JUDGMENT TIME. trying to kill a criminal before trial is explicitly and repeatedly forbidden/punished.) the other season i've seen part of where the rangers are cops has them popping all the villains into suspended animation to serve their sentences, which is... somewhat less final but really no more rehabilitative.
but anyway! point was. it's still strikingly different from american copaganda which has evolved to just "we're better than the alternative". this interests me.
(dekaranger is also a season that messed with the formula in ways which allowed it to tell more complex stories. usually, super sentai is a 22-minute show and roughly half the runtime is taken up with the morphing and robot combination sequences, which are reused across episodes, so you get maybe 10 minutes of story per episode. dekaranger does a *lot* of two-parters and also cuts the morphing and combination sequences way, way down when it needs to, so it can fit in more character work. so it is seriously complex for a sentai season.)
i think... i think in some ways it reminds me of stargate sg-1? both dekaranger specifically, and this broader pattern of, how do i put this... so you rightly don't trust the us military, even in 1997 or whenever sg-1 started airing, but you trust jack o'neill to not take military propaganda seriously, and you trust general hammond. hammond fills kind of the slot in sg-1 that wedge antilles does in rogue squadron, the guy who will do the Right Thing and who will shield his underlings from bad orders, no matter what. and both of the japanese copaganda shows i'm discussing here have a department head who could absolutely stand side by side with hammond in the "hello, i have both gravitas and morals, and you the lead character in the jack o'neill role may annoy me but i will defend to the death your right to also have morals, even though expecting you to just follow orders would be much more realistic for a leader in my position". a hardass who will not put up with any corruption, but who does put up with the loose cannon for having a heart of gold.
(dekaranger's department head is the show's most obvious nod to "we don't want to just have good humans vs bad aliens, that's kind of racist, let's get some good aliens in here". he is a blue-furred wolfman, well over six feet tall, with the most epic long tailored coat you have ever seen and the truly astounding name of doggie kruger. the narrator assures us this is his actual name. tokusatsu, the genre that encompasses power rangers and other japanese live-action shows wherein people in spandex and giant robots hit each other in various combinations, has been around since the 1970s, and there are people who make whole careers as toku suit actors -- performing fight scenes and less commonly non-fight scenes in full-body costumes, from rangers to robots to the occasional sentient lawnmower. a character like doggie kruger will be played by at minimum two people, the suit actor inside the wolfman fursuit and the voice actor who does his dialogue, who is generally a professional voice actor and also works in animation or whatever is going. and my point is that a good suit actor combined with a good voice actor -- and, in doggie's case, a few recordings of what i'm pretty sure are actual dog/wolf growls -- can absolutely bring the presence and subtlety you'd expect from a single human actor.)
anyway, i was expecting this diy farming to take about 32 hours of staring at the sky on my animal crossing island. for the first ten or twelve hours, i made a lot more progress than expected, but the rate has slowed down and i suspect i'm in for some bad luck to even out the good. (this is not me being, like, superstitious. there's a datamine. i'm supposed to get roughly 6 balloons an hour of which 15% should be diys i don't have, or a little less than one per hour. i've been getting a solid two diys per hour for almost twelve hours of farming. there's no way that kind of luck was going to last. and then i didn't get a single one for two hours, so it has in fact stopped lasting.)
anyway my point is that i only have about ten episodes of dekaranger left so i am pondering what to watch next. i might watch carranger again. that's the parody season they did for the 20th anniversary back in the '90s, where instead of being a dedicated heroic military-esque group of badasses like most sentai teams, the rangers are five losers who work at a random garage because the ranger mentor couldn't find anyone better in a hurry. it was the first season leia showed me, and i'll probably get a lot more of the parody humor now that i've seen some of the normal seasons.
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The just finished sentai season (Boonboomger, which you should watch because it's OMG SO GOOD) has a member who is a cop and he has a beautiful climactic moment that is all about him screaming that cops are there to protect people and not take power. Jou is wonderful.
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Scrolling down my flist, I saw this and did a double take before I read the last of the sentence. What happened in between posts that meant you were able to take up farming??? XD
(Then my brain caught up with the rest of the sentence and, you know, reality and things.)
*hugs*
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