So..how many of you still prefer the us versions over japan ?
 

Are there still many fans around here that actually still prefer to just watch our power rangers and don't really bother to get into the sentai stuff ?

i ask this because i have to shamefully admit i think i'm one of them...i grew up with power rangers and no matter how hard i try i just can not fully "accept" the japanese versions as the legit ones even tho they are offcourse.

i've been watching some zyuranger episodes on youtube recently since i finally wanted to see that, i never had before and since i am such a sucker for my beloved MMPR childhood i thought that might be a good watch since at least i was somewhat familair with it ' the suits,zords, baddies..) unlike many other sentais were i really have to start from scratch.

well, it was ok, but i didn't think it was that much better or anything, infact i had a hard time accepting the actors if that makes sense, they didn't really stand out, or apart from each other as much as say billy vs jason.

At the risk of sounding discriminating ( not my intention) i have this problem almost everytime with asian actors, a lot of them look similar and the language is just plain weird to listen to for more then 10 minutes,they always seem to be either shouting or screaming or making unintentionally funny facial expressions.

i've discovered some nice toku groups on facebook, including TTC where you can watch many fully subbed episodes of many diffrent series and all week long i've been watching stuff. from kamen rider the something called justirisers which i had never even heard of and yes the action can be good and the costumes are always exciting but the actual acting, and overall vibe,just doesn't seem to work on me.

I think this was my last attempt at getting into sentai & other toku stuff, when i feel like watching this form of superheroics, i'm sticking with american power rangers, cheesy acting included it still appeals to me more and i'm done feeling guilty about it. lol

i think this is largely in the same vein as asian action movies never really making it big in the us, sure there are groups of people heavily into them and proclaiming how much better they are than the generic american movie schtick but to pretty much 90% of the western population all them asian dudes look alike and don't have enough charisma to pull it off the way we get excited to see something like expendables for example....make an all star movie that casts the 10 best asian actors and hae them team up a la expendables and how many western people would really care ?....right.

i will always have respect and a general appreciation for tokusatsu and how it originated but when i want to watch power rangers i'll just watch power rangers. i'm tired of trying to get into sentai only to keep coming back to the american equivalent time and again.

Yeah...I'm the exact opposite of you. I enjoy Super Sentai way more than Power Rangers. I have no problem with having to watch it in Japanese (granted, I am Asian and know Japanese), but even before I got a full grasp on the language, I liked it.

Compared to your experience of watching Zyuranger and not liking it as much as MMPR, I am the exact opposite, when I rewatched MMPR, I didn't like it as much as I thought I did.

The language may be weird to you, but it sounds beautiful and exotic to me. You know how many american songs I have on my Ipod? Like 4.

American shows in general, besides the occasional musical/comedy show and cartoons, bore me to death. I mean, if you're talking emotion, I say a Japanese actor can portray that a lot better than an american actor. Japanese are way more entertaining to me, I see an american show for a few minutes, I shut it off and turn on some Toku on my laptop.

And in recent years, all of the American Power Rangers actors to me act and seem flatter in their emotions than day old soda.

Super Sentai has always been more entertaining to me. And saying all of them look a like is kinda racist man, I know that's not your intention, but it is.

Depends on the Series. Geki I like better than Jungle Fury, and I love JF. RPM I love a hellhuvalot better than Go-Ronger. Samurai and Shinkenger.. Are the same, except the people in Shinken can show emotion.

It honestly depends on the series. Things like Mystic Force, Jungle Fury and SPD don't even come close to Magiranger, Gekiranger and Dekaranger. But on the other hand, RPM is better than Go-Onger (although they aren't really all that comparable) and Zeo and In Space are better than the little bits I've seen of Ohranger and Megaranger.

I found myself not being able to enjoy power rangers now because I discovered sentai. The acting is so horrible in power rangers that it makes it tough to take. Atleast if the acting is bad in Toku, I can't tell the difference. But the Japanese actors seem to have a better grasp on the balance between serious and silly. Maybe it's just me...

@kamenriderooo : i know, if i had a more flattering way of expressing it i would, and there are a lot of things i really like and respect about the population and culture in general, i would even like to travel to japan if i ever have enough money to stay for an extended period.

My views are based solely on tv shows nothing else so please forgive me if it made me sound racist :(

The thing is, jason david frank or even david "billy" yost could walk on the other side of street a mile away and he'd be reckognized by a bunch of people, even casual people not into PR as "that blue power ranger guy !"...wereas if your asian, and unless your a really big legend like jackie chan, nobody around here would pick up on who you are even tho they might've seen you on tv before.

Anyway, please don't be mad at me, i'm just trying to get others opinions,it is a nice debate

Recently, Kuroki's (from Tokumei Sentai Go-Busters) actor caught a pervert who video taped a woman in the same store he was in. Red Mask's (From Hikari Sentai Maskman) actor visited the Philippines and was swarmed by fans. Green Flash's (from Choushinsei Flashman) actor saved a man undergoing Cardiac arrest. Yeah, I'm pretty sure that people don't recognize who they are if they're a mile away :p

That comparison doesn't quite work. I'd recognize someone like Kenji Ohba long before I'd realize the person across the street from me was David Yost.
It's a matter of perspective. I highly doubt most people would be able to pick the like of David Yost, Austin St. John, etc from a crowd. You might, but they're not the stars you think they are. Likewise, you can't expect an American crowd to pick out a Japanese star on the streets in America, especially when 90% of the stuff they filmed never actually came over here.

I'm fairly certain if Super Sentai actors walked down the street in Japan more people would recognise them than the Power Rangers actors though.

To be fair, that's not really using his star power. That's just being awesome.

I'd just cool it on the whole not being able to tell Asian people apart thing. You are digging a grave here. I like you mr.wrestlemaniac and I get what you are saying. But I saw 3 skateboarding white kids with bieber haircuts and backwards hats and I couldn't tell them apart. It's all relative.

Okay guys. Let's ease this Thread off the racial issues.

I'm kinda a split down the middle. I stopped watching power rangers a few years ago around when SPD was out. After finding out about Kamen Rider, I was instantly hooked into Toku especially sentai and kamen rider. However I haven't gone back and watched the older sentai series that was used for the ranger series I've watched, so I'll probably says from mmpr to spd I love the power ranger versions. However I can't speak much on after SPD to Samurai. And currently I like Shinkenger better than Samurai, so I think for me it depends on which one I watched first. But Ultimately I like both for their differences and quirks that each country brings to the table.

I will always appreciate Power Rangers for introducing me to Sentai. Hell, Power Rangers was the first series to take me away from Transformers when I was a kid.

My problem is not how the adaptations are executed, my problems lie with the lack of writing and acting capabilities. A lot of the Disney era stuff threw in enough explosions to give Michael Bay an orgasm. Add on top that every ranger team had to have some type of super power, diminishing the threat of the villains when they fight unmorphed. Then you have villains like Mr Snow in Operation Overdrive, Lothor in Ninja Storm, and Grumm in SPD that shows they were not even trying when it came to coming up with the villains. They either made them look ridiculously stupid to the point where you couldn't take them seriously, or/and they made them just down right idiotic in nature. Next, is the acting.

Sure, the acting was not always the show's strong point, but the ranger cast at least grew as the show went on. In the recent stuff, the series are so short that the actors have no chance to even improve to prove themselves to the audience. DinoThunder and SPD were the only series in the Disney era that had actors that started out pretty good in the beginning but then really got into their characters and were great by the end.

WIth that said, no, I will never find Power Rangers to be better than Sentai, but I will give it credit when it is do. They did an incredible job when they adapted the first several series (sans Turbo) into PR, because they were full of new ideas and were taken by surprised at how big the show became. Disney just pretty slammed it into the ground like Indiana Jones and had its way with the series. Just look at what they did to MMPR. They were losing money on the PR franchise, so what better way to make a profit than taking episodes already made and let their children draw on the video to make it "new" and "profitable." Sadly, Samurai did not help matters because it feels like a Disney PR show.

Ok thanks for the opinions everyone, this is what this topic was meant to be, not a racial debate.

I guess it really is a matter of perspective and depends largely on where you live who you would reckognize best.

i haven't watched every season of pr yet since i stopped watching religiously right after in space ended back in the day, altho i kept up a little bit and at least watched some episodes of every subsequent series, enough to know who is who, and to me, and only speaking for myself here, that is enough to build a basic knowledge to be able to reckognize the actors.

The best way i can put this, is if you were to send me to morphicon, i could at least tell who is whom/which ranger even to for some of them my knowledge would be as limited as say only watched 1 or 2 episodes with said actor ( ninja storm, spd..), which is something i would never in a million years be able to do if you sent me to the japanese equivalent to morphicon even tho theoreticlly i should, since i'm sure by now there are some sentai series i have seen more footage from recently than the aforementioned rangers i would reckognize..

But anyway that was the last comparison i' mgoing to make about this since this fire has already been fueled more than enough. i will give watching toku a rest for a while and try again, there are elements i really liked in the stuff i've been watching recently, so it's not as if i can't "get it", maybe i just burned myself out by trying to much to quick. For now, i'll just keep enjoying everything on it's own and try not to compare too much.

Personally, I can't watch Power Rangers because of the acting, I dont find it all that strong & I'm sorry to say that it turns me off.
I don't think that the acting on the japanese shows is really any better but I find it easier to tolerate.
Maybe it's because I don't understand japanese & have to follow the subtitles so I have less time to focus on the flaws of their acting.

i only watch PR not really into sentai

I mean I can freely admit that Power Rangers got me into Toku as a child and it was the introduction that gave me interest as an adult. But I wasn't aware that anyone preferred US versions of Sentai to the original source material. I don't think there's any US series that I've seen that I would ever say is better than it's source material. The early stuff is so wildly reinterpreted that it's actually hard to consider them the same shows. Even then the US stuff is fun but generally terrible when compared to it's source.

Megaranger is gonna have to be mind-blowingly amazing to come close to In Space...

I can't say that I prefer Sentai to PR, primarily because I only have 2 completed Sentai under my belt (Geki and Gokai), and the few Sentai I started did show some promise (Such as Shinken, Magi, Bouken, and Go-On. I did start GoBus, but I dropped that trainwreck at day one.), but I just stopped watching for one factor or another (Such as boredom with Shinken or general disinterest with Magi), so technically I have to say I preferred PR to Sentai, as a whole.

I don't think I was ever religiously into Power Rangers as a kid. Sure I really liked it, but I doubt I tuned into every episode. I watched whatever I could catch and probably stopped around Lost Galaxy. And since then I kinda wanted to watch Power Rangers so I'd try to watch an episode here or there, but it would never catch me enough to want to see more. I enjoy a lot of elements in Sentai over Power Rangers. I didn't get into Sentai until I was looking for this one subbed Anime and found it on TV-Nihon. I noticed they subbed a lot of Sentai, so I picked the one with the most interesting Power Rangers counterpart(Gekiranger/Jungle Fury) and I was hooked ever since.

Something about Power Rangers just doesn't cut for me. It's cheesy, but not the good kind of cheesy like Sentai. But that might just be personal taste.

I would have no problem attending Power Morphicon or a Super Sentai equivalent. I usually look into the characters and stuff of Power Rangers without actually watching so I at least know how to compare the equivalent series.

Doing that loses all connection though. It's more efficient, but without the connection, any character growth feels undermined. Any and every comparison would be unfairly weighed to the Japanese counterpart. The comparisons drawn in this manner would come down to "American character did blank, blank and blank. Meanwhile, the Japanese character did (Proceed to gush over what all this character did, as you were there when it happened)."

See, from the moment I first read about the toys in a toy magazine to the first commercial Fox showed, I was hooked. I watched it every day it was on, even the reruns, all of the way through the first half of Lost Galaxy. By then, I was sick of the show changing its cast members on a regular basis, and constant changing of the costumes and zords because by the time I finally would get the toys, it would be time for the next series. Hell, I did not even get the original Megazord and Dragonzord until my birthday in June of 94, not knowing that two months later, those zords were going to be obsolete.

I knew the show was taken from a Japanese show (it is pretty obvious to a Godzilla lover), but I did not know they changed series every year.

I am also kicking myself because I'm sure a lot of you remember how many bootlegs surged in cheap toystores advertising that they were selling Power Rangers. Well, there was a store that I went into that claimed they were selling just that, Power Rangers. I go over to the bin and started looking at the toys, looked through them, and yelled, "This is not Power Rangers, these are more knock-offs." They had five rangers, they all came with bikes, but there was no black ranger, only a green ranger which also looked nothing like the green ranger I knew. They were selling them for like $10 a piece. Years later, I come to find out, they were actually the DaiRangers with their bikes. If I knew then what I knew now, I would have had my dad buy them.

I completely understand what you mean. I wanted to watch Power Rangers. I tried starting from the beginning. I mean, it is all on Netflix. It's just so much harder to watch for me. I even tried watching bits of the more recent ones. I might eventually get around to watching it all, but it'll probably be a while.

See, I really liked the toys as a kid also. But my mom didn't really allow me to get many things. Nearly all the toys I owned as a kid that cost more than $5 were usually birthday or Christmas gifts. I'm sure this is the reason that now, every time I see something cool my reaction is "Shut up and take my money."

I like both power rangers and sentai
abaranger got dino earth and pr dino thunder not have dino earth

I think the thing Power Rangers had going for it was the fact that it was all in one contained Universe - you didn't have to have a movie to get a team-up. At any point, Jason, Tommy, Adam, etc., could show up to help the new group of Power Rangers. There's always nods back to previous seasons ... you just really felt like this was a new group of Power Rangers, knowledgable that there's previous Power Rangers, and this is their story.

With Jungle Fury, that all changed. It was like a mini-self-contained Universe. And the same for RPM (which we later learn IS a self-contained Universe). And Samurai, while it has Bulk and mentions of Skull, has shown absolutely no relation to previous years. Power Rangers is now feeling like Super Sentai in the sense that every series is its own self-contained series ... and I think that's a shame for Power Rangers, because they just can't pull off the awesomeness that Sentai and Kamen Rider do.

I think the biggest thing I like better about Super Sentai compared to Power Rangers was the polish the series alway had. This is mostly due to a lack of spliced footage, which make episodes seem discontinuous and inconsistent at times.

The one universe idea was interesting, but it also brought on a whole slew of plot holes with the less-than satisfying attempts at keeping continuity. I think even with Jungle Fury, it's still all part of the same universe, RJ did mention the Morphing Grid, and based on Theo's comments it was already pretty clear that Power Rangers have existed before in Jungle Fury. RPM was the first one to explicitly ignore previous canon.

I wonder if Gokaiger created a continuous universe? It may not be in-canon with the previous seasons, but it certainly created a universe with every Sentai team in existence and it remains to be seen if Go-busters takes place there.

I remember about that time seeing ranger figures with bikes from Fiveman . . .I think they were called "Global Rangers" or something.