Recap and Review: Power Rangers Samurai: Clash of the Red Rangers – The Movie

The narrator explains that In the Gunman World, in another dimension, robots are “threatening humanity” and the RPM Rangers are the last hope to fight against evil. Scott, RPM Ranger Red, is dueling Professor Cog, but tricks him and manages to escape. But not before taunting Scott about not being able to chase after into another dimension.

A subway train arrives at a station and out comes a horde of Grinders and Professor Cog. They’ve arrived in the Samurai dimension and he’s looking for Xandred.

The Samurai Rangers are fighting off a Nighlok, Sharkjaw. Cog watches from the sidelines, surprised to see Power Rangers in this dimension too. Sharkjaw dries out and heads back to the Sanzu. Xandred tells him General Gut will lead his Mooger Army onto surfaceEarth. Akumaro Some other Nighlok says Sharkjaw should’ve done better.

A little later, Cog steps into a crack and pops into the boat demanding Xandred for some Sanzu water to help poison the water in his dimension to kill all the humans. He proposes to help with Xandred with the invasion in exchange for some water.

“You scratch my back, I scratch yours. So Master, can I have some water?”

Another subway train. This time, it’s Scott. The Samurai Rangers are eating ice cream to celebrate the Nighlok drying out, but suddenly, a car falls in front of them. Scott turns off the fallen car’s alarm as the Samurai Rangers run in to the Grinders. They morph and fight.

Suddenly, Scott arrives, to the surprise of the other Rangers and starts taking the Grinders on his own. And does a very easy job of it.

“Time to get in gear!”

Scott introduces himself as Ranger Red. He explains the Grinders are from his dimension and he decided to help out since he wasn’t sure if their outdated weapons could handle them.

Jayden wants to see Scott’s eyes, but he says he can’t right now. The guys are very, very suspicious of this new hotshot, but the girls love him. They each happily take an arm of Scott’s and bring him home.

They show him around the house, Scott amazed by how low-tech it is. But enough of that, the Rangers want to know his story. Scott explains he’s here to look for Professor Cog who’s come to this dimension to look for a way to kill the last remaining humans in his dimension. He tells them he can’t demorph because he’s not sure if he can breathe the air here since in his dimension, they’ve had to live in a domed city to keep out the toxic atmosphere created by the robots. (Shoutout to Corinth!)

Jayden points him to a spare room so he can rest. Emily says she feels so sorry for him and what he’s had to go through, but Mike is jelly and doesn’t trust him because of the way he looks at Emily. How can you tell? Emily asks, since Scott’s been morphed the whole time.

Grinders attack Antonio’s body double as Mia finishes cooking the others dinner. Scott passes by and likewise passes on dinner. The alarm sounds and before the other Rangers go see what it’s about, Scott has driven off on Mentor/Ji/idunno’s Harley.

“MY BIKE!!!”

Scott gets to the waterfront where Antonio, holding a strange blue latern-thingy, is fighting off the Grinders. Scott continues to fight them off as Cog pops up and takes on Scott himself. The other Rangers arrive, but Cog takes care of them all. Scott tells Cog he’s a true Ranger though and he’ll never give up. That convinces Jayden that Scott is indeed a Ranger. (Or not.)

Cog hits Scott with Hypnobolts then sends a vortex toward Scott and Jayden’s way that would send them back to Scott’s dimension, but instead, the other Rangers try to hold it off until they get sucked in themselves. Scott and Jayden get flung into the water.

Back ashore, Scott is amazed that the rest of his team sacrificed themselves for him. Jayden says it’s because they think he’s their lord, their Tono Sama the key to stopping Xandred. They both say the other is full of himself and Scott assures Jayden his own team will take care of the Samurai Rangers in his dimension.

On the Sanzu, General Gut is updating Xandred on the progress of the invasion prep as Professor Cog watches the Grinders send Sanzu water through a vortex to the RPM dimension.

That night, Jayden continues to be pissy at Scott’s apparent hubris (even though he had that “true Ranger” moment earlier). And the next morning, he leaves on a horse to check out disturbances from the table map, leaving Scott behind. Scott takes the Harley (“NOT AGAIN!”) and catches up to him.

They decide to have a completely gratuitous race through the mountainous forest to the quarry where Cog has Grinders and Moogers waiting. The race has gotten their hormones up and all pissy at each other so they fight. Cog thinks his Hypnobolts are working.

But really, it was all a trick. Mentor/Ji/actuallyusefulforonce realized they were under a spell or something and found a symbol power to reverse it.

Xandred-sent Sergeant Tread turns all but one of the Grinders into motorcycles and the Moogers hop on to go attack Scott and Jayden. Jayden symbol powers a red sports car (“RED PONY!”) out of nowhere and the two of them hop in.

Once they take care of the Moogers, they set their sights on Cog. Jayden tosses Scott a special one-time use disc, allowing him to power up to Shark Attack Mode while Jayden uses a disc to power up to Super Mode (what!?).

After a couple of punches, the other Samurai Rangers come flying out of a vortex. Emily tells Scott that his “team” says hi. Together, they finish off Cog and Sergeant Tread.

But apparently, there’s a “real” battle they have to face now and we see there’s hundreds and thousands of Moogers waiting.

General Gut orders them to attack. The Samurai Rangers summon their horses and Antonio gets into Red Pony with Scott. After some horseback fighting, the four Rangers get off to take them on, telling Jayden to go after General Gut. Meanwhile, Red Pony breaks down.

When it looks like Jayden’s done for, he takes out the disc Scott used earlier and uses it himself to power up into Shark Mode. Jayden defeats Gut’s first life and he embiggens. So they call on zords that aren’t supposed to exist yet to then defeat the second life.

At the subway station, the five Rangers say goodbye to Scott. They thank each other and Emily says to say hi to his team for them.

Scott walks to the door and Mike follows him. “Hey, good luck with Emily,” Scott says, “I do have eyes under here you know. I see the way she looks at you.” Mike smiles as the train leaves.

The others walk over to Mike. Kevin asks what Scott said to him, but Mike replies, “Nothing, he just opened my eyes.”

Episode/Movie Thoughts
And thanks to my incredibly low expectations for this “teamup,” it actually turned out pretty well.

It was actually respectful to RPM and not some “History/Wormhole”/spit on the previous season redux. They didn’t dumb down Scott’s lines to Samurai‘s level. And it was a fairly cohesive story with minimal exposure to the acting of the regular Samurai cast.

Now first of all, was this even promoted on Nickelodeon? I don’t regularly watch the network all week, but I haven’t seen or heard any promo for the special/movie other than a lone tweet from Nick.

The most important discussion point of the episode though, Was that Eka Darville voicing Scott? The credits say otherwise, a Tobias Reiss was the voice actor. And watching the episode, you couldn’t help but think, “Damn, this voice actor they got sounds so much like Eka, accent slippage and all.”

But then you get to thinking and realize, “Wait… that WAS Eka Darville!”
Really, it has to be him or this voice actor is the best ever at imitating voices and doing impersonations. There’s been discussion about Eka having to do the guest stint under a pseudonym to avoid legalities with unions and his current stint on Terra Nova, which would be understandable. But I’ll believe it was indeed Eka and say how awesome it was to have him back on the show, even if it was only his voice (which, let’s be honest, was much better acting than the rest of the cast unmorphed).

The explanation they gave for staying morphed was reasonable and believable enough, maybe even more reasonable than the way they explained away Dr. O’s in-suit entrapment in DinoThunder.

And truthfully, even if wasn’t Eka (and I believe it was), it actually turned out okay. Though many, including myself, were dreading the fact that we wouldn’t be getting a traditional, full-team teamup and the prospect of not even having a single RPM actor appear on the show, the movie/special ended up being pretty good by Samurai standards.

Dare I say, the best half-hours of Samurai so far. Maybe it could be the RPM touch or the fact that the bulk of the cast was absent most of the hour.

It wasn’t without its major flaws though.

As successful as the voice work was for Scott, Antonio’s and Steven Skyler’s voice double was the complete opposite.

Then there were the jarring moments of inexplicable Shinkengerisms and what would appear to be spoilers for the 2nd half of Samurai airing next year.

It was pretty hilarious to see Genta’s sushi cart and Antonio holding on to DaiGoyou for that long period of time. The sushi cart can get a pass as just background, but you haven’t seen Shinkenger, you’d have to wonder what in the world that thing Antonio was holding on to. Plus, the Shiba curtain/panel/fabric/background being present while the Rangers summoned their horses. Having Kuroko randomly pop up would’ve made it more hilarious.

Now, they get kudos for actually editing together the Shinkenger vs Go-Onger teamup and the standalone Shinkenger Fateful War movies together and then building an original story around it. This was probably the most original Power Rangers footage this season, and it was very good to see. This also seems to be the most effort they’ve put into being fresh and creative all season long.

But the continuity problems, whether by Nickelodeon mis-scheduling or Saban design, dragged down what would have otherwise been a solid hour. Apparently, the Black Box has been opened and they’ve already unleashed Super Mode. And Akumaro, a pivotal Nighlok that’ll play a part in the final arc of Shinkenger (and likely Samurai) pops up out of nowhere and acts as if he’s been on the boat since forever.

Then there’s the zords that don’t exist yet.

Again, kudos for being able to string together two unrelated movies, but way to mess up continuity once again, whoever’s fault it is.

Despite the hints that’ve been dropped in an episode or two, the Mike and Emily stuff felt almost like Nick and Madison in a “Woah, where did that come from!?” kind of way. We’ll have to wait and see if they actually do anything with it.

The Scott-Jayden bromantic rivalry was definitely not as compelling as the Scott-Dillon bromance/aborted rivalry for Summer’s heart in RPM. And that two minute Race was completely unnecessary, but again kudos for that amount of original footage.

So overall, a relatively good hour of Power Rangers Samurai. Above average for what we’ve gotten so far. Would it have been nice to see the actual RPM actors and the entire RPM team appear for the teamup? Absolutely. If anything, it made me want to go watch RPM in a Nicktoons Morphenomenon Jungle Fury-type marathon. But considering the circumstances, overall, we ended up with a pretty enjoyable “movie.” I wouldn’t mind the rest of the run being like this.


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0 thoughts on “Recap and Review: Power Rangers Samurai: Clash of the Red Rangers – The Movie

  1. Samurai was a let down altogether, so yeah, I didn’t have high hopes for the team up– and thanks to that, it didn’t actually seem too bad. Did Saban piss off the creators of Super Sentai? They seemed to purposely put so much of japanese culture into Shinkenger to make it harder to adapt….

  2. ive seen clips if you know where i can get the movie im all ears but the clis ive seen its pretty decent for the corny stuff samurai has and says, good thing they didnt team up with ninja storm cause samurai’s and ninja’s dont like each other long history…

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