Recap / History of Power Rangers Ninja Storm

With Disney now in full control of the franchise, the show enters a new era with a new location and a new attitude. Linkara sees how Power Rangers Ninja Storm continues the franchise while looking at the growing pains under a new company.

Tropes:

• Arbitrary Skepticism: Similar to Lightspeed Rescue, the first episode suggests that it is a Continuity Reboot unrelated to the past seasons, that Power Rangers were fictional or at most an urban legend. This season is eventually tied into the rest of the franchise, so it seems like it's skepticism despite all of the monster attacks and alien invasions over the last decade. The re-release video goes further, with Linkara suggesting that maybe the civilians got so jaded, monster invasions just weren't news-worthy anymore.
• Anti-Climax: While Linkara praises Return of Thunder and The Samurai Journey as strong multi parter episodes, he found that they ended earlier than needed and the finales were padded with fight scenes or comic relief.
• Ass Pullinvoked: Kanoi's explanation for why he turned into a guinea pig.
  "That is not an explanation."
• Badass Decay: Linkara brings up an In-Universe example regarding Lothor. In the time travel episode, it was shown that his past self as Kiya was actually serious, intimidating, and a cool villain, making Linkara question just what happened during his exile to cause him to become such an idiot.
• Cool Helmet: Gives praise to the collapsible mask feature of the helmets since it allows the viewers to see the actors and helps build the idea that the characters are genuinely in the suits and the action, rather than it just being stunt doubles or dubbed over stock footage.
• Continuity Reboot: It was originally assumed that the season would be a reboot of the series, thanks to some comments from early interviews promoting the show and dialogue in the early episodes. However, while it was slated as a "new beginning", it was never outright called a reboot or anything along those lines. Linkara does bring up that it led to some confusion and Early-Installment Weirdness though.
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: He later notes during Dino Thunder that though he considers Lothor an incompetent fool who engages in far too much comic relief when he gets into a fight, he's a very powerful combatant.
• Denser and Wackier: He felt this worked to the season's detriment. As the greater focus on comedy and wacky antics from the villain's side made them come across as incompetent and nonthreatening. That, and he didn't really like most of the humor for this season since it resulted in Mood Whiplash.
• Elephant in the Room: Like the Ricardo Medina Jr. incident, Linkara talks about Pua Magasiva's passing via suicide in 2019 and the legal trouble he got into due to his mental health issues in the revision version. As with with the previous incident, Linkara did not want to talk about the Pua situation, but he knew that if he didn't, it would hang over the video.
• Establishing Character Moment: Talks how the first episode actually failed in this. Linkara gets that the writers were trying to push the whole inexperienced thing for the three Rangers, but notes they pushed it too far especially in them messing up their first transformation sequence (when said transformations only consists of four words), which makes them come off as borderline incompetent, instead.
• Franchise Original Sin: invoked
  • Of a sort, he mentions his disapproval of Ranger's "civilian powers" as it dilutes the need for morphing. But within this season (where the civilian powers started) the premise is of Ninja students and thus having unusual abilities sort of works.
  • He brings up in his Mystic Force video that the "villains must battle the rangers one at a time" excuse for both that series and this one is incredibly stupid, but Ninja Storm was actively trying to be comedic, so it could get by with that excuse compared to the darker and more serious Mystic Force.
• Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain: Considers Zurgane this, to a degree. He feels he's the only smart villain in the series and is Surrounded by Idiots, including his boss.
• Irony: Brings up how funny it is that despite being filmed in New Zealand to save on budget, Power Rangers is banned there due to the violence of the show.
• Mood Killer: States the show's humor, especially in "Samurai's Journey", could be this.
• The Scrappyinvoked:
  • Was not a fan of Lothor and his group due to his frequent Breaking the Fourth Wall jokes and Mood Whiplash. He openly calls Lothor a "Male Divatox," and shows glee when Dino Thunder claims that the Thunder Rangers were the biggest threat that the Ninja Rangers, "Thus proving how worthless Lothor was as a villain." though he does admit Lothor was an impressive fighter in his Dino Thunder review and even compared him favorably to the villains of Mystic Force.
  • Linkara also shares a distaste for the Team's mentor, Sensei Kanoi Watanabe. In particular, he questions the generic "wise sayings" that Kanoi gives out as advice (in particular him chastising one of the Rangers for stopping criminals alone, instead of with the group). He also remains confused as to how Kanoi was turned into a hamster in the first place (or how one of Lothor's blasts changed him back to human, for that matter).
• Sound Defect: Notes that this was before they got a handle on the sound quality for Power Rangers, so as a consequence, everyone sounds like they had their microphones way too close to their faces and the audio was put through some abysmal processing. In the remake, he ends up brushing this off due to the poor video quality he had at the time and not the DVD-quality rips he uses now.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Characterinvoked: He argues that Zurgane would've made for a better Big Bad than Lothor.
• Vindicated by Historyinvoked: Downplayed in Lothor's case. He still finds him to be a terrible villain but acknowledges him as a great fighter. This inadvertently makes him better than Master Xandred, who spent the entire first season of Samurai and most of the second as an Orcus on His Throne and was never impressive in any case.
• What Could Have Beeninvoked: At the beginning of the review, Linkara mentions Amit Bhuamik's "Hexagon" proposal. He ultimately puts it into the Awesome, but Impractical category. While it sounds like the ultimate Power Rangers continuity porn, and the premise sounding a lot like the Justice League, a couple of factors would keep it from actually working.^Explanation Hurricaneger was a standalone series with no other teams around (minus crossovers), the show was just starting to move production to New Zealand, and most of the costumes and props were either sold or destroyed when they thought the show was going to be cancelled. Not to mention that doing so would require loads of original footage which they didn't have the budget for.