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Fanfic / Eiga Sentai Scanranger

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https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/scanranger_(2).jpg
The Holy Warriors of Hollywood. Then...

Movie geeks will save us all!

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/scanranger2.jpg
...and now

In this stunning homage to Super Sentai (and fully-extended middle finger to Power Rangers, that still takes heavy inspiration from it), Professor Daphne Alexandria is more than just a mild-mannered film professor, she’s the head of a secret organization that protects Earth from hostile aliens, and her prize students are being drafted. Why? Because the power she has to bestow can only be used by those with a passionate love of movies. And why does Alex feel the need to trust the fate of the world to five crazy kids? Because of the imminent invasion of the not terribly effective MAYHEM Corps, hell-bent on conquering New Jersey! If the rangers can stop harping on their hatred of Haim Saban and all things Power Rangers long enough, they might just pull this off. And despite how everything sounds, it takes itself too seriously too often to be a parody.

How seriously? It's fanfiction that included a Clip Show.

Written by Vince Jones, who was outraged at how Tokusatsu programming was watered down into the Power Rangers before making it to American airwaves. Ran from 1997-2006, releasing 39 "episodes", a Christmas special and a crossover "movie" with Choujin Sentai Jetman. The last two episodes finished were basically revisiting the crossover movie.

Poorly written, ill-conceived and all with only the occasional shred of irony, Scanranger was a shining example of So Bad, It's Good.

The story is archived here, with the writer also posting it on FF.net after Geocities went down.

A Let's Read of the series can be found here, and it's also become a subject at Das Sporking.

It should be noted that while he continues to try to share his story with the internet, the author's hatred of Power Rangers has petered off a lot in the intervening years.

Our heroes, such as they are, are:

  • Vin Furamatsu Henderson a.k.a. Vin Harlock/Redscanner: Athlete of Action. The Hero. Village People fan. Empowered by action movies, though in practice it's more like movies with sword fighting. Changed his last name because of his admiration of anime hero Captain Harlock.
  • B.C. Shimamura/Bluescanner: King of Comedy. Meant to be the Plucky Comic Relief and The Heart, but often ends up being The Load. Empowered by clean comedy. Only clean comedy.
  • Nick Simonds/Greenscanner: SPFX Soldier. The Smart Guy (relatively speaking) and a Casanova Wannabe. Empowered by special effects. No, that isn't a movie genre.
  • Kunio "Mikey" Mikimoto/Yellowscanner: Animemaniac. Kind of a Butt-Monkey. Empowered by Anime. Not just any animation, anime. The writer goes to pains to explain how one of the Rudolph movies counts in the Christmas Episode.
  • Carmen Diaz/Yellowscanner II: Affirmative Action Girl. Kunio's crush who goes from a stuck-up bitch to a born-again superhero after he's crippled in battle and her own anime powers surface.
  • Toni Montanez/Pinkscanner: Musical Mistress. The Heart. Empowered by musicals.
  • Takeshi Hayata/Silverscanner: Gin Hikari no Senshi. The Sixth Ranger. Cool Old Guy. Adjunct professor of Asian Studies. Empowered by Tokusatsu.
  • Lieutenant Commander Professor Daphne Alexandria: "Professor Alex" for short. The Big Good. Team Mom, to the extent that the rangers really do sometimes seem to look on her as a surrogate mother. Widow of Roger.

They're opposed by MAYHEM (Mechanical Androids Yoked Hither to Eliminate Mankind)

Recurring Super Sentai tropes:

Tropes specific to Eiga Sentai Scanranger:

  • Absurdly Spacious Sewer: "Kunio's Excellent Adventure In Babysitting" has him chase a monster into sewers big enough to have a martial arts action scene in.
  • Adaptational Wimp: In Choujin Sentai Jetman, Gai/Black Condor is a womanizing, rebellious badass loner who would rather fight than talk things out. In "Scanranger vs. Jetman," Gai is a spineless wimp who caves in when casino personnel gets in his face (watch the second episode to see how wrong this is), compares himself to Kenny G when picking up chicks, worries about getting in trouble with Chokan for skipping training, and freely admits to being a "selfish idiot."
  • Affectionate Parody: Well, if we can call it a parody, since the story takes itself WAY too seriously to be one.
  • Aliens Speaking English: Lampshaded in "Scanranger vs. Jetman", although it mainly serves to call attention to how neither story bothered until the characters had to interact with people from their own planet who speak a different language.
  • All Men Are Perverts: Besides the standard energy attacks Vixen’s main power is to enthrall people (even the girls) by making them see images of sexy celebs. The only one who’s had any success resisting is Vin, who’s supposed to be a sucker for a pretty face.
  • All Part of the Show: In “Main Street Men” where the rangers impersonate a boy band and then transform and fight it out with MAYHEM on stage. Apparently they even thought the mecha fight was staged!
  • All Your Base Are Belong to Us:
    • In episodes 30-31 MAYHEM attacks and destroys Scanranger’s secret hideout, prompting a move to a new underground set-up elsewhere
    • It might be worth noting the Big Bad is possessing a former member of the rangers' support group and possibly could have done that at any time, since the Sixth Ranger, also a founding member, knew where it was and let himself in when he decided to join the team.
  • Anvil on Head: B.C.'s favorite attack.
  • Artifact of Doom / Cosmic Keystone: The Lighkari amulet from whenever Jetman appears makes it owner crazed with power, but if anything happens to it the space-time continuum falls apart.
  • Artistic License – Economics: When a casino manager confronts Gai over his debts in "Scanranger vs. Jetman," we find out he owes 10,000 yen, which is treated like an astronomical amount Gai has to trade the solid gold, jewel-studded amulet he found to have any hope of paying back. In actuality, 10,000 yen is equal in amount to only around US$75.
  • Artistic License – History: "And Ug, shall I send you back to what you call the Cro-Magnon period and have those dinosaurs rend you limb from limb?"
  • Ascended Fanboy: The kids are chosen for the team because of their intimate knowledge of cinema. Even more so than that, the Japanese Scanrangers are revealed to be Sentai fans in "Scanranger vs. Jetman", after which everybody seems to become one.
  • An Asskicking Christmas: A whole bonus story is dedicated to the Rangers and their allies fighting a Christmas Tree monster, complete with seasonal special attacks.
  • Author Tract: The entire thing, obviously. Besides the anti-Power Ranger content there were some others scattered here and there like one episode having a subplot concerning the author's dislike for the raunchiness of modern comedy and rap music (yes, really).
  • Badass Preacher: Peter Emmanuel.
  • Beach Episode: Despite the villains making it sound like they’re up to something nefarious, it ends up being pretty much disposable filler.
  • Broken Aesop:
    • The episode after Carmen joins is supposed to be about her learning the value of teamwork. Not only does she do almost everything herself (everybody but Takeshi has been captured and as usual he’s barely around himself), what help she does get is confusing and pointless (why are they pretending Carmen's betraying the team...to save the team?), and the main group has their Sixth Ranger and a Humongous Mecha that’s already there sit out the giant battle. Not to mention Vin just had to say they could’ve gotten out of their predicament without Carmen’s help.
    • Also the episode "And Voodoo to You Too" has Nick decrying the American import of Dragon Ball Z and how the dialogue was rewritten so heavily to downplay all the death and destruction. B.C. counters that otherwise it would be too intense for kids, and the older fans have the original uncensored stuff they can still enjoy note . A couple episodes later we have the Clip Show, which is where the series makes its most blatant attacks on Power Rangers with B.C. singlehandedly defeating a group of PR-original villains. He makes fun of other aspects of the show, like how they always have to say "destroy" instead of "kill", and how in Power Rangers: Dino Thunder the villain was changed from a little girl who's the vessel of an Eldritch Abomination. Does he think censoring violent kids shows is a good thing or not?
  • Captain Ersatz:
  • Celebrity Paradox: Sometimes the story drops the names of actors who appeared in Choujin Sentai Jetman (a ranger even meets two of them in the Beach Episode). Other times the story describes Jetman as happening for real.
  • Chewbacca Defense: In “With Maliss Towards All”, the Scanrangers find a group protesting them for (presumably) causing damage to campus property the students are stuck paying for. The rangers defend themselves by insulting the protest leader (the National Enquirer crack), telling him to ignore the problem and look on the bright side, and accusing him of cheating Vin out of the state fencing title. Ironically a few episodes later we find out the rangers’ backers repair the collateral damage from their battles, giving them a valid avenue of defense.
    • Oh, and the protest leader turns out to be a villain, so of course the Scanrangers are in the right.
  • Clap Your Hands If You Believe: On the verge of being defeated by their first giant monster, the Scanrangers believe in the power of their favorite movies, and are rewarded with the ability to combine their mecha.
  • Clip Show: "Winter Interlude" is supposed to be one of these, as the Scanrangers look back on their past adventures.
  • Clueless Aesop:
    • The Christmas Episode had a guest hero praise the Scanrangers for not destroying a Monster of the Week created from a Christmas tree. Because apparently, “Trees are an important part of the world’s energy source! It was reasonable the Scanrangers didn’t want it destroyed. That villain-created tree, however, is not real!” Even if it were real we’d still be talking about an evil, heavily-armed monster tree. Just how important to the ecosystem is a tree that’s already been cut down and in the process of dying, anyway?
    • Another such aesop, regarding a girl named Sarin who's mocked for being differently-abled, also crops up in the Christmas ep. It starts out looking like the message is going to be your standard "Respect others' differences" Aesop but the thing is none of Sarin's classmates learn the lesson, and indeed it's completely forgotten about halfway through the episode. When her predicament's lightly mentioned again just before the end it seems to have mutated into "You're special, so ignore anyone who treats you like you're weird."
    • In the Mid-Season Upgrade arc, Kunio has the last reference book he needs for a term paper and gives it away to Carmen, his unrequited love, who doesn't even thank him. This sounds like "You should be generous even if people aren't grateful," but he tells us it's team policy that if any of them bomb a class they're out of the Scanrangers until they make it up. Meaning that act of generosity reduced their ability to save the world by 20%.
  • Comically Missing the Point: In one episode Toni meets an interesting guy and her friends immediately start acting all overprotective of her. Toni compares her friends' attitude to Kevin Costner and Whitney Houston's relationship in, um....The Bodyguard.
  • Defrosting Ice Queen: Carmen. Weirdly, even though Kunio's crush on her was his only subplot, he apparently gets over her. By the time she starts reciprocating he's said to be interested in his physical therapist instead.
  • Department of Redundancy Department: Several examples. "Combined gestalt," "hitting on impact," "fortress stronghold," "similar resemblence," "Like a spinning Class 9 hurricane"...
    • There's no such thing as a "Class 9" hurricane. Hurricanes are ranked in categories, and there's only five of them.
  • Designated Girl Fight: While the author has clearly seen this trope in action (Pinkscanner and White Swan team up to fight the female villains in "Scanranger vs. Jetman," for eample), the story hardly ever makes a point of Pinkscanner fighting Vixen. It's only when a second female Scanranger joins that Vixen has a grudge against a particular team member.
  • Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Blackorg is the most powerful force of evil in the story. He not only can but has steamrollered all the Scanrangers by himself on two occasions, the second including Silverscanner and after the team got a power-up. But in "Scanranger vs. Jetman", Red Hawk takes him out with one Wing Gauntlet-assisted punch.
  • Don't Explain the Joke: Almost every time the story makes a reference to some other media (which is several times an episode at the very least), the source is pointed out. Usually by the characters but sometimes by a parenthetical note from the writer. Of course there are times when this is fine, like when they’re adapting it into an attack, but the writer couldn’t do a scene transition to the dark side of the moon without mentioning Pink Floyd.
  • Downer Ending: The fic as is ends on one, with Mikey havin been arrested for assaulting "Professor Fox", with the threat of him being expelled being a real possibility.
  • Fake Defector: In the episode after Carmen joins, she pretends to sell out the team.
  • Fat Bastard: Nick uses his powers to imitate him in the episode where the rangers impesonate spies for the purposes of going sumo on a monster's ass.
  • Five-Token Band: Vin’s black, so he comes from the ghetto and listens to hip hop. Takeshi’s from Hawaii, so he’s a surfer. Carmen's from the Dominican Republic, so she's hot-blooded. And any Scanranger with Japanese heritage (there are at least three), is a lifelong tokusatsu and probably anime fan.
  • Genre Blindness: The Scanrangers show very little awareness of the conventions of Sentai. Surprising, what with the Ascended Fanboy thing. This line from "Scanranger vs. Jetman" says it all:
    Kunio: "In super sentai shows, it's customary for the minions to attack the team first, and then the monster appears! How the heck could I forget that?!"
  • Gosh Dang It to Heck!: As you'd expect there's no actual cursing in the story, but for some odd reason when the heroes feel the need to use an especially strong insult they usually go for "bastion," presumably as a family-friendly alternative to "bastard". Even though that word is not even remotely an insult.
  • Gratuitous Japanese:
    • The Japanese Scanrangers sometimes slip back into their native tongue, and more noticeable that Team Nightmare (created by a British villain in a story set in America) say “Nightmare Gattai!” to combine. Taken to an extreme in "Scanranger vs. Jetman" where a character will often say something in Japanese, then say the same thing in English after a friendly alien uses her powers to tear down the language barrier.
    • There’s also how when he needed to come up with an “alien” sort of name, Vince would often pick a word tenuously related to what he had in mind, then splice the English and Japanese versions of the word together (e.g. Kagamirron = "Kagami"/"Mirror" for a parallel Earth, Lighkari = "Light"/"Hikari" for a race of “good” aliens, Futurai presumably = "Future"/"Mirai" for an alien race that gives Nick the secrets of higher technology).
    • There's also the fact that monsters' names all start with the Japanese word for "black". As in, presumably, Big Bad Blackorg.
  • Heroes "R" Us: Project Paramount exists to "to keep aliens and other hostile extraterrestials from conquering this planet.." which it does by equipping a team of superheroes and cleaning up after them once the dust settles.
  • Hollywood Voodoo: Personified in a Monster of the Week. Bonus points for the monster also having Tarot powers.
  • Hypocrite:
    • In the arc where the Sixth Ranger joins the Scanrangers repeatedly ream the arc’s guest villains for attacking from behind and otherwise fighting dirty. Despite Nick attacking a villain from behind while invisible and using the Film Energy equivalent of steroids during the same arc.
    • It's debatable that Nick continues this behavior the next time they fight the same guest villains. The narration points out he’s sticking to his code not to take life when he kills one of their cyborg members. The thing is, he chased the villains who were already reeling from being defeated by the Scanrangers all the way to the moon, so he’s kicking them while they’re down. It doesn’t help that Nick breaks as many body parts as possible when he fights the one that put him in a coma earlier in the arc, what with the team’s mentor saying there will be no fighting for revenge on her watch.
  • Imagination-Based Superpower: Not only do Greenscanner’s powers derive from special effects, letting him do theoretically anything, but the way Film Energy works is compared to Green Lantern’s powers.
  • Infinite Supplies: The people who supply the rangers also repair the property damage resulting from their battles. Although part of the Mid-Season Upgrade involves enabling their Humongous Mecha to transport itself and its opponent to another dimension to avoid fighting in inhabited areas in the first place.
  • Insult Backfire: In a meta sense. Scanranger was written as a Take That! to Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers (when it started), but borrows enough elements from it you'd almost think it was an Affectionate Parody.
  • Intercontinuity Crossover: Maybe two with Choujin Sentai Jetman. Maybe, because the story contradicts itself and tells it different ways at different times: that Jetman really happened in Scanranger's universe and they get to meet via time travel (I.e. Professor Alex actually used to work for Skyforce and is old friends with Commander Odagiri), or that it's just a show some of the Scanrangers really like, with the Scanrangers traveling through time and into an alternate universe where the show's real to meet Jetman (I.e. the couple of times the Scanrangers name-drop actors from the show).
  • Laser-Guided Amnesia: Before he rejoins the team, Takeshi remembered everything about his life except serving as a member of the top-secret anti-alien organization. Which makes it kind of hard to believe his buddies never found him.
  • Left Hanging: Work stopped just a little before they were due to hit the home stretch.
  • Limited Social Circle: Toni's friend Monisha is the only friend outside the team we see when the friend didn't show up for the sole purpose of getting mixed up in that episode's Evil Plan, and even she stops appearing after the tenth episode. The rangers go to their secret base or Alex's office to hang out, and Toni and Alex went away on summer break together.
  • Lost Aesop:
    • It's clear the author intensely disliked how Power Rangers was made. What isn't clear, and which would seem central to putting so much effort into calling out a show you don't like, is what kind of show he wanted instead, or what about Scanranger was supposed to be closer to the author's idea of how to do these shows right.
      • Did he want dubbed Toku like we sometimes used to get, like Ultraman and Johnny Sokko and his Flying Robot? That's hard to figure out from Scanranger being about a multi-racial team of heroes defending the same state the author lives in. If anything, it sounds like Power Rangers instead inspired this story.
      • Indeed, it seems to be generally noted that with its somewhat lighthearted theme of saving the world with movies, American setting and incredibly hammy, bumbling comedic villains, Scanranger reads more like a season of Power Rangers than Sentai. This was probably due to it being written mainly in the mid-to-late 90's when Power Rangers was a lot more readily available than episodes of Sentai, never mind translated episodes. The author seems to have unintentionally used the show he was attacking as reference material; how are people supposed to know you're fixing something, when your product seems exactly the same? note 
      • The characters, costumes and mecha were all original to this story. Is that what the author wanted, for American creators to just take the idea of what a Sentai show's like, and make all-original shows in the formula a la Tattooed Teenage Alien Fighters from Beverly Hills and The Mystic Knights of Tir Na Nóg?
      • The author's attitude toward various issues depicted in his story seems to have changed over the course of writing it. Understandable, people learn and change, but see Broken Aesop above: is he supporting or mocking censorship for violent children's shows? If the author doesn't say what he wants, it's even harder to tell after he changes his stance on things within the same work.
      • Lastly, Scanranger was created to celebrate the original Japanese shows over the American adaptations of them. This gets weird when you think about how the Scanrangers get their powers from movies, and not made-up ones that only exist in the fic's world, real movies the reader could hunt down and watch themselves if they were interested. That's not even getting into all the references to movies and filmmakers that have nothing to do with the rangers' powers. Making Scanranger a story that's meant to glorify Japanese superhero shows while mocking the way they're adapted for America, that also relies on tons and tons of references to American media. If there's a takeaway from that, it's hard to figure out what.
    • In episode 23 Key creates a South Park character with his powers to menace the rangers, who is defeated by Yellow Scanner using his anime powers to explode the pseudo-Cartman's head with the power of Fist of the North Star. With it being treated very much as one style being superior to another. The point the author was trying to make about super-violent anime vs. American adult comedy, in a story that usually tries hard to be family-friendly, we can only guess.
  • Magic A Is Magic A: Subverted, if unintentionally. How the characters' powers work can be inconsistent. Vin needs to be extremely specific about which Zorro movie he wants to use in one episode even though what he is copying is the Z-slash you'd see in any version. But in the next, Takeshi is getting away with basing an attack on the Space Sheriff series in general. Ug's genre is war movies but he uses his powers to whip up the spider-mech from Wild Wild West, which most viewers would probably not call a "war movie". At one time Nick, using his special effects powers, taps into Rocky III to use Hulk Hogan's wrestling moves.
  • Magic Countdown: In chapter 16 the rangers figure out where the villains' current hideout is and go there to stop their current evil scheme. As soon as they leave a mob of mind-controlled students break into Alex's office to attack her. Meanwhile the rangers fall into a trap, have to be rescued at the last second by the Sixth Ranger, have a fight with the Monster of the Week that's drawn out by most of the rangers' powers mysteriously failing, have the obligatory mecha fight, which is also drawn out by the rangers being trapped and the Sixth Ranger having to save them again, before finally killing the monster and breaking its spell over its victims. In the time it took for all that to play out, the mind-controlled students were unable to cross a room and get close enough to hurt Alex.
  • Magic Meteor: Film Energy (and Blackorg) came to Earth in meteors.
  • Malaproper: Numerous examples in the narration. The story frequently got "was" and "were" backward, apparently thought "ascend" meant to move downward, "sheathe" meant to ready a sword for use, used "enabling" when it meant "causing" (as in "the monster shot Pinkscanner's mech, enabling it to crash"), "stray shot" when a hero shoots a villain or monster they probably full intended to hit, etc.
  • Mid-Season Upgrade: The “Power Upgrade” arc, naturally. Pretty standard, except Thunder Dolby, the Scanrangers’ original robot, is completely destroyed, and then not only do they get a brand new never-before-seen robot, Blockbuster, but a new and improved Thunder Dolby is rebuilt an episode and a half after its destruction.
  • Mood Whiplash: "There's Something About Toni" goes from the rangers fighting hate with love (hugging the monster's victims to break the spell over them) to the villains attempting to mass-murder the attendees of the school's Valentine's Day dance.
  • Never Say "Die": Averted (and mocked by B.C.), but worth noting that the Scanrangers (or at least B.C.) support such censorship.
  • Never Trust a Trailer : More than once a recap or preview mentioned something that hadn't happened yet or never happened at all.
  • No OSHA Compliance: In one episode B.C. and a supporting character are walking through the base when suddenly B.C. gets tackled. Turns out B.C. accidentally walked into the path of a laser cannon just as it was being test fired. And we're asked to believe these guys are the ones trying to SAVE people?
  • Not Allowed to Grow Up: It seems like Vince was trying to have Scanranger unfold more or less in real time like actual Sentai shows do, with years passing in-story while work on it progressed for years. The Scanrangers are still undergrads with no one mentioning how long they’ve been there.
  • Offscreen Villain Dark Matter: MAYHEM is here because they want to steal our natural resources. In spite of the strain presumably put on their stockpiles by failed scheme after failed scheme, the idea is never broached of leaving and raiding another planet where the natives aren't as technologically advanced as they are.
  • Omnidisciplinary Scientist:
    • Helper Dr. Markby is both a "physician and inventor."
    • Likewise Alex isn't just a film professor, she's got a military background, she's a former ballet dancer, she was a lanaguage teacher with Jetman's support team, she knows martial arts, and can pilot mecha if necessary. If she needs to be good at something or the writer thinks it would make her cooler, she's good at it.
  • One-Steve Limit: Averted, though one doubts it was deliberate. B.C. and scientist helper Dr. Markby have the same first name (Ben), a Red Shirt astronaut in the first episode is named Nick, and Vin’s martial arts teacher from back in the 'hood is named Tony (in all fairness the story almost exclusively uses his full first name). There's also a throwaway character in "The Good, The Bad and General Ug" named Mike.
  • Open Secret: The Scanrangers say their true identities must be kept a secret and are likewise defensive about revealing them, even though MAYHEM's been exploiting the knowledge of their secret identities since at least the third episode.
  • Orcus on His Throne: In the fourth episode Blackorg actually does get up and fight the Scanrangers himself, and defeats them handily. This mainly calls attention to how he spends the rest of the series yelling at his minions for their incompetence or telling them to back off when they're winning.
  • Paper-Thin Disguise:
    • Vixen gets a job teaching at the Scanrangers’ school as Professor Vivian Fox. During the interview the story basically comes out and says it’s a disguise the audience would see through automatically.
    • The time Anark Key masquerades as TV pitchman Eric Meyham.
  • Personality Powers: The area covered by a character’s Film Energy tends to echo whatever trait makes them unique. Vin’s a man of action, Nick’s super smart, B.C.’s the class clown, Kunio’s an artist, Toni’s a girl, Peter’s a devout Christian, and so on.
  • Planet Looters: After being unsure about MAYHEM's motivations for the first part of the story it's eventually decided that they want to steal our natural resources.
  • Power Perversion Potential: A family-friendly variant, but at the end of "The Vengeance of Emperor Toranza" B.C. and Takeshi use their time machine to try their luck with their favorite girls from Choushinsei Flashman and Space Sheriff Shaider.
  • Prince and Pauper: The male Scanrangers are identical in appearance to the Main Street Men, a famous boy band, with different hairstyles. When they meet face to face Vin is able to identify them at once, but had apparently never noticed anything along the lines of, "This guy'd look like me if I were bald, this guy would look like Kunio if he had glasses..." etc.
  • Psychic Link: Kunio and Takeshi inexplicably develop one, although it's forgotten after a few episodes.
  • Punny Name: Byte bites monsters, Arno Benedict’s a power hungry snake in the grass, Ug’s as dumb as his name, and Cyrus Borg's a... never mind.
  • Recruit Teenagers with Attitude: Alex needs to assemble a task force to protect the world from alien conquerors, but the Film Energy she’s got to hand out can only be used effectively by movie buffs. Acting on that, she gets a job teaching film classes at a New Jersey college, then places the fate of mankind in the hands of the five students with the highest grades. Granted they are experts at hand-to-hand combat, but Alex might have mentioned that when explaining why they were chosen.
  • Redundant Parody: The original run had a chapter that attempted to parody spy movies, with each of the heroes becoming a pastiche of a well-known character in the genre. The thing is Nick becomes Boston Powered, New England Man of Mystery, and the villain is even outright compared to Dr. Evil. It also takes the "don't be a dick" scene from xXx but doesn't sound any more ironic than the real one note , really just swapping out the word "dick" with "twit" to keep it family-friendly. The chapter was noticeably left out when the story was reposted elsewhere, with even the chapter numbers and teasers deliberately moved around to exclude it.
  • Refusal of the Call: Subverted. The kids think their soon-to-be mentor is playing a joke on them when she explains their powers, but immediately rush to defend their school when robots beam down and attack.
  • The Reveal: Unwittingly averted. Toward the end of the completed chapters it turns out Blackorg's taken over someone's body and they're starting to regain control, and it was played mysteriously as to who it could be. Seemingly production had gone on for so long the author had forgotten back in the teens of the series he'd had Alex explain how her husband died and the Sixth Ranger lost his memory, and at the same time she'd also explained how Blackorg took over the body of her other assistant.
  • Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale: Vin can see Earth with the naked eye from a planetoid on the other side of the universe.
  • Senseless Sacrifice: Mortally injured by Blackorg, Peter uses his ultimate attack to finish the villain off once and for all. He goes to his grave thinking he succeeded. As revealed by the first scene of the following episode, he didn't. In fact if anything his death just makes MAYHEM more of a threat, as Blackorg survives and adds a new member to keep an eye on things while he's recovering
  • Shame If Something Happened: MAYHEM threatening to break Christmas ornaments.
  • She-Fu: Toni's a gymnast and sometimes incorporates it into evading her enemies.
  • Shout-Out: A rare one that doesn’t get pointed out in dialogue. Chapter 5 features a one-shot villain named Lord Maliss, whose real name is Malcolm Lord. Though due to the obscurity of the reference and the fact the character is introduced leading a rally against the heroes, many assume him to be a reference to Justice League villain Max Lord.
  • Skewed Priorities: "From Here To Fraternity" has one of the guest heroes chewing out the monster for bending innocent students to his will, which is understandable, but his real crime is interrupting the guest heroine's over-the-top introduction.
  • Smurfette Principle: There’s only one woman on either side for better than thirty episodes. There’s also the Scanrangers’ commanding officer, but one wonders if that’s more on account of feminism or Vince Jones’s idolization of Choujin Sentai Jetman.
  • Spoof Aesop: In one Toni asks what they learned at the end and no one’s sure. The humor is short-circuited by the facts that the author can’t do comedy and that the situation is immediately dropped so they can date a busload of Miss America contestants.
  • The Starscream: Guest villain Arno Benedict.
  • Sue Donym: When going undercover as girls, Vin becomes Victoria, Nick becomes Nicole, and Kunio becomes (wait for it) Annie May.
  • Super Not-Drowning Skills: During the Mid-Season Upgrade Takeshi spends at least three weeks Buried Alive, and survives.
  • Surrounded by Idiots: What’s usually coming out Blackorg’s mouth when talking to his underlings.
  • Swiss-Cheese Security: After disappearing for three years, Silverscanner's able to enter the rangers' secret base without alerting anyone until he wants to, meaning they didn't change their security codes or who the retinal scanners recognize in all that time. More to the point in the All Your Base Are Belong to Us story the villains magically discover where the base is and are able to infiltrate it with tiny spy/suicide bomber robots. Literally, the plot just says they know where it is so they do. In "Carmen's Baptism of Fire" Key's able to hack their communication channel because that makes things easier on the writer.
  • Tomboyish Name: Until Carmen joined the only major female figures in the heroes’ camp were named Toni and Alex.
  • Too Dumb to Live: Peter, with the raging power of God in his corner, was doing what all six Scanrangers had just failed to do: defeat the Big Bad. Just as Peter's about to finish the job, however, what happens? Takeshi, his power depleted and sporting a gaping chest wound, interrupts Peter, asking to be allowed to help. Blackorg takes advantage of the lapse in Peter's attention to hit him with an attack that ends up killing him. Takeshi doesn't even get his injury looked at and passes out in the next episode.
  • Unusually Uninteresting Sight: In one episode a Victim of the Week seems more put out by the fact that his girlfriend's house was broken into by two-bit criminals than the space monsters running amok. Mind this was only a little bit after the monsters gained the power to grow into giants, at which point it probably should've seemed especially threatening.
  • Utopia: The school is one. Every student's individual needs are met, it's known as a place where a lot of cultures are blended, and the academic program is awesome, unlike the awful school the writer attended.
  • Viewers Are Goldfish:
    • Whenever Jetman guest stars the narration regularly reminds us that the Japanese characters speak Japanese.
    • As has been noted, one episode is about the rangers impersonating a group of singers. During the concert put on toward the end the narration constantly reminds the reader that (X band member whose name and likeness they probably don't remember) is really (Y Scanranger). Despite reading about the Scanrangers agreeing to impersonate the band, training to impersonate the band, and then coming up with a plan to go on stage and impersonate the band to smoke out MAYHEM.
  • Villain Decay:
    • Arguably starts in the second episode where Nick easily knocks Key out and impersonates him before he even has a chance to fight. That being the first time the Scanrangers ever encounter one of the villain officers.
    • Ug’s supposed to be the villains’ tough guy, but more than once he’s been taken out by a single attack. In “The Good, The Bad, and General Ug” he even ran away from a fight he appeared to be winning.
  • Weaksauce Weakness: B.C.’s Film Energy is shorted out by the presence of swear words. This includes impressions of the Tasmanian Devil.
  • Who Writes This Crap?!: “Last Temptation of Kunio Mikimoto”.
  • Will They or Won't They?: Probably supposed to be going on with Nick and Toni, but it was explicitly set to “just friends” after the Mid-Season Upgrade.
  • The Worf Effect: When the Scanrangers get their new robot, Blockbuster, it fights the villains' own Humongous Mecha which up until that point had been invincible, and completely owns it. In the next episode it's getting thrown around by a Monster of the Week so Silverscanner can show off his awesome new robot powerup.
  • Worst News Judgment Ever: In an early episode a years-old murder is front page news, for no other reason than because the plot’s contriving to the have killer (the Monster of the Week) face the Scanrangers. It doesn’t even go into why the death is considered a murder rather than an accident (the victim fell off a catwalk), or for that matter how and why a MAYHEM monster would’ve been terrorizing the Scanrangers’ school three years before the villains arrived from deep space.
  • Wouldn't Hit a Girl: In the second episode Toni tells the monster off for attacking a woman. In the third Vixen tries to hide behind this and Kunio tells her off on the basis of equal rights. So, whichever way advantages the heroes best.
  • Writers Cannot Do Math: "The cybercreature pulls a pair of tarot cards, one a devil, one a reaper, representing death, and one a chariot."
  • You Didn't Ask: In the oft-mentioned "Scanranger vs. Jetman", Alex surprises Kunio with her ability to speak Japanese and quotes the line. Bear in mind the guy who was surprised also speaks two languages, the same ones in fact.

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