Category: Musings

Review #067 – Mighty Morphin Power Rangers (Super NES)

Later tonight, the remainder of Breakdown!
Tomorrow, Power Rangers CD and the beginning of Eighth Coin!

*Yeah, this is a Dailymotion video upload. YouTube will get this later this week, but for the Dailymotion crowd and this blog, I’m uploading all the Power Rangers reviews I’ve got thus far.

Random Thought About Next Mutation

Just a curious thought that I felt like throwing out there;

I found an old tape that had, among other bits of randomness, the first episode of the short-lived maligned Ninja Turtles: The Next Mutation series that introduced the world to FemTurtle… I had always wondered what the backstory behind this series was and whether it had any connection to the movie trilogy that came before. What had me wonder about this was the Turtles’ lair. See, the lair on the show is based on the one from the second and third movies. Perhaps it’s a trivial nitpick and perhaps the two has little to do with each other… but still, one has to wonder about the possible links between the two.

I’m sure somebody did a fanfic on that already, though. If not… there’s an open challenge to anyone writing fanfics. Any takers?

COMIC REVIEW – Star Trek: Debt Of Honor (1992 DC Comics One-Shot)

So this is an interesting little beast; a Star Trek movie-era one-shot story published in a prestigious hardcover graphic novel from DC Comics that is basically an excuse to give you as many callbacks, winks, and nods as you could possibly fit within 90+ pages of comic book. To the layman with no clue about Star Trek, this means very little, but to the hardcore Trekkie out there, Debt Of Honor references so many things, features so many guest characters including those who have only been spotlighted in a single episode of Star Trek, and makes so many callbacks to past moments and eras that it almost overwhelms the entire book. It’s usually the worst kind of thing when so many callbacks are made and the whole thing coasts on nostalgia that it detracts from the overall product.

And yet the funny thing about Debt Of Honor is that these nods aren’t just quite little things. Some of them contribute quite a bit to the overall story, which has quite a few layers to it. Captain Kirk, commanding the second ship to bare the name U.S.S. Enterprise, still feels guilt over the loss of the previous Enterprise, and is about to partake in a mission to take on a menace from his past. What follows is a story that bounces between present day and flashbacks, which touch in a number of eras. From Kirk’s days on the Farragut to the five-year mission and even The Motion Picture and its dull gray uniforms gets some love.

Complimenting the superb storytelling and writing is the wonderful art. Everything looks like what it’s supposed to; none of the ships depicted have weird proportions or anything of the sort. There’s a genuine effort in some cases to have the characters somewhat resemble the actors who portrayed them. Though it is funny seeing Kor depicted as he appeared in “Errand Of Mercy”, considering that DS9 would bring the character back and give the modern Klingon look. This came out before that was a thing, so that’s not an intentional mistake… but it is funny.

Debt Of Honor is one of the few Star Trek graphic novels that I still have laying around and is one that I often go back to every now and then. It’s a damned fine book with the perfect balance between fan service and solid storytelling; one that anyone working in a popular franchise should strive to achieve. This gets my highest recommendation.