August 2022

Greetings and salutations, fellow aficionados of anime, Power Rangers, Super Sentai, and everything early 1990s to early 2000s, Antoni here. Be prepared to don those nostalgia goggles once again, everybody, because I am going to take you back to the years where my fictionalised version of Saban’s Power Rangers franchise from August 28, 1993 to August 10, 2002, with the final Saban-Era Power Ranger incarnation Wild Force airing its twenty-sixth episode before moving to Disney, would have aired on Toonami from August 28, 2000 to September 20, 2008. As to be expected, these also include the Inuranger movie tie-ins much like their real-life counterparts in the forms of 1995’s Mighty Morphin Power Rangers the Movie and 1997’s Turbo: A Power Rangers Movie. Strap in for a morphenomenal ride back to your childhoods, fellow 90s to early 2000s friends, and stay glued to your television screens with some popcorn .   This will mark the last time I am ever going to redo this list of what I would call the Toonami Era of the Inurangers franchise, which is the Saban Era of Power Rangers franchises’s fictionalised counterpart. It is not because I do not want to do it anymore, but because I love the Saban Era of the Power Rangers even with some of its gaping flaws and moments of campiness, and, of course, I also love anime with a passion. Even looking back at the previous attempts of making the Toonami-Era Inurangers teams list, I did not know what I was thinking when assigning certain characters these particular rangers. For instance, the fact that I made Kyuzo from Samurai 7 the Inuranger version of Cole Evans of Wild Force was a decision I regretted, but I have learned from this experience, and I would gladly recast Kyuzo as a seventh ranger in Inurangers Lightspeed Rescue and reassign the Cole Evans role to none other than Ippo Makunouchi from Hajime no Ippo. Speaking of Hajime no Ippo and recasting, there will also be some recasts done, including having Ichiro Miyata be the Inurangers Turbo version of TJ Johnson among other decisions that shall gladly be rectified. Nevertheless, this is still going to be a whole lot of fun because at least they are in their right roles, with select entries still maintaining their right casting.   Ever since re-evaluating and re-organising the Toonami-era Inurangers teams, I have also become a lot stricter in terms of one cast of seven members per incarnation. As I stated before, I am not going by the real-life Super Sentai/Power Rangers franchise of having mostly five to eventually six members per incarnation but a total of seven members, for the colours of red, green, white, black, blue, yellow, and pink shall remain intact as the primary Inuranger colours, although incarnations such as In Space, Lightspeed Rescue, Time Force, and Wild Force would mix up the colour scheme. For instance, Mighty Morphin Inurangers Seasons 1 until 3 will still have the same cast of seven rangers, while Zeo and subsequent seasons would have entirely new casts of seven rangers, although there will be some members of Inurangers Turbo who are going to end up in the In Space incarnation. Therefore, the strict rule of seven members per Inurangers incarnation prevails.   I would also like to have a word about composite and decomposite characters because this is something I could have addressed a little bit more verbosely when I was doing these Inurangers lists. Because there are seven members per Inurangers incarnation in total, there will be occasions where the traits of certain characters would also be inhabited by the characters I have chosen to be the specific colour of Inuranger. This especially holds the most weight in Mighty Morphin Inurangers, but is also true for Inurangers In Space, Inurangers Lightspeed Rescue, and Inurangers Time Force to a certain extent. For instance, Sesshoumaru the White Mighty Morphin Inuranger and Shuran the Green Mighty Morphin Inuranger are decomposite characters of Tommy Oliver’s tenure as the Green Ranger from MMPR Seasons 1 to 2 and the White Ranger from MMPR Seasons 2 to 3, with the former leaning towards more on Tommy Oliver’s entire persona and the latter bearing most traits from Tommy’s clone/”twin” Tom from “Return of the Green Ranger”. Inuyasha, Hakkaku, Ginta, Ayame, and Shunran are going to receive the composite character treatment, and you will find out which composite character combinations suit them the most. So, do not expect any Peace Conferences or International Gymnastics deals or what have you to occur in any of these instances, especially with what specifically happened to Walter Emanuel Jones, Thuy Trang, and Austin St. John during their tenure on Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. Besides, the less said about what happened during their time with payment and their demand for unionisation the better because that is quite the can of worms several Power Rangers fans could never shake off.   There will also be instances where certain allies to the Power Rangers in canon would find themselves being rangers themselves as embodied by the chosen characters, such as the likes of Billy the former Blue Mighty Morphin Power Ranger from Zeo as the White Gold Ranger, Alex Drake the first Red Time Force Ranger joining in the team as the Crimson Time Ranger, Ms. Angela Fairweather from Lightspeed Rescue participating as the Chromium Lightspeed Rescue Ranger, and Princess Shayla from Wild Force becoming more active as the Emerald Deer Ranger all embodied by the characters I have chosen for them. They will essentially contribute far more than any viewer or hardcore Power Rangers let alone Super Sentai fan can ever bargain for. Additionally, there are also some mixes as to which character I would assign for which specific ranger, especially since I would assign Toran from Inuyasha as the first female Red Inuranger in Inurangers Zeo with Mika Seido from Geneshaft as the second female Red Inuranger for In Space following suit, Botan from YuYu Hakusho as the first…