This Will Forever Be The Perfect Episode Of Power Rangers

You ready? Let's do it

The history of Saban's long-running Power Rangers franchise is fraught with ups and downs

However, few of the peaks have been quite as satisfying as seeing all 10 of the original

Red Rangers team up together in order to save the world, which is just one of the multitude

of reasons that Forever Red might just be the perfect episode of Power Rangers

Power Rangers is the American adaptation of the long-running Japanese tokusatsu program Super Sentai

Saban Entertainment licenses the original Sentai footage from Toei and re-edits it into new adventures

It's a tradition in both versions of the franchise to bring back previous seasons' rangers for significant anniversary celebrations

The original six seasons took place in the same timeline. However, after Power Rangers in space, the show pivoted to mirror the original Super Sentai model of each season being a one-and-done season-long adventure

These teams rarely cross over or even acknowledge the existence of other teams of Power Rangers

However, the episode we're focused on today fulfills a dream that most of the Ranger fandom is consistently clamoring for

Interconnectivity. Yeah? This was something that the 10th season of the show aimed to tackle

The 34th episode of Wild Force titled Forever Red is something truly special

Deemed the 10th anniversary special, the episode in question is a full-blown team-up featuring every Red Ranger up to that point

It's basically the Avengers endgame in the Rangers universe. And it comes with an added cherry on top of being directed by arguably the greatest Ranger director of them all Koichi Sakamoto Sakamoto has directed decades worth of Rangers episodes as well as working on the Toku Holy Trinity of Kamen Rider Super Sentai and Ultraman His trademark flair for

a moving camera, beautiful action choreography, and, of course, explosions are all over this episode

Forever Red opens with Andros, the in-space Red Ranger, watching a group of cogs from the Machine

Empire, the primary antagonist from Zeo, as they unearth something mysterious from the sands of the

moon. We quickly learn that Tommy Oliver, aka the Zeo Red Ranger, portrayed by the late Jason David

Frank, is putting together a team of Red Rangers to stop the remnants of the Machine Empire from

excavating Lord Zed's Zord, Serpentera, to act as a doomsday machine and destroy the Earth

Remember, in 2002, when this episode was released, there had only been 10 crossovers up to this point

in the franchise overall, one of which featured the retooled Kamen Rider Black Rx as the short-lived

Masked Rider, and then, well, the less said about the in-space Rangers meeting the Ninja Turtles from

the next mutation, the better. However, the clumsiness and small scale from the previous

crossovers is nowhere to be found here. All of the Rangers are presented as larger than life

but despite how fun it is to see all the Red Rangers together for the first time

it's Austin St. John's Jason, the original Red Ranger, that gets the most epic introduction

After having left the show over salary issues and then eventually rejoining the cast briefly

as the Gold Ranger, Austin St. John's relationship with Saban was complicated at the time of shooting

this episode. Yes, he returned for Beast Morphers, Grid Connection, but he's noticeably absent from

the Rangers 30th anniversary special once and always mainly because of currently pending legal troubles However in 2002 none of that was on the horizon It was just a heroic rejoining of Jason into the Rangers family

like he's a full-blown movie star, driving up on a Harley Davidson

and removing his helmet to sheepishly quip, You guys weren't going to do this without me, were you

From here, Tommy gives a brief exposition dump explaining a new villain named General Vingix

is unearthing Serpentera, and we're off to the races. The episode is full of Koichi Sakamoto's directing tropes in the best way

The choreography rapidly and brilliantly breaks up the Rangers so they're each taking on multiple cogs at the same time

allowing them to all have their moment and still make it feel like the odds are stacked against them

Cole Evans, Wild Force Red, played by Ricardo Medina Jr., chases Vengex and his generals out of the base and onto the surface of the moon

where he's rescued from laser fire by Lost Galaxy Red and the Red Alien Ranger

Paul, hold on! Are you okay? Great! And then, we get the moment that every Rangers fan has been waiting for

A Henshin sequence where all ten Rangers transform into their suits, back to back

The thematic underpinning of the scene being that the only real element that bonds the various Rangers seasons together

is the morphing grid and the transformational sequences that go hand in hand with it

From here, we careen into an all-out brawl, and due to Sakamoto's deft hand

it doesn't feel like other Power Rangers episodes. He directs the fights with the same reverence as the street clothes fight

but he levels up the choreography by pairing the Rangers together. Sakamoto also plays with the sense of scale to the action

Usually the fights in Rangers are all horizontally oriented because they are doing things as fast and cheap as possible

However when Turbo Red and Lost Galaxy Red take out one of the generals by knocking him into the air and then slashing him with their swords it quite possibly the first vertically oriented fight in Rangers history The final fight is in

Space Red and Lightspeed Rescue Red in a laser battle with one of the generals, which climaxes

in an extended speed ramping shot. Sakamoto uses four different filmmaking techniques for the four

clusters of Red Rangers. Despite the impressive display of abilities, Venjix manages to escape in

Serpentera, which leaves Wild Force Red no other option than to pilot his Wild Force Rider down the

throat of Serpentera, causing it to explode. Which was apparently because they ran out of money

and you can tell. The CGI on Serpentera is pretty bad even by 2002 standards, but

it doesn't really matter. We all know we're here to see dudes in suits punch each other

And guess what? We got that in spades. There have been a few crossovers since Forever Red

but most of them have relied heavily on previously existing Sentai suit footage

and none of them have felt as special or well-directed. It just goes to show you

when you have the right people and you give them the time and space to make something truly unique

it can stand the test of time. Sakamoto worked on close to a decade of Ranger's material

but Forever Red was one of a select few episodes that he shot completely from scratch

There's obviously a reason for why Saban went the extra mile and gave him a little more money and time to make this all Red Rangers special

But to this day, almost 20 years later, few pieces of Ranger media have come close to rivaling this 10th anniversary effort

You've done a great service to the entire universe. Don't mention it, bro. Maybe the powers that be should learn a thing or two

Next time they're trying to reboot the Power Rangers into a big budget live action feature film

just hire Koichi Sakamoto