Bryce's Pipe Bomb Survival Guide*

In case you've just met me, I was perhaps raised a bit too much on movies. Part of it was certainly my mom's passion for watching movies, and it was something we could do together. I also lived pretty far from my school, so I didn't have any friends who lived close by. The cherry on top might be that my mom worked nights for a large part of my childhood, so I spent a lot of time at home. We didn't have cable, and I spent a long time in between functional videogame systems. I remember swapping between three different 8 bit Nintendo consoles, hoping to find the one that would actually work and let me play Zelda or Duck Hunt. What we did have was a LOT of VHS tapes. Some purchased, some recorded off of broadcasts, or from someone's house that had cable, and ones that were pirated by daisy chaining VCRs together. I should mention that I also had a pretty abysmal attendance rate at school, and there's a lot of weird stuff that used to be played during daytime telev

So, I'm pretty disappointed in my previous Power Rangers post, so I'm going to try and make up for it by talking about the show instead of the toys, which may be more compelling. So, way back in the mid '90s, Saban released a show called Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. Looking back on it, it should have been a one off oddity, not the beginning of a massive franchise that is going to be showing it's 26th season next year. If you're unfamiliar with Power Rangers, the basic idea is this: A group of young people, typically late teens to early twenties, are empowered to fight some encroaching threat to humanity. They do this by transforming into superheroes, with each ranger having a unique color. Often the monster of the week will grow into a larger form, and then the rangers will jump into vehicles/mechs and eventually combine their individual vehicles into a large robot. All of this is live action, which means the combined robot is a person in a cardboard and foam s

As should not be a surprise to anyone reading this, I love transforming robot toys. My first love was Transformers, of course. The line went on a long hiatus, at about the age that I could start doing random chores for my family to make some extra money. There was a remarkable dearth of transforming robots to be found on toy aisles until the Power Rangers showed up. Power Rangers was too silly of a show for 6th grade Bryce to admit watching and liking, but I did enjoy the designs for the robots that they piloted, which then transformed and/or combined. I've recently been reading a lot about how the show gets made, and it's fascinatingly bizarre. I want to avoid getting side tracked by the show, since I'm trying to talk about the toys, but the weird thing about the show is that they take a Japanese show, and basically cut, edit, and splice in original footage, such that really, they've made an entirely different story, and just used stock footage for all of the action