firehose

One of the nice things about having my job is that occasionally, someone I don’t know will be cleaning out a garage or whatever, find something weird, and immediately decide that they should mail it to me because they think it’s something I’d want to see. It doesn’t happen a lot, but it’s often enough that at this point, it’s stopped being weird. Mostly.

Point being, that’s exactly what happened when reader Jeff found his wife’s membership kit for the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers Official Fan Club from 1994 and offered to send it over. This is not an offer I turn down, especially with the 20th anniversary of MMPR coming up next week, so join me as we explore the garden of delights that is the Power Rangers Fan Club Kit.

Jeff was kind enough to pack the box with plenty of padding (and a set of trading cards complete with trivia questions about the Rangers and stuff like who invented radio), but even so, I was surprised at how well this thing held up after almost 20 years. It makes sense, though, since Jeff claims that it’s only been opened around twice in that entire time, but still, it’s pretty crisp, as you can see in this photograph with 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand for XBox 360 included for scale:

When I popped the box open, I was greeted with a letter welcoming me to my new role as a Junior Power Ranger and advising me that this was a role that required self-esteem and confidence:

Fortunately, these are both things that I have in abundance, despite the fact that I just opened up a MIghty Morphin Power Rangers fan club kit at the age of 31.

The letter, signed by “The Power Rangers,” also devotes half of its space to plugging VR Troopers, Saban’s first (and bat-s**t craziest) attempt to capitalize on the success of Power Rangers. Like Power Rangers, it used footage from Japanese sentai shows for the action, but it used the footage of two different series at the same time, meaning that members of the team could never actually appear together or interact with each other. It’s also worth noting that it was attempting to capitalize on the hip, new craze for virtual reality by using footage from a show that had been shot in 1985. It ran for ninety-two episodes. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it (my preferred MMPR knockoff was USA’s Tattooed Teenage Alien Fighters From Beverly Hills) , but since it’s on Netflix, I pretty much have to at this point.

Underneath the letter, there’s all the actual fan club stuff. Obviously, the biggest draw here is the Official Fan Club Video, a half-hour VHS tape. Surprisingly, the whole thing hasn’t been uploaded to YouTube, but here’s a quick highlight reel:

Fortunately, my all-consuming nostalgia means that I’m one of six people in America who still owns a working VCR, so I was able to watch the whole thing. I’m not really sure what I was expecting, but the end result is this bizarre little Q&A with the Power Rangers, who are in 100% character the entire time. It doesn’t seem scripted, but they’re answering questions as the Rangers rather than as the actors who play the rangers, talking about how scary it was to fight a particular monster or how confused they were when Zordon summoned them to the Command Center on the grounds that they had “attitude.” It’s even weirder because they use behind-the-scenes footage a few times for filler, but they hand down the basic requirements for Junior Rangers. It’s pretty much “be nice to people and stay off drugs.” I can only do one or the other, guys. You’re asking a little too much here.

After the video, there’s an insulated lunch bag, the height of ’90s sandwich storage technology:

When I saw the lunch bag, I had the distinct feeling that I actually had this when I was a kid. Not this one, I mean — I was never really bullied when I was in school, but I imagine rolling up into sixth grade with a hot pink Power Rangers lunch bag would’ve changed that toute de suite — but one of them. I may not have had it since I don’t remember anything else, but to be fair, I was a child who dearly loved lunch.

Next up, a pair of Official Junior Power Ranger shoelaces:

Sadly (and, you know, completely understandably), these are sized for kids’ shoes, so I don’t think they’ll fit in my shoes. Believe me, I’d use them if they would, but alas. Hopefully CA editor Caleb Goellner has tiny, childlike feet that can make use of them.

[Editor's Note: ...I'm a size 12  ]

I dropped out of college because back then, there was no real way to get class credit for “knowing a lot about Batman,” so imagine my delight when I moved that stuff aside to find a stack of glossy photos of the cast and my Official Certification as a Junior Power Ranger! Finally, something to fill that frame my mom got twelve years ago and show up those snobs at the next family Christmas dinner:

See that, suckers? Those are high-quality reproductions of the signatures of all six original Rangers. And it’s embossed. Foil embossed.

The thing is, you can’t really carry a framed membership certificate around with you wherever you go, but the good people at the PRFC thought of that, too. In addition to the certificate, you also get a wallet-sized Official Identification Card:

I am definitely planning to carry this around to impress people. Not in an arrogant way or anything, just, you know, I open up my wallet to pay for a cup of coffee and maybe it falls out and catches that cute barista’s eye. “Oh, ha ha, sorry. Yeah, I don’t like to brag about it or anything, but yes, I am an official Junior Power Ranger. Why yes, I am free this evening… for love.”

It’s not just a flashy piece of paper, though. It’s also a useful reminder of how to stay off drugs, which was apparently the biggest problem for a bunch of teenagers who spent all their time trying to keep a moon witch from literally destroying a city with giant monsters. The reverse has some handy ways that you can D.A.R.E. to resist drugs and alcohol, pictured here with Mr. Cent:

There are a few other things in here that you’d get for your $17.95 like a poster, temporary tattoos, stickers, iron-on transfers that are definitely going onto the next hoodie I buy, but like most fan clubs, the main idea here is to get you to spend more money. As such, the kit includes five Power Rangers Dollars that you can put towards ordering more stuff, and a catalog. I’ll admit that I was a little disappointed in the catalog at first — it’s mostly just replacement stuff for what’s in the kit, for the extremely unlikely event that a ten year-old loses a pair of shoelaces — but then I flipped it over and saw something amazing.

For only $9.95, children of 1994 could employ the downright magical new technology of image manipulation to get their own Morphin Portrait. This, of course, was just pasting your face on the body of your favorite Power Ranger, and this is the image they chose to sell the idea:

Please, please tell me that this is still an option. It’s not that I want one for myself, but that I want to take the ad’s advice and surprise friends and relatives with their own Morphin Portrait. Specifically, that Morphin Portrait. I want to give it to everyone I know.

If there is nothing else that we have learned from the Power Rangers Fan Club Membership Kit, it should be that there are very few things in this world as fantastic as a baby with a hi-top fade.

Google's Keep app is one of the fastest ways to record a quick note if you are an Android user, and today the app is getting even better with built-in reminder features. Like the reminders already implemented in Google Now, Keep can be set to alert you at a specific or general time, or a location. Location suggestions pop up as soon as you start typing, and you can snooze reminders if you aren't ready to deal with the task when they go off.

In addition to reminders, Google also streamlined the tool to add images to a Keep note. Though Keep started out as a very bare-bones note-taking app, Google's iterations on it are making it more and more appealing to those that are using Evernote or some other note-taking service. Keep is available for Android and Chrome, but Google has not indicated whether or not it will come to iOS at some point in the future. The update is rolling out to the Play Store now and should be available some time today.

Fresh off an Eisner win for her 2012 adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle In Time, graphic novelist and filmmaker Hope Larson is already stirring up interest in her next project, Four Points, a graphic-novel adventure set in 1860 and illustrated by artist Rebecca Mock.

Here are some highlights from Larson’s conversation with the LA Times‘ Hero Complex blog about the book:

About the lead characters: 

 I really wanted to do an adventure story with male and female protagonists for kids, because when Wrinkle in Time came out in October, I started getting tons and tons of email and meeting all these people who would tell things to me like, “Oh, my kid is 7 and he or she has never read a book on their own before. This is the first book that they’ve actually sat down and they’ve read the whole thing.” That was huge for me. I don’t usually get that kind of feedback. I don’t usually hear from my readers very much. I would read these emails and basically cry. I thought it would be great if I could do another book along these lines that would be fun and engaging and accessible for kids who are reluctant readers.

On whether she feels a sense of responsibility when writing about young women:

I think it’s probably something that I think about more, now that I have a few stories under my belt, I’m more interested in writing assertive female characters and take-charge female characters. It’s easy to fall into a passive role in general as a writer. Most writers are introverted and sort of shy. It’s really easy to write yourself and from now on I want to be writing characters who are going out and really driving their own story a bit more.

On setting the book in 1860: 

I wanted to write something action-packed and full of adventure. It’s basically about these twins who end up traveling from New York to San Francisco and having a bunch of adventures along the way. It’s going to be two books. Book one, there are pirates, but it’s peripherally for a lot of the book, and then book two is going to delve more into pirate adventure.

On her film aspirations:

The ideal situation would be to have parallel careers going on. I’m moving away from drawing comics into writing comics, and that means that I have a lot more free time. I actually went to film school; it’s something I’m passionate about.

There’s no release date just yet, but we’ll be on the lookout for a clearer timeframe manifests.

[Via The LA Times]

Dungeons & Dragons: Chronicles of Mystara, a package containing ports of two Capcom-made D&D arcade games available for download right now, was a true labor of love. It wouldn't have happened, as producer Kazuhiro Tsuchiya told Famitsu magazine, without users in Japan clamoring for it in the survey responses they sent to the publisher over the years. It also wouldn't have happened without the support the two games (Tower of Doom and Shadow over Mystara) had inhouse — to the point where a group of Capcom programmers had the games up and running on consoles before they actually had permission to use the D&D license.

"The D&D series is licensed from the table RPG, of course," Tsuchiya said, "but other D&D game products have come out overseas as well. It's difficult for the licensor to use the same brand for different titles, and so we haven't had a chance to port it despite the requests we get from fans. Things didn't come together until fairly recently and so we didn't have a lot of time to handle development, but we still wanted more than just a straight port."

So Tsuchiya called in Kenji Kataoka, a Capcom designer who was actually the director on the original Shadow over Mystara arcade game back in 1996. "Myself and the programmers were able to do what we wanted," said Kataoka, who's also serving as director on the Chronicles project. "The coders had ideas of their own, and most of the time they matched with mine. I had to think a little before I said yes to letting multiple players use the same character, though. I thought it would affect the game balance and story setting too much. Given that this is based on a table RPG, I thought it'd be weird if you had multiples of the same character onscreen. Still, I relented on that because it's what the fans want. If you're playing online and two people want to play as Crassus, you don't want to get in the way of that."

Kataoka's involvement helps to give Chronicles that veneer of authenticity that's always important with retro-game releases. For one thing, all the art assets and design stuff that's unlockable in the Vault wouldn't be there without his support — most of it is scanned from originals that Kataoka's kept at his house for nearly two decades.

"This is really neat stuff," Tsuchiya said. "It dates back to the era when we were still using dedicated word processors instead of PCs to create these documents. It's neat to see all the comments from our bosses at the time jotted down on the papers, and it's also valuable stuff because it gives people an idea into the process behind how a game designer thinks and how his work eventually grows into a full game."

"I don't know if budding game designers can learn anything from it today," Kataoka added, "but I think they can at least get a feeling of the passion that drove us and the things we wanted to brings to gamers. People have had to wait a while for this port to happen, but that time allowed us to put in all kinds of neat features. I think it's a pretty good deal."

Chronicles of Mystara is available for download now on the PS3, Xbox 360, Wii U and Steam. A special retail package also goes on sale for the PS3 only in Japan tomorrow.