SERIES: Power Rangers Dino Fury

EPISODE: S29:E14 – “Rafkon Revealed”
STARRING: Russell Curry, Hunter Deno, Kai Moya, Tessa Rao, Chance Perez, Jordan Fite
WRITERS: Becca Barnes, Alwyn Dale, Maiya Thompson
DIRECTOR: Chris Graham
PREMIERE DATE: September 29, 2022

SYNOPSIS: The Rangers travel to Zayto and Aiyon’s home planet of Rafkon.

New around here? Check out the Power Rangers review archive!

By Rob Siebert
Fanboy Wonder

So the Rangers are leaving Earth undefended while they travel across the universe to Rafkon, eh? Who am I kidding? We just saw the Beast Morphers team in the previous episode. They’re around if something goes down, right?

The Rangers finally travel to Rafkon…and it looks exactly like Earth. I understand that Power Rangers is, and always has been, a kids show on a strict budget. But as far back as the mid-’90s, the show has had a simple trick to make mundane shooting locations feel like other planets: Tint the screen a certain color.

Go back and look at episodes like The Power Transfer in season two, or A Friend in Need in season three. The Rangers travel to other planets in those episodes, but if you pay attention to what’s actually around them, they’re almost never on any kind of extravagant sets. The show created an illusion using a fairly cheap trick. A trick that came in especially handy once they got to seasons like Power Rangers in Space. So what’s stopping them from using that trick here?

A shot from inside Lord Zedd’s visor (shown above)! That’s an old Mighty Morphin staple! I didn’t even realize how much I missed it!

But hey, right there! They tinted the shot red! So why can’t they use that trick (albeit not such an intense red the entire time) for a larger chunk of the episode?

Perhaps inevitably, it feels like Zedd has eclipsed Void Queen as far as being the big bad of Dino Fury. At least as far as these past few episodes are concerned. They had to know that was going to happen, to an extent. In addition to being a character from back in the day that longtime fans would naturally gravitate toward, design-wise Zedd is cooler than all the other villains by a mile. Hopefully they up Void Queen’s evil quotient as we inch closer to the end of Dino Fury. She certainly shouldn’t be shoved aside.

The Green Morphin Master appears at the end of the episode, having saved the Rangers from a face-off with Zedd. I was initially going to nitpick about them not bringing in former cast members to do the voices of these Morphin Masters. (Because why the hell not?) But as it turns out, they did!

Beth Allen, who voices the Green Morphin Master, had an on-screen role way back in S.P.D as a friend of Jack’s. She was later in Operation Overdrive as Tyzon’s fiancee, and then did the re-dubbing of Udonna’s voice in Beast Morphers. She never played a Ranger, and she’s never had what I would call a major role on the series. But she is technically a former cast member. So they get by on a technicality on that one…

Email Rob at primaryignition@yahoo.com, or check us out on Twitter.