The Truth About Power Rangers

The year was 1995 and a secret war was being fought between the Power Rangers and one man. Phil Phillips, named after his stuttering grandfather, received instructions from God to write a book about the anti-Christian messages in children’s shows. He was never told to stop, so he kept doing it. The Truth About Power Rangers is his 10th version of the same book, and we now how what happens after a Christian man is forsaken by his Lord after scouring 200,000 hours of cartoons for signs of witchcraft or Buddhist philosophies.

I want to get one thing off my chest before we start. Phil Phillips is the roiling, unstable kind of effeminate don’t see outside of closeted Christian husband communities. He talks like he’s workshopping a character called Pastor Bottom LaRue: Unmistakable Homosexual. He looks like a counselor who sells amyl nitrate to teenagers at gay conversion Bible camp. His cheeks tell the story of a man who would lose 12 pounds a day if he gave 4% fewer blowjobs. He looks like a pile of dinner rolls brought to life by fairy magic, which is word-for-word how his wife describes his lovemaking as she becomes visibly sad. There is more semen in a Phil Phillips handshake than in four handfuls of semen. If you showed him a baseball he would compliment the stitching and ask if you needed help pulling out the rest of your anal beads.

I’m having fun, but Phil’s secret desires aren’t super relevant to the book. There are a few mentions of the perfect muscle density of the young Power Ranger boys, but that’s barely gay. The Power Rangers keep it tight and they’re looking good. I bring it up for two reasons. One, he sucks and I genuinely think it would hurt his feelings if he found out everyone can tell, and two, I want to establish the conflict and cognitive dissonance raging inside his brain. He has been lying to himself and his wife for decades in order to trick a being he believes to be the omniscient Creator of the universe. It’s possible his thoughts on Power Rangers are tainted by these deranged and inconsistent beliefs. At the very least, all the hours he spends retching at the thought of his husbandly vulva duties is going to eat into his pop culture analysis time.

Like my article about it, Phil Phillips opens his book by pointlessly describing the obvious. At first, it’s just explanations of morphin’ dino powers and episode summaries. As a primer for curious parents, it’s far, far more than adequate. It’s literally 57 pages long. It might be the longest document on Power Rangers abilities ever written. And aside from one complaint about how teaching karate to unsupervised children is risky for lamps (see below), he doesn’t explain why any of it matters. He’s describing every detail of Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers, a pretty formulaic kids show with positive messaging, as if it’s a given that the Devil made it. As if battling moon evil with karate is such an insult to God there is no need to spell out why.

Phil brings up a good point in this passage. What is the likelihood of children wearing loose clothes, scoff, in an un-lamped area? VERY LITTLE LIKELIHOOD!!! He’s outrageously pissed at the idea of lamps breaking, but then a miracle happens. I don’t know if it was all the time away from the inside out wrongness of his wife’s female genitalia, or if he was simply starting to enjoy the show, but after this section Phil started cheering up. Soon there was no judgement or moralizing– he was just some weird adult man breathlessly explaining all the awesome things he saw the Power Rangers do. His religion-dulled brain and below average writing skills strained to retell each adventure in as much detail as possible. He explained their puns and got so excited when they morphed. For about forty pages, the TRUTH About Power Rangers was how they were fucking sweet.

Fun doesn’t last forever, though. Eventually Phil Phillips remembered God sent him on a mission to destroy these foolish Power Rangers. He knew one of their crimes against His Plan probably had something to do with violence, so he found some questionable studies, interpreted findings in questionable ways, and came to the conclusion the Power Rangers were bad because they didn’t try running away from evil more often. Phil isn’t exactly a pacifist, but he believes you should let only God do all the karate. Here, I’ll let him explain:

Phil’s first argument against karate is that God is supposed to protect you, so protecting yourself is betraying your trust in Him. This is like telling Christians to run out of a restaurant before paying because the Lord said He would provide. It’s shaky logic even before you consider how weird it is to expect the Power Rangers to follow the rules of the religion in your specific leaky brain when they talk to their own dinosaur gods in a different universe. So I guess forget the restaurant analogy. This is like barging into a Bangladeshi house and telling them to throw their towels on the floor so the staff at the Best Western Plus Kansas City Airport knows to wash them. It’s like Phil Phillips getting mad at his wife for not naming her penis Motorbiscuit. It’s dumb and wrong, but only after it’s first crazy.

Phil explores this theory of agency and self-defense being bad for a long time. I highlighted the spot where he accidentally wrote the thesis statement not for the book he intended to write, but the one he did. Phil Phillips has spent so many years trying to figure out how to hate cartoons, he has lost all perspective on the difference between menacing and annoying. All his perceived threats are imaginary, and his imagination can picture hair on his wife’s back and nothing else. When you think punching your enemies is more of a threat than enemies, you’ve played too many games with words. I get I’m under less stress than a man who knows God can see him when he shops online for dance belts, but I think it’s so easy to be this smart. On my dumbest day, 9 times out of 10, I know standing still and letting karate kill you is bad.

Phil especially hates Alpha’s Magical Christmas, the Power Rangers holiday album. Not because it’s terrible, which would be fair to say, but because it implies all cultures “are equally valid and worthy.” A big part of Christianity is thinking how everyone else is wrong even if you’re a chipmunk-looking fucker who has been complaining about cartoons for twenty straight years and thinks maybe we should all leave evil alone. Phil might advocate for pussiness, but at least he doesn’t spend Christmas accepting and loving others like some kind of monster.

One of the funniest things Phil does is suddenly get furious at ordinary story beats. Here he is, after a brief mention of Power Ranger Ryan’s shiny, eye-catching costume redesign, getting furious at the idea of a superhero rescuing his father from cyberspace:

Phil instantly, and for no reason, thought children would see this dad trapped in the Internet and decide it was their job to reunite their divorced parents. He gets there in one goddamn sentence. This is mind soup. He’s mad at cyber superheroes in an action show for staying too busy? This is like writing an angry letter to bowling for normalizing kindness. It’s like campaigning against fish to fight sunshine. I feel like trying to explain this fucker is making me go c-crascorb dibble crouton hat.

There’s a section where Phil compares the Power Rangers to “gangs” because of their colored uniforms and how they defend their “turf” which he reluctantly admits is “the entire planet.” So to be clear, he’s mad at the Power Rangers for defending the planet because that’s the defining characteristic that makes gangs bad. I think smart people call this specific type of dumb argument the noncentral fallacy, but if I had to put it in terms Phil could understand, I’d say this is like calling yourself a good husband because you sometimes ask the hole in the YMCA wall if it has anal thrush. Phil, this argument is like calling yourself a hero because you pant into a Spider-Man mask when you watch your neighbor’s boys play in the sprinkler.

Phil wrote, where everyone could see it, how one of the risks of Power Rangers is it teaches children to call on demons and “What if one answers?” I don’t have a joke, I just love how after all his paranoia about cultural indoctrination and fear of child karate (the only type of karate), he reveals his true concern: he thinks Dinozoid powers might be real. And it’s terrifying to him. To be clear: this man wrote a book about why you should fear Dino Morphin’ Power Rangers and floated the theory IT’S POSSIBLE THEY EXIST.

In his big finish, Phil makes a list of reasons you should never watch Power Rangers, you know, besides their sinister promotion of heroism, friendship, and generosity. First is Low Production Values, and fair enough, Phil: this show isn’t very good. Second is Only Perfect People where Phil whines about how only one cast member wears glasses and even they are sort of hot. Speaking of hot, the third reason is Sexual Overtones where he complains, and I quote, “The teens regularly wear shorts and tank tops, all the better to show off their perfect muscles.” He also gets mad about the show’s diversity, not because we are losing karate jobs to the non-whites, but for reasons never explained. He’s just suddenly also racist on top of everything else.

He goes on to cite the show’s bias against job creators and its disrespect toward authority as reasons no one should watch it. These are all hilariously inconsistent with values he expressed earlier in the book, probably because God doesn’t assign the task of destroying the Power Rangers to his heaviest hitters.

Of all the final reasons to stay away from the show, nothing beats #5: A Heavy Emphasis on Stereotypes. Moments after complaining about diversity and the dangers of allowing any cultures or religions to exist outside the one he was born into, he’s pissed off at Power Rangers for not being woke.

I think we all agree it’s pretty fucked up the Power Ranger producers made the black one the Black Ranger and the Asian one the Yellow Ranger, but I’m not sure the best messenger for this is the sanctimonious idiot who got pissed off at Christmas songs for being too inclusive and still called Asian people “Oriental” in 1995. I am completely exhausted trying to translate this maniac’s God brain into English, but this is like Phil Phillips complaining that his wife doesn’t appreciate his tidiness to the man eating his ass in her van. If you wrote a book called Zero Muslim Hat Ideas for Easter, Phil Phillips would still have written the dumbest, most pointless religious book of all time.