"Come down here and fight like a pig!"
Here we go, another “classic” episode of Power Rangers that made many, many rounds in my VCR when I was a kid. Food Fight is sort of the epitome of a Mighty Morphin’ episode: teens have problem, Rita gets inspiration from their problem, makes a monster, the rangers defeat said monster, and then their problem is solved at the end of the day. What makes Food Fight better than average is the pacing of the story and extended scenes on the moon palace; it's much more fun than listening to Rita screech her plan off screen while Goldar swings a sword at the camera repetitively, anyway.
The ranger teens are helping run a school food fair, trying to raise money for new preschool playground equipment. Principal Kaplan oversees the festival and Ernie helps provide some Hawaiian specialties. Bulk and Skull only show up to start a food fight, for which the teens promptly get blamed, and are put on clean-up duty. But before they even start, Zordon sends them off to fight the Pudgey Pig monster, created by Rita after witnessing their food fight. The rangers’ weapons get swallowed by the pig, who then sends them into a vortex and proceeds to eat all the leftover food at the festival. By the time the teens make it back, all the food is gone, except for (Trini notices) the food in the spicy section. The rangers come up with a plan to trick Pudgy into eating a spicy radish so they can get their weapons back and kick the pig’s ass.
Like I mentioned, I love how many scenes there are featuring
Rita and her crew. Typically we
only spend a few seconds in the palace out of plot necessity, but this time we
got to see a little personality from Finster and Rita that was entertaining and
actually kind of funny:
Finster: “I have a Pudgy Pig, my Queen, but it’s not my best work…”
Rita: "THEN MAKE IT YOUR BEST WORK!!!”
An unfortunate side effect of using solely Sentai footage for your villain scenes is that you’re extremely limited by what you can use because of the dubbing possibilities. I appreciate it when as much Rita footage as possible is used, which explains why I like this episode.
The titular food fight is pulled off pretty nicely, and we
get to see more fun from Bulk, Skull and their unnamed minions who I always wished we could
see more of. I’d like to think
that Bulk and Skull built up so much bad karma for ruining the food fair that it caused
them to be cursed with getting food thrown on them every week for the rest of
their lives. It might be cheesy as
all hell, but at least the food fight was fun to watch. Though we all have to agree that Kaplan
is an idiot for making the rangers clean up the festival instead of Bulk and
Skull (but they never do anyway, so it’s alright I guess).
The Pudgy Pig is a classic Mighty Morphin’ monster, and for good reason. He actually does something that hinders the rangers: he takes away their weapons and threatens to eat the world’s food supply within two days, if Zordon’s calculations are correct. WHICH THEY ALWAYS ARE. It was a decent way to tie the footage together via a food fair, and we get the first monster-on-Bulk-and-Skull action in the series history. Ok, they just snarl at each other so I don't know if it's "action," but it's something. The point is, the rangers' have to defeat the monster without their weapons, and while simple, it's definitely an effective plot device. It's also good that there's no shoehorned Megazord fight at the end. Not every single episode needs a Zord battle, especially since most of them are pretty inconsequential.
If there's a weakness that the episode has, it's that no one really learns anything or changes. Maybe Kaplan could have given more than a half-assed apology at the end, maybe a bigger focus on Trini during the festival scenes... I don't know. Something that could have given it some more substance when it comes to the characters. Then again, as I'll say plenty of times on here, Power Rangers is a live-action cartoon. Not like Batman: The Animated Series, I mean like Looney Tunes. Part of the fun of the show (for kids) is that the rangers do the same thing every time, but they fight a different monster. I'm not saying I approve of that (I'd much prefer character development and story arcs, but we'll get there in time), all I'm saying is that's what the writers were going for and that's what they achieved. They were just fortunate to have the right cast to make their cartoon characters come to life much better than they were written, and besides the costumes, fights, robots, and awesome music, that was part of the reason it was such an earth-shattering success.
Mighty Morphin' Score: 8/10
Power Rangers Score: 6/10
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