It’s almost as if someone saw “Power Rangers” and how much money it was making and wrote a check for a hundred thousand dollars. They then told producers to raid every single prop and costume store in Los Angeles, as well as every left over prop in the nearest studio warehouse. From there, they had to cobble together their own “Power Rangers” show. What we inevitably got was “Tattooed Teenage Alien Fighters from Beverly Hills.” Even the title screams “We made this shit up in a terrible time crunch.”
It’s not enough that the show is terrible in production quality, but not even the writing can compensate for the lack of action or special effects. It’s tough to connect and empathize with four teenagers that go to a posh school in Beverly Hills, and hang out in a coffee shop. With forced diversity and a very convoluted set up, the production designer took color coordinated leotards, added face plates to the masks, and set loose a bunch of gymnasts to fight evil as Galactic Sentinels. The fact that their powers can form a giant space knight to do battle with whatever generic monster they’re battling one week seems redundant.
Especially when you consider the human warriors themselves become giants when they turn in to Galactic Sentinels. At a time where Power Rangers were all the rave, I tuned in to see almost every Power Rangers knock off, and “Tattooed Teenage…” was possibly the worst. It’s unfocused, badly written, and the production qualities are on par with your typical public access series. The concept for the Galactic Sentinels seems somewhat interesting, especially when you consider the characters are given mystical zodiac based tattoos, but that’s where the promise ends.
“Tattooed Teenage…” never seems to know what to do with itself, thus it basically just throws in whatever nonsense in that it can, and is barely a guilty pleasure TV series to enjoy ironically. DIC Entertainment probably placed a lot of their eggs in the “Tattooed Teenage…” basket, which sadly didn’t last very long on television. The Complete forty episode series is now available from Mill Creek Entertainment through a four DVD set. It’s one of the many disastrous take offs from the Power Rangers formula that fell by the wayside, and for good reason.