Eiga Sentai Scanranger



Movie geeks will save us all!



In this stunning homage to Super Sentai (and fully-extended middle finger to Power Rangers), Professor Daphne Alexandria is more than just a mild-mannered film professor, she’s the head of a secret organization that protects Earth from hostile aliens, and her prize students are being drafted. Why? Because the power she has to bestow can only be used by those with a passionate love of movies. And why does Alex feel the need to trust the fate of the world to five crazy kids? Because of the imminent invasion of the not terribly effective MAYHEM Corps, hell-bent on conquering New Jersey! If the rangers can stop harping on their hatred of Haim Saban and all things Power Rangers long enough, they might just pull this off. And despite how everything sounds, it takes itself too seriously too often to be a parody.

Written by Vince Jones, who was outraged at how Tokusatsu programming was watered down into the Power Rangers before making it to American airwaves. Ran from 1997-2006, releasing 39 “episodes,” a Christmas special and a crossover “movie” with Choujin Sentai Jetman. The last two episodes finished were basically revisiting the crossover movie.

Poorly written, ill-conceived and all with only the occasional shred of irony, Scanranger was a shining example of So Bad It's Good.

The story is archived here, with the writer also posting it on FF.net after Geocities went down.

It should be noted that while he continues to try to share his story with the internet, the author's hatred of Power Rangers has petered off a lot in the intervening years.

Our heroes, such as they are, are:

 * Vin Furamatsu Henderson a.k.a. Vin Harlock/Redscanner: Athlete of Action. The Hero. Village People fan. Empowered by action movies, though in practice it’s more like movies with sword fighting. Changed his last name because of his admiration of anime hero Captain Harlock.
 * Nick Simonds/Greenscanner: SPFX Soldier. The Smart Guy (relatively speaking) and a Casanova Wannabe. Empowered by special effects. No, that isn’t a movie genre.
 * B.C. Shimamura/Bluescanner: King of Comedy. Meant to be the Plucky Comic Relief and The Heart, but often ends up being The Load and The Scrappy. Empowered by clean comedy. Only clean comedy.
 * Kunio “Mikey” Mikimoto/Yellowscanner: Animemaniac. Kind of a Butt Monkey. Empowered by Anime. Not just any animation, anime. The writer goes to pains to explain how one of the Rudolph movies counts in the Christmas Episode.
 * Toni Montanez/Pinkscanner: Musical Mistress. The Chick. Empowered by musicals.
 * Takeshi Hayata/Silverscanner: Gin Hikari no Senshi. The Sixth Ranger. Adjunct professor of Asian Studies. Empowered by Tokusatsu.
 * Carmen Diaz/Yellowscanner II: Affirmative Action Girl. Kunio’s crush who goes from a stuck-up bitch to a born-again superhero after he’s crippled in battle and her own anime powers surface.
 * Lieutenant Commander Professor Daphne Alexandria: “Professor Alex” for short. The Big Good. Team Mom, to the extent that the rangers really do sometimes seem to look on her as a surrogate mother. Widow of Roger.

They're opposed by MAYHEM (Mechanical Androids Yoked Hither to Eliminate Mankind)

 * Blackorg: Card-Carrying Villain, Dark Lord, Large Ham. The Big Bad as well as the Bad Boss. An evil alien usurping the body of a former member of the rangers' support group. Killer of Alex's husband.
 * General Ug: The Brute, Dumb Muscle.
 * Vixen: The Vamp.
 * Anark Key: Kind of an Evil Genius, in that he’s supposed to be the crafty one and he’s the minion picked on by the Bad Boss most often.
 * Byte: Team Pet who bites monsters to enlarge them. Originally built by Kunio and ultimately dies making a Heroic Sacrifice to save the rangers, or does he?
 * Colonel TriloByte: Enigmatic Minion brought in to take over while Blackorg’s recovering from nearly being killed.

Recurring Super Sentai tropes:

 * A Mech by Any Other Name: Hollywood Vehicles (based on studio mascots), Box Office Smashers (based on the rangers' movie genres).
 * All Your Powers Combined: When they put their weapons together to make the Cinemasher weapon.
 * Animal Mecha: The Hollywood Vehicles, which are based on movie studio mascots (specifically the Tristar Pegasus, MGM Lion, Hollywood Pictures Sphinx, Tatsunoko Seahorse, and NBC Peacock).
 * Applied Phlebotinum: Film Energy, a cosmic power that only takes shape through a passionate love of movies (they channel movie scenes, imagining, say, Zorro slashing his sword or Moe poking Curly in the eyes, then perform the action themselevs in a powered-up fashion). Not only does it empower the Scanrangers, their mecha runs on it too. It’s so great the villains eventually steal some for themselves.
 * BFG: The Camzooka.
 * By the Power of Grayskull: “Lights! Camera! Action! Scanranger!” or individual name in place of Scanranger.
 * Deus Exit Machina: Takeshi tends to show up to perform last minute saves for the rest of the team, although the story's not in the habit of explaining where he's been.
 * Humongous Mecha: Named after a theater sound system (Thunder Dolby THX), a projection technique (Widescreener), and a video store (Blockbuster).
 * Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: A lot were perversions of movie titles or Hollywood-related sayings (e.g. “Hooray For Hollywood Vehicles”, “Kunio's Excellent Adventure In Babysitting”, “The Good, The Bad and General Ug”).
 * In the Name of the Moon: “Soldiers of the Silver Screen!”
 * Mecha Expansion Pack: Silverscanner (who can enlarge himself to giant size) gets a spaceship that turns into a robot, then his robot gets an upgrade so it can attach to his giant form, then his robot gets another upgrade so it can attach to the team's robot.
 * Mecha-Mooks: Kinks, to be exact. No, not that kind.
 * Monster of the Week: Cybercreatures.
 * "On the Next Episode of..." Catchphrase: “Roll that film!”
 * The Psycho Rangers: The story has two groups seemingly meant to be the anti-Scanrangers, Benedict’s Brigade (led by Arno Benedict and made up of several Monsters Of The Week) and Team Nightmare (made up of cyborg parodies of Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, Candyman, Leatherface and Ghostface) after Benedict's Brigade goes down once and for all.
 * Transformation Trinket: The rangers start out by using VHS-themed changer bracelets, then later get DVD-themed ones for some reason.
 * Weapon of Choice
 * Cool Sword: Red had two, the Swashbuckler, which can turn into either a "bushido sword" or rapier, and later the Cinerama Cutlass that combines his three old attacks into one.
 * Hand Cannon: Green and Yellow. Green's shoots DVD's, Yellow's is based on a Macross missile launcher.
 * Simple Staff: Blue.
 * Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me: Pink.
 * Swiss Army Weapon: Silver's gun/sword jobber.

Tropes specific to Eiga Sentai Scanranger:
"Kunio: "In super sentai shows, it's customary for the minions to attack the team first, and then the monster appears! How the heck could I forget that?!""
 * Affectionate Parody: Well, if we can call it a parody, since the story takes itself WAY too seriously to be one.
 * Absurdly Spacious Sewer: "Kunio's Excellent Adventure In Babysitting" has him chase a monster into sewers big enough to have a martial arts action scene in.
 * Aliens Speaking English: Lampshaded in "Scanranger vs. Jetman", although it mainly serves to call attention to how neither story bothered until the characters had to interact with people from their own planet who speak a different language.
 * All Men Are Perverts: Besides the standard energy attacks Vixen’s main power is to enthrall people (even the girls) by making them see images of sexy celebs. The only one who’s had any success resisting is Vin, who’s supposed to be a sucker for a pretty face.
 * All Part of the Show: In “Main Street Men” where the rangers impersonate a boy band and then transform and have a "pretend" fight with MAYHEM, with mecha and everything.
 * All Your Base Are Belong to Us: In episodes 30-31 MAYHEM attacks and destroys Scanranger’s secret hideout, prompting a move to a new underground set-up elsewhere
 * It might be worth noting the Big Bad is possessing a former member of the rangers’ support group and possibly could have done that at any time, since the Sixth Ranger, also a founding member, knew where it was and let himself in when he decided to join the team.
 * An Asskicking Christmas
 * Anvil on Head: B.C.'s favorite attack.
 * Artifact of Doom / Cosmic Keystone: The Lighkari amulet from whenever Jetman appears makes it owner crazed with power, but if anything happens to it the space-time continuum falls apart.
 * Artistic License History: “And Ug, shall I send you back to what you call the Cro-Magnon period and have those dinosaurs rend you limb from limb?”
 * Ascended Fanboy: The kids are chosen for the team because of their intimate knowledge of cinema. Even more so than that, the Japanese Scanrangers are revealed to be Sentai fans in "Scanranger vs. Jetman", after which everybody seems to become one.
 * Badass Preacher: Peter Emmanuel.
 * Beach Episode: Despite the villains making it sound like they’re up to something nefarious, it ends up being pretty much disposable filler.
 * Broken Aesop: The episode after Carmen joins is supposed to be about her learning the value of teamwork. Not only does she do almost everything herself (everybody but Takeshi has been captured and as usual he’s barely around himself), what help she does get is confusing and pointless (why are they pretending Carmen's betraying the team...to save the team?), and the main group has their Sixth Ranger and a Humongous Mecha that’s already there sit out the giant battle. Not to mention Vin just had to say they could’ve gotten out of their predicament without Carmen’s help.
 * Captain Ersatz: The Main Street Men.
 * The Stuntmaster robot which is basically a copy of Jetman's Tetra Boy.
 * Catch Phrase: "I can't tell you that..Ancient Japanese secret..”
 * ”Got caught in rush hour traffic..."
 * "As you Americans say, the rest is history."
 * Celebrity Paradox: Sometimes the story drops the names of actors who appeared in Choujin Sentai Jetman (a ranger even meets two of them in the Beach Episode). Other times the story describes Jetman as happening for real.
 * Chewbacca Defense: In “With Maliss Towards All”, the Scanrangers find a group protesting them for (I think) causing damage to campus property the students are stuck paying for. The rangers defend themselves by insulting the protest leader (the National Enquirer crack), telling him to ignore the problem and look on the bright side, and accusing him of cheating Vin out of the state fencing title. Ironically a few episodes later we find out the rangers’ backers repair the collateral damage from their battles, giving them a valid avenue of defense.
 * Clap Your Hands If You Believe: On the verge of being defeated by their first giant monster, the Scanrangers believe in the power of their favorite movies, and are rewarded with the ability to combine their mecha.
 * Clip Show: "Winter Interlude".
 * Clueless Aesop: The Christmas Episode had a guest hero praise the Scanrangers for not destroying a Monster of the Week created from a Christmas tree. Because apparently, “Trees are an important part of the world’s energy source! It was reasonable the Scanrangers didn’t want it destroyed. That villain-created tree, however, is not real!” Even if it were real we’d still be talking about an evil, heavily-armed monster tree. Just how important to the ecosystem is a tree that’s already been cut down and in the process of dying, anyway?
 * Another such aesop, regarding a girl named Sarin who's mocked for being differently-abled, also crops up in the Christmas ep. It starts out looking like the message is going to be your standard "Respect others' differences" Aesop but the thing is none of Sarin's classmates learn the lesson, and indeed it's completely forgotten about halfway through the episode. When her predicament's lightly mentioned again just before the end it seems to have mutated into "You're special, so ignore anyone who treats you like you're weird."
 * In the Mid-Season Upgrade arc, Kunio has the last reference book he needs for a term paper and gives it away to Carmen, his unrequited love, who doesn't even thank him. This sounds like "You should be generous even if people aren't grateful," but he tells us it's team policy that if any of them bomb a class they're out of the Scanrangers until they make it up. Meaning that act of generosity reduced their ability to save the world by 20%.
 * Comically Missing the Point: In one episode Toni meets an interesting guy and her friends immediately start acting all overprotective of her. Toni compares her friends' attitude to Kevin Costner and Whitney Houston's relationship in, um....The Bodyguard.
 * Defrosting Ice Queen: Carmen. Despite this Kunio’s affection seems to dissolve along with it, and by the time she starts reciprocating his feelings he’s said to be interested in another girl.
 * Department of Redundancy Department: Several examples. "Combined gestalt," "hitting on impact," "fortress stronghold," "similar resemblence," "Like a spinning Class 9 hurricane"...
 * There's no such thing as a "Class 9" hurricane. Hurricanes are ranked in categories, and there's only five of them.
 * Designated Girl Fight: Played fairly straight, such as Toni and Kaori team up to fight Vixen and Maria in the crossover. Fairly because while the author has clearly seen this in action, the story hardly ever makes a point of Pinkscanner fighting Vixen. It's only when the second female Scanranger joins that Vixen has a grudge against a particular team member.
 * Did Not Do the Research: To name just one, Playstation games didn't come on cassette.
 * The author seems to be one of the people who thought the Toon Makers version of Sailor Moon was perpetrated by Saban.
 * The description of the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "City On The Edge of Forever" from the crossover special is spotty at best.
 * At one point Yellowscanner makes up a new attack based on the Kaioken attack from Dragonball Z. The problem is, rather than something that briefly multiplies his strength, what he creates is a basic chi fireball attack.
 * According to this story crocodiles and alligators are only differentiated by where they're found in the wild.
 * The end of one of the early episodes refers the reader to the eighth episode of Jetman. However, since it also refers to Raita being lucky it probably meant the ninth episode (the one where Raita's visited by a female childhood friend ).
 * Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Blackorg is the most powerful force of evil in the story. He not only can but has steamrollered all the Scanrangers by himself on two occasions, the second including Silverscanner and after the team got a power-up. But in "Scanranger vs. Jetman", Red Hawk takes him out with one Wing Gauntlet-assisted punch.
 * Don't Explain the Joke: Almost every time the story makes a reference to some other media (which is several times an episode at the very least), the source is pointed out. Usually by the characters but sometimes by a parenthetical note from the writer. Of course there are times when this is fine, like when they’re adapting it into an attack, but the writer couldn’t do a scene transition to the dark side of the moon without mentioning Pink Floyd.
 * Fake Defector: In the episode after Carmen joins, she pretends to sell out the team.
 * Fat Bastard: Nick uses his powers to imitate him in the episode where the rangers impesonate spies for the purposes of going sumo on a monster's ass.
 * Five-Token Band: Vin’s black, so he comes from the ghetto and listens to hip hop. Takeshi’s from Hawaii, so he’s a surfer. Carmen's from the Dominican Republic, so she's hot-blooded. And any Scanranger with Japanese heritage (there are at least three), is a lifelong tokusatsu and probably anime fan.
 * Follow the Leader: The villains’ first evil act of the series is to blow up a manned space station. In one episode a monster goes around stealing women’s voices prompting the guys to set a trap by dressing in drag. Near the midpoint of the story the rangers get an unpiloted robot that turns into a giant gun, which Carmen steals while pretending to betray the team to trade it for MAYHEM captives. Something about these situations makes one think of jets.
 * In the first episode the soon-to-be rangers are snatched up by their future mentor, who tells them about the imminent arrival of evil aliens on Earth, that they've been chosen to wield superpowers to repel the aliens, and who lets the disbelieving youths go when they don't quite buy it. The youths are then forced to fight the aliens' soldiers and take a chance on their supposed powers when they find themselves outmatched. That sounds more like "Day of the Dumpster" than most Sentai pilots (where they either see evidence of the villains' invasion first, or already belong to the organization), which is really weird considering the original point of this story.
 * The story started in 1997, and has its Sixth Ranger in a silver suit and a wisecracking creature that bites the monsters to enlarge them.
 * The writer had sections of his site devoted to Kamen Rider Black and its sequel Kamen Rider Black RX. And his villains have an insect-like space fortress.
 * Genre Blindness: The Scanrangers show very little awareness of the conventions of Sentai. Surprising, what with the Ascended Fanboy thing. This line from "Scanranger vs. Jetman" says it all:
 * Genre Blindness: The Scanrangers show very little awareness of the conventions of Sentai. Surprising, what with the Ascended Fanboy thing. This line from "Scanranger vs. Jetman" says it all:


 * Gratuitous Japanese: The Japanese Scanrangers sometimes slip back into their native tongue, and more noticeable that Team Nightmare (created by a British villain in a story set in America) say “Nightmare Gattai!” to combine. Taken to an extreme in "Scanranger vs. Jetman" where a character will often say something in Japanese, then say the same thing in English after a friendly alien uses her powers to tear down the language barrier.
 * There’s also how when he needed to come up with an “alien” sort of name, Vince would often pick a word tenuously related to what he had in mind, then splice the English and Japanese versions of the word together (e.g. Kagamirron = "Kagami"/"Mirror" for a parallel Earth, Lighkari = "Light"/"Hikari" for a race of “good” aliens, Futurai presumably = "Future"/"Mirai" for an alien race that gives Nick the secrets of higher technology).
 * There's also the fact that monsters' names all start with the Japanese word for "black".
 * Green Lantern Ring: Not only do Greenscanner’s powers derive from special effects, letting him do theoretically anything, but the way Film Energy works is compared to Green Lantern’s powers.
 * Heroes-R-Us: Project Paramount exists to "to keep aliens and other hostile extraterrestials from conquering this planet.." which it does by equipping a team of superheroes and cleaning up after them once the dust settles.
 * Hollywood Voodoo: Personified in a Monster of the Week. Bonus points for the monster also having Tarot powers.
 * Infinite Supplies: The people who supply the rangers also repair the property damage resulting from their battles.
 * Although part of the Mid-Season Upgrade involves enabling their Humongous Mecha to transport itself and its opponent to another dimension to avoid fighting in inhabited areas in the first place.
 * Insult Backfire: In a meta sense. Scanranger was written as a Take That to Mighty Morphin Power Rangers (when it started), but borrows enough elements from it you'd almost think it was an Affectionate Parody.
 * Intercontinuity Crossover: Maybe. Two with Choujin Sentai Jetman. Maybe, because the story wavers back and forth between Jetman really happening, and just being a TV show, with the "real" Jetman characters living in an alternate dimension.
 * Laser-Guided Amnesia: Before he rejoins the team, Takeshi remembered everything about his life except serving as a member of the top-secret anti-alien organization. Which makes it kind of hard to believe his buddies never found him.
 * Left Hanging: Work stopped just a little before they were due to hit the home stretch.
 * Limited Social Circle: Toni's friend Monisha is the only friend outside the team we see when the friend didn't show up for the sole purpose of getting mixed up in that episode's Evil Plan, and even she stops appearing after the tenth episode. The rangers go to their secret base or Alex's office to hang out, and Toni and Alex went away on summer break together.
 * Magic A Is Magic A: How the characters' powers worked could be inconsistent. Vin needed to be extremely specific about which Zorro movie he wants to use in one episode, but in the next Takeshi was getting away with basing an attack on the Space Sheriff series in general. Ug's genre is war movies but he used his powers to whip up the spider-mech from Wild Wild West, which most viewers would probably not call a "war movie". At one time Nick, using his special effects powers, taps into Rocky III to use Hulk Hogan's wrestling moves.
 * Magic Meteor: Film Energy (and Blackorg) came to Earth in meteors.
 * Mid-Season Upgrade: The “Power Upgrade” arc, naturally. Pretty standard, except Thunder Dolby, the Scanrangers’ original robot, is completely destroyed, and then not only do they get a brand new never-before-seen robot, Blockbuster, but.
 * Missing Episode: Abduction of the college president.
 * Mood Whiplash: "There's Something About Toni" goes from the rangers fighting hate with love (hugging the monster's victims to break the spell over them) to the villains attempting to mass-murder the attendees of the school's Valentine's Day dance.
 * Moral Dissonance: In the arc where the Sixth Ranger joins the Scanrangers repeatedly ream the arc’s guest villains for attacking from behind and otherwise fighting dirty. Despite Nick attacking a villain from behind while invisible and using the Film Energy equivalent of steroids during the same arc.
 * It's debatable that Nick continues this behavior the next time they fight the same guest villains. The narration points out he’s sticking to his code not to take life when he kills one of their cyborg members. The thing is, he chased the villains who were already reeling from being defeated by the Scanrangers all the way to the moon, so he’s kicking them while they’re down. It doesn’t help that Nick breaks as many body parts as possible when he fights the one that put him in a coma earlier in the arc, what with the team’s mentor saying there will be no fighting for revenge on her watch.
 * Never Say "Die": Averted (and mocked by B.C.), but worth noting that the Scanrangers (or at least B.C.) support such censorship.
 * Never Trust a Trailer : More than once a recap or preview mentioned something that hadn't happened yet or never happened at all.
 * No OSHA Compliance: In one episode B.C. and a supporting character are walking through the base when suddenly B.C. gets tackled. Turns out B.C. accidentally walked into the path of a laser cannon just as it was being test fired. And we're asked to believe these guys are the ones trying to SAVE people?
 * Not Allowed to Grow Up: It seems like Vince was trying to have Scanranger unfold more or less in real time like actual Sentai shows do, with years passing in-story while work on it progressed for years. The Scanrangers are still undergrads with no one mentioning how long they’ve been there.
 * The Not-Secret: The Scanrangers say their true identities must be kept a secret and are likewise defensive about revealing them, even though MAYHEM's been exploiting the knowledge of their secret identities since at least the third episode.
 * Offscreen Villain Dark Matter: MAYHEM is here because they want to steal our natural resources. In spite of the strain presumably put on their stockpiles by failed scheme after failed scheme, the idea is never broached of leaving and raiding another planet where the natives aren't as technologically advanced as they are.
 * Omnidisciplinary Scientist: Helper Dr. Markby is both a "physician and inventor."
 * Likewise Alex isn't just a film professor, she's got a military background, she's a former ballet dancer, she was a lanaguage teacher with Jetman's support team, she knows martial arts, and can pilot mecha if necessary. If she needs to be good at something or the writer thinks it would make her cooler, she's good at it.
 * One Steve Limit: Averted, though one doubts it was deliberate. B.C. and scientist helper Dr. Markby have the same first name (Ben), a Red Shirt astronaut in the first episode is named Nick, and Vin’s martial arts teacher from back in the 'hood is named Tony (in all fairness the story almost exclusively uses his full first name). There's also a throwaway character in "The Good, The Bad and General Ug" named Mike.
 * Paper-Thin Disguise: Vixen gets a job teaching at the Scanrangers’ school as Professor Vivian Fox. During the interview the story basically comes out and says it’s a disguise the audience would see through automatically.
 * The time Anark Key masquerades as TV pitchman Eric Meyham.
 * Parody Failure: One episodes involves the rangers impersonating the characters in a story B.C.’s writing parodying superspy movies such as James Bond, XXX (no points for guessing which ranger’s character came from that one), Dark Angel, Mission: Impossible and Tomb Raider. It's pretty much just lame until you get to Nick’s character, Boston Powered, New England Man of Mystery.
 * It doesn't help that the writer's idea of parody is having Not-Bond take off his tuxedo to reveal a wetsuit instead of the other way around and Not-Lara toting .44s instead of .45s.
 * Personality Powers: The area covered by a character’s Film Energy tends to echo whatever trait makes them unique. Vin’s a man of action, Nick’s super smart, B.C.’s the class clown, Kunio’s an artist, Toni’s a girl, Peter’s a devout Christian, and so on.
 * Planet Looters: After being unsure about MAYHEM's motivations for the first part of the story it's eventually decided that they want to steal our natural resources.
 * Power Perversion Potential: A family friendly variant, but at the end of “The Vengeance of Emperor Toranza” B.C. and Takeshi use their time machine to try their luck with their favorite girls from Choushinsei Flashman and Space Sheriff Shaider.
 * Prince and Pauper: The male Scanrangers are identical in appearance to the Main Street Men, a famous boy band, with different hairstyles. When they meet face to face Vin is able to identify them at once, but had apparently never noticed anything along the lines of, "This guy'd look like me if I were bald, this guy would look like Kunio if he had glasses..." etc.
 * Psychic Link: Kunio and Takeshi inexplicably develop one, although it's forgotten after a few episodes.
 * Punny Name: Byte bites monsters, Arno Benedict’s a power hungry snake in the grass, Ug’s as dumb as his name, and Cyrus Borg's a... never mind.
 * Recruit Teenagers with Attitude: Alex needs to assemble a task force to protect the world from alien conquerors, but the Film Energy she’s got to hand out can only be used effectively by movie buffs. Acting on that, she gets a job teaching film classes at a New Jersey college, then places the fate of mankind in the hands of the five students with the highest grades. Granted they are experts at hand-to-hand combat, but Alex might have mentioned that when explaining why they were chosen.
 * Refusal of the Call: Subverted. The kids think their soon-to-be mentor is playing a joke on them when she explains their powers, but immediately rush to defend their school when robots beam down and attack.
 * Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale: Vin can see Earth with the naked eye from a planetoid on the other side of the universe.
 * Senseless Sacrifice:
 * Shame If Something Happened: MAYHEM threatening to break Christmas ornaments.
 * She Fu: Toni's a gymnast and sometimes incorporates it into evading her enemies.
 * Skewed Priorities: "From Here To Fraternity" has one of the guest heroes chewing out the monster for bending innocent students to his will, which is understandable, but his real crime is interrupting the guest heroine's over-the-top introduction.
 * Smurfette Principle: There’s only one woman on either side for better than thirty episodes. There’s also the Scanrangers’ commanding officer, but one wonders if that’s more on account of feminism or Vince Jones’s idolization of Choujin Sentai Jetman.
 * Spoof Aesop: In one Toni asks what they learned at the end and no one’s sure. The humor is short-circuited by the facts that the author can’t do comedy and that the situation is immediately dropped so they can date a busload of Miss America contestants.
 * The Starscream: Guest villain Arno Benedict.
 * Sue Donym: When going undercover as girls, Vin becomes Victoria, Nick becomes Nicole, and Kunio becomes (wait for it) Annie May.
 * Super Not-Drowning Skills: During the Mid-Season Upgrade Takeshi spends at least three weeks buried alive, and survives.
 * Surrounded by Idiots: What’s usually coming out Blackorg’s mouth when talking to his underlings.
 * Swiss Cheese Security: After disappearing for three years, Silverscanner's able to enter the rangers' secret base without alerting anyone until he wants to, meaning they didn't change their security codes or who the retinal scanners recognize in all that time. More to the point in the All Your Base Are Belong to Us story the villains magically discover where the base is and are able to infiltrate it with tiny spy/suicide bomber robots. Literally, the plot just says they know where it is so they do. In "Carmen's Baptism of Fire" Key's able to hack their communication channel because that makes things easier on the writer.
 * Tomboyish Name: Until Carmen joined the only major female figures in the heroes’ camp were named Toni and Alex.
 * Too Dumb to Live:
 * Unusually Uninteresting Sight: In one episode a Victim of the Week seems more put out by the fact that his girlfriend's house was broken into by two-bit criminals than the space monsters running amok. Mind this was only a little bit after the monsters gained the power to grow into giants, at which point it probably should've seemed especially threatening.
 * Viewers Are Goldfish: Whenever Jetman guest stars the narration regularly reminds us that the Japanese characters speak Japanese.
 * As has been noted, one episode is about the rangers impersonating a group of singers. During the concert put on toward the end the narration constantly reminds the reader that (X band member whose name and likeness they probably don't remember) is really (Y Scanranger). Despite reading about the Scanrangers agreeing to impersonate the band, training to impersonate the band, and then coming up with a plan to go on stage and impersonate the band to smoke out MAYHEM.
 * Weaksauce Weakness: B.C.’s Film Energy is shorted out by the presence of swear words. This includes impressions of the Tasmanian Devil.
 * Who Writes This Crap?: “Last Temptation of Kunio Mikimoto”.
 * Will They or Won't They?: Probably supposed to be going on with Nick and Toni, but it was explicitly set to “just friends” after the Mid-Season Upgrade.
 * The Worf Effect: When the Scanrangers get their new robot, Blockbuster, it fights the villains' own Humongous Mecha which up until that point had been invincible, and completely owns it. In the next episode it's getting thrown around by a Monster of the Week so Silverscanner can show off his awesome new robot powerup.
 * Worst News Judgment Ever: In an early episode a years-old murder is front page news, for no other reason than because the plot’s contriving to the have killer (the Monster of the Week) face the Scanrangers. It doesn’t even go into why the death is considered a murder rather than an accident (the victim fell off a catwalk), or for that matter how and why a MAYHEM monster would’ve been terrorizing the Scanrangers’ school three years before the villains arrived from deep space.
 * Wouldn't Hit a Girl: In the second episode Toni tells the monster off for attacking a woman. In the third Vixen tries to hide behind this and Kunio tells her off on the basis of equal rights.
 * Writers Cannot Do Math: "The cybercreature pulls a pair of tarot cards, one a devil, one a reaper, representing death, and one a chariot."
 * You Didn't Ask: In the oft-mentioned "Scanranger vs. Jetman", Alex surprises Kunio with her ability to speak Japanese and quotes the line. Bear in mind the guy who was surprised also speaks two languages, the same ones in fact.
 * You Keep Using That Word: The story frequently got "was" and "were" backward, thought "ascend" meant to move downward, "sheathe" meant to ready a sword for use, used "enabling" when it meant "causing" (as in "the monster shot Pinkscanner's mech, enabling it to crash"), "stray shot" when a hero shoots a villain or monster they probably full intended to hit, etc.