30 Years Ago Today, It Was Friday in California

Three decades ago, on a Friday no less, Super Sentai inadvertently gave us a shitpost for the ages, via the medium of clanging surgical tools, a very Japanese American police officer, and a simple statement of fact.

Social media loves itself a weekly meme, from Daniel Craig’s joyous declaration on Saturday Night Live of the weekend’s arrival to Futurama‘s Fry reminding us that it’s Saturday night (even if not all of us have bottles of Shasta and an all-Rush mixtape). But one particular highlight in the past few years has been “Today Is Friday in California”—which has of course joined the throngs of having its own dedicated social media accounts to inform us every Friday that it is indeed also Friday in California. The absurdity of it all—the hospital setting, the police officer rising menacingly out of frame, the accented English—makes the clip perfect for internet virality. But its source, a now 30-year-old episode of Japanese superhero TV, only makes the context even more absurd.

The clip comes from the 46th episode of Ninja Sentai Kakuranger—the series in the long-running tokusatsu franchise that followed Zyuranger, which famously provided the action footage for Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers, and itself would find its suits used for the short-lived Alien Rangers miniseries “The New Year’s Manga Hell,” itself a loosely seasonal timely tale. The story focuses on the blue ranger of the team, Saizō, who visits a local temple with with the rest of the Kakurangers to pray for the new year. He buys a fortune at the shrine, only to be wracked with paranoia when it turns out his fortune is actually a daikyo, or “great curse,” promising challenges and hardship for the coming year, only for things to go immediately wrong when the team is ensnared by the machinations of a yokai named Mujina.

Mujina, an art-themed monster of the week, has spent the prior year building up a cursed manga to trap the Kakurangers in, which he finally sells to an introverted boy named Akira—trapping the Kakurangers in the pages as they’re forced to face their narratively destined doom. All of the group has a bad time inside the faux-manga world, but especially Saizō, who can’t transform into Ninja Blue to defend himself thanks to the shrine curse. What follows is mostly the poor guy being relentlessly beaten up and attacked as the manga progresses from one ludicrous situation to another, culminating in a moment where Saizō is attacked by a biker and saved by paramedics… only, for, well, you know what to happen:

Of course, this is Super Sentai, so our heroes (with a little help from Akira) manage to escape the manga and beat Mujina in a fair fight, and everything goes back to normal—Saizō’s fortunes included, presumably, considering Kakuranger came to an end just seven episodes later. But it’s remarkable that it thrives all these years later, not for its connection to the legacy of the Power Rangers franchise—if anything it still largely exists in its shadows, never having received a “full” adaptation in the height of the Mighty Morphin’ era the way other post-Zyuranger shows would go on to—but as the source of a weekly internet shitpost.

Today might be Monday, but it’s Friday in our hearts.

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