30 years ago today, it was a Friday in California

Three decades ago, on a Friday no less, Super Sentai Via a buzzing surgical instrument, a very Japanese-American police officer, and a simple statement of fact, he’s inadvertently given us the dirtiest site for the ages.

Social media loves itself a weekly meme, from Daniel Craig’s hilarious ad onwards Saturday Night Live to Weekend arrival to FuturamaFry reminds us that it’s Saturday night (even if we don’t all have to). Shasta bottles and Rush’s mixtape). But one of the highlights of the past few years has been “Today is Friday in California” – which of course joined the crowd of owners. Dedicated social media accounts To inform us every Friday that it is indeed also Friday in California. The absurdity of it all — the hospital scene, the police officer appearing menacingly out of frame, the English accent — make the clip perfect for going viral. But its source, a 30-year-old episode of a Japanese superhero show, makes the context even more ridiculous.

The clip is taken from episode 46 of the series Ninja Sentai Kakuranger– series in the long-running tokusatsu franchise that followed Zyuringerany He is best known for presenting action shots to Mighty Morphin Power Rangersand she will find herself using her suits for a short time Alien Rangers The miniseries “The New Year’s Manga Hell” is itself a loosely timed seasonal story. The story focuses on the team’s Blue Ranger, Saizō, who visits a local temple with the rest of the Kakurangers to pray for the new year. He buys a fortune from the shrine, only to become paranoid when it turns out that his fortune is actually a daikyō, or “great curse,” promising challenges and hardships for the coming year, only for things to immediately go wrong when the team fails. He gets caught up in the machinations of a youkai named Mujina.

Mujina, the art-themed monster of the week, had spent the previous year creating a cursed manga to trap the Kakurangers in, which he eventually sold to an introverted boy named Akira – trapping the Kakurangers in the pages where they were forced to. Facing their narrative fate. The entire group is having a bad time within the fake manga world, but especially Saizō, who cannot transform into Ninja Blue to defend himself thanks to the shrine’s curse. What follows is mostly the poor guy being relentlessly beaten and attacked as the manga progresses from one ridiculous situation to the next, culminating in a moment where Saizo is attacked by a motorcyclist and saved by paramedics… just, well, you know what happens:

Of course this is Super Sentaiso our heroes (with a little help from Akira) manage to escape the manga and beat Mujina in a fair fight, and everything returns to normal – including Saizo’s fortunes, presumably, considering Kakuranger It ended after only seven episodes. But it is remarkable that it flourishes all these years later, not because of its connection to the world’s legacy Power Rangers The franchise – if anything, still exists largely in its shadows, never receiving a “full” climax film adaptation Great morphine Era the other way yetZyuringer He appears He will continue to do so– but as a source for a weekly online article.

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

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