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, through clagging surgical instruments, a very Japanese American police officer, and a simple statement of fact.

Social media loves a weekly meme, from Daniel Craig’s hilarious statement Saturday Night Live of the arrival of the weekend to FuturamaFry reminds us that it’s Saturday night (even if we don’t all bottles of Shasta and an all-Rush mixtape). But a particular point in recent years has been “Today is Friday in California” – which of course joined the crowd to have their own. dedicated social media accounts to inform you that every Friday is really even Friday in California. The absurdity of it all—the hospital setting, the police officer who looms menacingly out of frame, the English accent—makes the clip perfect for internet virality. But its source, a 30-year-old episode of Japanese superhero TV, 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 follows Zyurangerwhat you do famously provided the action footage in order Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangersand he himself will find his clothes used for short life Alien Rangers miniseries “New Year’s manga hell”, itself a timely story of the season. 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 at the shrine, only to be overcome with paranoia when he discovers that his fortune is actually a daikyo, or “great curse,” promising challenges and hardships for the coming year, just so things go immediately wrong when the team. is trapped by the machinations of a yokai named Mujina.

Mujina, an art-themed monster of the week, has spent the past year building a cursed manga to trap the Kakurangers, which he eventually sells to an introverted boy named Akira – trapping the Kakurangers within the pages as they are forced to to do. face their destined narrative fatality. The whole group has a bad time in the faux-manga world, but especially Saizō, who can’t 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 another, culminating in a moment where Saizō is attacked by a biker and saved by paramedics… just, because, well, you know what to do:

Of course, this is it Super Sentaiso 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 fortune included, presumably, considered. Kakuranger it came to an end just seven episodes later. But it is remarkable that it prospers all these years later, not because of its connection with the legacy of the Power Rangers franchising-if something still exists largely in its shadow, it has never received a “full” adaptation in the height of the Mighty Morphin’ was the way other post-Zyuranger shows was going to– but as the source of a weekly internet shit.

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

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