Hulu’s Latest Anime is a Fun Twist On Power Rangers

Hulu and Disney+ are quickly becoming go-to destinations for some pretty high profile anime, with titles like Bleach, Sand Land, and more all available on the Disney-owned subscription services. Another new anime series has just started to air on Disney+, and fans of Power Rangers should definitely be paying attention.

The new anime is called Go! Go! Loser Ranger! – or Sentai Daishikkaku in Japan – and it’s essentially just a parody of Power Rangers. Well, technically it’s a parody of Super Sentai, a tokusatsu series which Power Rangers uses footage and costumes from, but you get the gist.

So here’s the setup: 13 years ago, monsters started to invade Earth, with some big boss monsters commanding a veritable army of henchmen called Dusters. The big guns were called in to defeat them, the Dragon Keepers, our Power Rangers team. For 13 long years, the Dragon Keepers have fought against the monsters… except not really.

The boss monsters were defeated within a year, and the Dusters, in saving their own butts, made a peace treaty with the Keepers: put on a show every weekend to make the Keepers look like heroes, and they won’t be destroyed forever. So that’s what they’ve been doing, every single Sunday, for 12 years.

Our main character is not one of the Keepers, but instead a Duster, Foot Soldier D. D has grown tired of being thrown into the jaws of the Dragon Keepers, and decides it’s time to fight back. He’s immortal, like all Dusters, and although he’s not particularly skilled, he can keep fighting back forever. And what better way to fight back against the Dragon Keepers and improve his skills than by disguising himself as a Keeper and joining their ranks?

It’s a fantastic setup, and it’s a great little twist on the Power Rangers/Super Sentai formula. I mean, imagine, in Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers, if we got a few episodes from the perspective of a Putty. What are they thinking, how do they feel about being trashed every single week, just making the Power Rangers look good? That’s basically Go! Go! Loser Ranger! in a nutshell, and it’s wonderful.

Having there be a dark and seedy underbelly to the ranger team is an interesting direction, too. It’s clear from the first episode that the Keepers are powerful, and that’s likely how they defeated the Dusters’ bosses in the first place, but they’re also clearly just coasting on scripted battles against willing combatants. How long is that going to last, especially with D unknowingly among their ranks?

There are so many questions, and I want answers right now. I wish the entire series was available right now. But alas, Go! Go! Loser Ranger! is airing weekly on Hulu in the US, and on Disney+ via Star everywhere else, so we’ll be tuning in once a week to see it play out.