A series full of action and humor. If you loved the style of series such as “Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers” or grew up during the early ’90s and are nostalgic to watching “VR Troopers” again, then definitely give “VR Troopers: Season One, Volume One” a chance!
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DVD TITLE: VR Troopers: Season One, Volume One
TV SERIES AIR DATE: 1994
DURATION: Episodes 1-26 (9 Hours)
DVD INFORMATION: 4:3, English Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo, Closed Captions
COMPANY: Saban/Shout! Factory
RATED: TV-Y7 FV
RELEASE DATE: October 2, 2012
Directed by Worth Keeter, John Blizek, Vickie Bronaugh, Al Winchell, Robert Hughes, Debra Spelling, Shuki LEvy, Douglas Sloan
Written by Douglas Sloan, Margo McCahon, Mark Litton, Robert Hughes, Michael Ryan, Stewart St. John, J.K. Richards, David Avallone, Judd Lyn, Al Winchell, Adam Gilad, Clifford Herbert, Diane Mathers
Produced by Robert Hughes
Co-Producer: Ellen Levy-Sarnoff
Supervising Producer: Tony Oliver, Scott Page-Pagter
Associate Producer: Danielle Weinstock
Executive Producer: Shuki Levy, Haim Saban
Music by Jeremy Sweet, Ron Wasserman
Edited by Terry J. Chiappe, Bert Glatstein, Terry Kelley, John Lafferty
Casting by Thom Klohn, Katy Wallin
Production Design by Yuda Acco, Tim Papienski
Costume Design by Miye Matsumoto
Featuring:
Mike Reynolds as General Ivar
Gardner Baldwin as Grimlord
Richard Rabago as Tao Chong
Brad Hawkins as Ryan Steele
Michael Bacon as J.B. Reese
Sarah Brown as Kaitlin Star
Julian Combs as Professor Horatio Hart
Aaron Pruner as Percival “Percy” Rooney III
Kerrigan Mahan as voice of Jeb
Farrand Thompson as Young Ryan
Zeb the Dog as Jeb
This is the ongoing story of Ryan Steele, Kaitlin Star and J.B. Reese, three young heroes with extraordinary powers enabling them to transform into virtual superheroes: the VR Troopers! Empowered with a technology created by Ryan’s scientist father, these youths have been chosen to defend our reality from the encroaching powers of Grimlord, an evil mutant who threatens to take over the world.
When Saban’s VR Troopers premiered in 1994, it was the first children’s series to take viewers into a world of virtual reality. Now you can see where the highly rated series began, with the first 26 action-packed episodes of Season One!
With the early success of Saban’s “Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers”, the company realized that bringing these Japanese series to the American public and tailored with western storylines and American talent has not only become financially successful for the company but also making money in merchandise sales.
But by 1994 Saban wanted to try something different. Crafting its own series using footage from three Japanese Metal Heroes Tokusatsu series. Saban would feature footage from “Superhuman Machine Metalder”, “Dimensional Warrior Spielban” and “Space Sheriff Shaider” and try to blend these footage into one official series with an all new American storyline.
Known as a sister series to “Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers”, “VR Troopers” was successful for three years but unlike the Ranger shows where in Japan, there is a new series shown each year, Saban had exhausted their footage from all three Japanese series that footage would have to be constantly re-used. And thus, led to the cancellation of the series and focus being put on Saban’s new series “Big Bad BeetleBorgs”.
“VR Troopers” is a series that focuses on three young adults who live in Cross World City. Ryan Steele (portrayed by Brad Hawkins) the focused martial artist, J.B. Reese (portrayed by Michael Bacon) the hacker and Kaitlin Star (portrayed by Sarah Brown), a photojournalist for the Underground Voice Daily.
All three are karate students at Tao’s Dojo, led by Tao Chong (portrayed by Richard Rabago) and all was going good in their lives. But one day, Ryan receives a message a message from his father, who has been missing for many years. The message was for the three to go to a strange laboratory and inside is digital version of Professor Horatio Hart (portrayed by Julian Combs), a friend of Ryan’s father, Tyler.
Ryan learns that Tyler Steele was secretly working on extremely advanced virtual reality technology and discovered a whole new world in VR. In this world, mutants and monsters are living and the main ruler is Grimlord, who is trying to find a way to conquer the Earth realm.
In Erth, he has a billionaire industrialist named Karl Ziktor trying to allow armies of monsters from the VR world into Earth. And with humanity in danger, someone will need to fight them. And his hopes that three people can take on Grimlord’s beasts using specialized armored bodies with extreme firepower and vehicles.
So, knowing how badly Earth may be if they don’t fight, Ryan, J.B. and Kaitlin become the VR Troopers. And together with the advice of Professor Horatio Hart and Ryan’s talking hound dog, Jeb, the VR Troopers are prepared to take on anything Grimlord and Karl Ziktor sends their way.
VIDEO & AUDIO:
“VR Troopers: Season One, Volume One” is presented in 4:3 and this is probably the best quality we are going to see of the series. As many ’90s shows (animated or live action) will not receive the HD remastering or cleanup (especially due to the costs involved in remastering and clean up). With that being said, “VR Troopers” was shown via syndication and it was a series that utilized older stock footage from Japanese series released in the early ’80s.
As expected on DVD, you can expect mild artifacts and banding. But for those who recorded the series on VHS or on television, this is probably the best looking version of the TV series on any media right now.
As for audio, the audio is actually quite clear via Dolby Digital Stereo 2.0. Dialogue and music is clear and I heard no audio problems during my viewing of the entire series.
There are no English subtitles but closed captions are included.
SPECIAL FEATURES:
There are no special features.
“VR Troopers” is a series that many people will watch out of nostalgia and are fans who supported the release of Tokusatsu shows in America.
It’s interesting because when the announcement was made that “VR Troopers” would be released on DVD, there are many who I know, said that they grew up with the series. I actually wrote a review of the first episode back in 1994 (J!-ENT BBS):
“VR Troopers” is a series that I had high expectations for. Similar to “Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers”, you have a Zordon like mentor with Professor Horatio Hart and characters who are young adults as opposed to high school students.
While I did enjoy the infusion of “Superhuman Machine Metalder”, “Dimensional Warrior Spielban” and “Space Sheriff Shaider”, my excitement was dampened because the series entered a new style of cheesiness as it included a talking dog, corny dialogue and acting that was so-s0.
Perhaps I am too used to “Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers” and I just need to warm up to this series with more episodes. We’ll see.
That was in 1994. And here we are, 18-years-later, and now I’m reviewing “VR Troopers: Season One, Volume One”.
And while I’m not going to back-pedal with what I wrote in my review from 1994, as I do feel the series had corny dialogue and I am still not impressed by Jeb the talking dog, there was something about this series that I enjoyed for its camaraderie and also the inclusion of the older Japanese stock footage.
As a person who watched the latest series coming from Japan (thanks to a local Japanese video rental store at the time), I was pretty hardcore into the whole Sentai and Tokusatsu scene. But I can understand how things would be different in America but sometimes, “VR Troopers” had fluctuations of episodes that were awesome to episodes that were so badly cheesy.
As episodes progressed, the chemistry between Brad Hawkins, Michael Bacon and Sarah Brown obviously had gotten better. Cheesiness was less and less, although featuring the trio rapping was really bad. But the fighting scenes were pretty good and noticed after watching these episodes that they really did try to emphasize the solo fight scenes of Kaitlin Star.
There were episodes that I enjoyed such as “Nightmares” in which Grimlord had found a way to prevent Kaitlin from sleeping and putting nightmares in her brain. Or “The Virtual Spy” featuring Grimlord trying to bring in a person to get close and infiltrate the group. But if anything, the episodes featured a lot of teamwork and a good amount of fighting scenes. I would mind showing this series to my child because it’s not really violent and with each episode, there is always a lesson learned (courtesy of Ryan sharing his thoughts in his mind about his latest experience for his father).
As for the DVD, you’re getting 26-episodes on three DVD’s, which is a pretty cool! And I believe this is the best that anyone we’ll ever see or hear of “VR Troopers” on physical media.
Overall,watching these episodes once again, I realize that I’m a bit more tolerant and I enjoyed it much more than I did back in 1994. The fact that Saban had to feature footage from three older Japanese Tokusatsu series was not easy but they did it. And for the most part, it’s what fans had wanted to see at the time, to see more of these Japanese shows coming stateside, even though it needed to be altered for a Western audience. Saban proved it with Power Rangers and they proved it again with “VR Troopers” despite running out of footage.
A series full of action and humor. If you loved the style of series such as “Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers” or grew up during the early ’90s and are nostalgic to watching “VR Troopers” again, then definitely give “VR Troopers: Season One, Volume One” a chance!
