Tattooed Teenage Alien Fighters from Beverly Hills

Wow. I can't believe how relieved I am that this show actually exists.

You see, I clearly remember it from way back when I was a little kid. Four teenagers with strange magical tattoos would tel-port into this black room with a pedestal. On the pedestal was a blob of slime called Nimbar that gave the teens missions. They would then transform into laughably bad costumes and fight villains. The whole thing was like an incredibly low budget power rangers. I honestly don't remember much of what went on, but for years I've remembered this show but have never seen anything else about it until now. It just vanished like the vapor it was.

I only remember one episode, in which a monster sprayed the teens with a gas, then all sorts of bad things happened, including the death of Nimbar. Finally the token African girl said that everything bad had happened since they got sprayed. Then they will themselves to wake up. They had been sharing a dream, or something for 18 minutes since they'd been sprayed, and THE MONSTER FREAKIN' DID NOTHING the whole time they were asleep. Even at seven I wondered what the Kessel was with that.

That is how dumb this show's plots were.

But, yes bad. The writer-producers were initially promised they'd have either A: Japanese monster footage from Tsuburaya,or B: A reasonable American alternative. They got C: crap. When you get crap, you make the best of it, which they did. Was it a parody? Mr. Fisher and Mr. Staahl came from Chicago's Second City, so you make the judgment. Made the judgment yet? It was a joke. It would have been a more successful joke if the shows had more than a ten cent budget, but everyone did the best they could. And if it hadn't been at least a slightly memorable joke, you wouldn't be reading this now, would you? Personally, I think David Lander's portrayal of Lechner totally rocks. Well, rocks a bit.

Tattooed Teenage Alien Fighters from Beverly Hills is the super ghetto knock off of Mighty Morhpin Power Rangers. This series was actually funnier though because of its cheap qualities. They all had a tattoo of a zodiac sign I think, and then they would turn into zodiac warriors and fight these foam rubber monsters. Their mentor was also a house plant, probably of the ficus family. This show is great pop culture, because it is so terribly lame and short lived. If this ever re-airs it means the end of the world but go ahead and watch it because you will laugh your hinder off.

Like a few of the other commentators said, this show was low-quality knockoff of the Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers. I always thought the whole show was meant as satire back when I was watching it, because the writers seemed to be consciously making it so much more stupid than the Power Rangers, which was stupid enough on its own. My favorite episode was when our four teenage heroes were turned into retards by the main evil dude or somebody. Nimbar tried to gather them all up in one place by telling them things like "I have candy" or "Barney will be there". If it wasn't meant as parody, then pretend it was, because otherwise it would be too sad to think about.

I loved this show which contained the campy youthful humor of shows like Saved By The Bell and California Dreams and mixed it up with action to capitalize on the Power Rangers / Superhuman Samurai / VR Troopers / Beetleborgs craze of the 90s! Four teens were given the power to turn into giants to fight equally gigantic monsters, and strangely enough, always in the same city set! The monster suits were cheesy even by campy Godzilla standards and when necessary, the teens joined together to form...not a giant robot, but a cheesy knight in shining armor! By not taking itself seriously, it was actually more entertaining to me than the higher budgeted shows aforementioned. I'd love to see them collected on DVD but am equally sure they never will be. From the USA Network!