Jaguar Ranger

Height: 16cm

Articulation: 19 total points: Swivel neck; 4 points each arm - universal shoulders, hinge elbows, forearm swivel; 5 points each leg - universal hips, thigh swivel, hinge knee, hinge ankle.

Colors: Molded blue, black, grey (accessories only); Painted black, white, silver, orange.

Accessories: Jungle Batons x2; Jaguar Blaster

Release Data: Released in November 2007 in the United States at a suggested retail price of US$6.99.

Gallery: 11 images.

Additional Media: MP3 Soundbyte (57kb)

Author: ExVee




In teams of three Rangers, I find distinct archetypes are often laid down. First, you have the leader, the Red Ranger. He gets all the cool stuff, and Disney thinks the show is almost exclusively about him. Next, you have Girl Ranger (color varies). Girl Ranger gets no cool stuff, and only token amounts of focus in show. Finally, you have The Other Ranger. It's the remaining male Ranger, who by virtue of being a guy, gets some cool stuff, and a little bit more attention than Girl Ranger. Though Jungle Fury has not started airing as of the time of this review, we can presume this formula will be maintained. In which case, Jaguar Ranger will have for quite a while the unglamorous role of being the guy Ranger who's just a backup for the star and probably only get focus episodes when the sentai stock footage calls for it.


The Figure


Jaguar Ranger shares a common body design with the other four male Ranger figures, so much of this review is likely to apply to any of those figures just the same as it does here.

The head is jointed on a simple swivel, meaning a greatly reduced range of articulation compared to having a ball jointed neck. The swivel joint is also rather stiff. Since the neck is painted white, I suspect it's a case of some paint fusion which may get smoothed out with use. The blue plastic is on the dark side, which in poor light can make distinguishing the edges of the black painted areas from the surrounding blue difficult. I'd have personally opted for a slightly lighter blue color to help with this issue. In some cases, you can barely tell the visor or any helmet details are painted in.

The gimmick for this series of Ranger figures is motion activated sounds. While I'm uncertain why Evil Space Alien doesn't have this feature, I can tell why Cheetah Ranger lacks it. Utilizing user-replaceable LR44 batteries, the electronics compartment occupies a volume of space greater than the maximum width and depth of Cheetah's torso. The sound is activated, rather than via impact, by sharp motion. Jaguar and Tiger each seem to have different sensitivity, so some figures may be able to be activated by a quick tap, but both of mine require being shaken more. The sound is emitted through a small speaker, cleverly disguised in the scratch logo on the chest, making the speaker openings not readily visible. It's also worth noting that more than half of the figures I tried before selecting my purchase were dead on arrival, despite not having had their battery interruption tabs pulled, so make sure you check the figures before you buy one. No telling whether the batteries died anyway, or if the motion sensing mechanism is somehow damaged during shipping.

In Jaguar Ranger's case, the sound is of a growl, followed by a quick succession of punches, the sound of which is heavily distorted by the no doubt considerable encoding needed to fit these sounds on a tiny chip. The other thing is that sometimes the sounds will activate when you don't want them to, like just moving the figure from one place to another. That happened several times even before removing it from the packaging.


The articulation in the arms is equal to Cheetah Ranger, but slightly different. Cheetah had swivels in the upper arms, but none for the wrists or forearms. Jaguar, like the other male Rangers, lacks a swivel in the upper arm and has one in the forearm. Just like Cheetah's opposite situation, this creates its own share of posing problems. I can only hope the Super Mode figures in the Summer assortments are given a slightly greater range of jointing. But suffice to say that as it is, posing with the weapons is even more difficult while lacking the upper arm swivel. Plus, the swivel joints in the forearms have a habit of popping off a bit easily.


The legs have the same amount of jointing as Cheetah, but since dude doesn't wear a skirt, you can actually do something with the articulation. Granted, to do certain poses, you'd need yet more joints in the legs. Down on one knee, for instance, doesn't really work at all. But a kick to the head? Works great! The shape of the pelvis and thighs forces the legs to be set at a bit of an angle, where it's impossible to have them be straight up and down. I find it to create mild stability issues in some cases, but your mileage may vary. The ankle joints have a wider range of motion than Cheetah, but in general moving them past a certain point in either direction basically guarantees the figure's taking a dive.


Sculpt and Deco

As expected, the sculpting is simply excellent. The build of the body is nicely subtle, with just the suggestion of definition in the torso, and the heaviest musclulature in the thighs. It's a very nice way of striking a balance between comic styling and more realistic guy-in-suit style. The paint is about on par with the other Jungle Fury figures, including that the all-important white outlines stop after the front half of the torso, eliminating all distinction between the rectangular patterns and the thick black stripes down the sides. But at least the black shoulder design was done properly here, instead of missing bits like Cheetah had.


Accessories


-Jungle Batons

Rather than a pair that combine into a staff, these batons are in the form of tonfas. Just like the other weapons I've covered so far, these come pre-bent for your convenience, and I couldn't find a single example with unwarped weapons. The other thing is that both the intended grips, and the possible alternate grips are both too narrow to be held securely in the figure's hands. About all you can do is wedge the weapons under the wrists to apply pressure against the inside of the hands. The downside is that this leaves the tonfas angled inward. And then since you have no bicep swivel, you can't do anything to offset it.


-Jaguar Blaster

Made the name up myself. It's a small cannon, made to resemble the head of the Jaguar Zord, and it has a cannon barrel sticking out of its mouth. The weapon fits over either forearm, and has short pegs to fit into the hand for stability. It fits quite snug on the arm, and makes for a reasonably nice add-on. It also has a pair of sized pegs on the back end, which fit into Cheetah Ranger's robot gun to make a larger combined weapon. Nice little piece, especially for a (presumably) toy-exclusive weapon.



Closing Remarks

Personally, I think the gimmick is a little weak, and that the light up features from the past two series made for better, more simple and reliable special functions, and the sound functions in each series were executed better in the Summer assortments. Given the failure rate I've observed, it's clear something is not going as planned. Given that, I'd have sooner lost the gimmicky function and gotten a couple new points of articulation instead.

Even so, as a basic figure, it works pretty well, and I think it's a good model for how future Ranger figures should be sculpted. From a short distance, you can't even see the muscle lines on the torso, which lets the figure look much better in my opinion than the comic book hero style given to us over the past several years. Too bad Jaguar Ranger can't hold his main weapons correctly.

Jaguar Ranger gets a Good, downgraded from Very Good because of the accessory issue.


-ExVee, 12/11/2007