The episode opens as it almost always does at the youth center, as everyone seems to be in a good mood. Even Billy, whose poor attempts at dancing sends him tripping on a cart carried by Ernie, and strangely bouncing all around the place like a nerdy pinball. After finally crashing and burning, Kimberly tells him that this is not the way to get girls. Yeah, thanks Kim. His spine may be messed up, he’s dizzy, and he’s humiliated himself in front of the youth center. I think getting girls is the least of his worries. Rita, as usual, is watching from her castle on the moon, and gets inspired not by Billy’s faux pas, but the music playing that has everyone happy. So, she plans to use music to finally win the day.
Billy is still pretty messed up from his little trip, and through pointless techno babble, pretty much says that he’s intrigued by the music, but sucks at dancing. But this isn’t the real conflict of the episode, as we see a girl in Kimberly’s dance class bump into someone else. She gets yelled at for her lack of coordination, casuing the not-so-coordinated girl to run off. It’s not much longer until we learn that the not-as-coordinated girl (named Melissa) is actually deaf. Kimberly tries to cheer her up by pointing out that at least she’s not as bad as Billy when it comes to dancing. Jeez, Billy’s just the butt-monkey of this whole episode so far.
Back to Rita’s, she tells Finster to make a monster that will use music to lure the power rangers into her trap. Like a meaner version of the pied piper. Finster warns her that musical monsters aren’t very reliable, but she’ll have none of his attempts at logic, and tells him to get to work. Back at the youth center, the whole conflict from earlier is easily put to bed (the deaf girl, not Billy’s awful dancing), just as it’s that time of the episode for things to get interesting.
Bulk and Skull arrive to mock Kimberly’s dance class, until their told by Zack to give it a try. They instead decide to antagonize the goody-goods some more, until the duo are owned by Zack’s dance skills. This ends with Zack’s balancing act on the Juice Bar stand attempted to be topped by Bulk, who instead just goes flying over, making a fool of himself as usual.
Finster finally comes up with a new monster named the Naughty Gnome, who uses a magic accordion to put the citizens of Angel Grove under his spell. The Naughty Gnome is another really well done early monster design. Doesn’t have that total bad ass factor of King Sphinx, but that was clearly never the intention. He looks like the kind of villainous troll creature that you’d see in a fairy tale, so for that, it works perfectly.
And he gets to work by playing his accordion, which puts several of the girls leaving the juice bar into a hypnotic trance. All of them, except for Melissa, because of the whole, you know, unable to hear part. He leads them into a cave somewhere in the wooded area of Angel Grove, which is guarded by the putties. Melissa eventually gets Jason, who goes to get the other rangers. Back in the Cave, we see that the Nasty Gnome is having the girls dance in their hypnotic state with the putties while Squatt and Baboo prepare the gnome’s meal.
The rangers are finally led to the cave, as they tell Melissa to hide while they morph. This of course takes them from the wooded cave area to another rocky part of the woods because the almighty Sentai footage demands it. The rangers assemble their power blaster, and blow up the gnome. Well, that was quick. Oh, wait. It did jack squat, as Rita just makes the gnome grow. That means it’s time once again for the almighty stock footage as the rangers form the Megazord. The accordion of the gnome begins to mess with the megazord, but that doesn’t last too long, as it gets a punch to the face, and a mega sword slash to finally finish it off.
The rangers save the girls in the cave, and everything seems to have gone well enough. We end the episode with Jason screwing up some sign language, and Melissa deciding to help Billy with his dancing problems, which actually makes him decent to end the episode on a high enough note.
A Different Drum was a decent episode. Not as action heavy as previous episodes, and not as much Ranger action as you’d want. I did like the overall message of showing someone’s strengths despite their disabilities, while never making it feel too overbearing to the plot itself. The monster of the episode was pretty cool in design, but ultimately one of the weaker fights in the series to date. Also, for an episode called “A Different Drum“, we never actually saw any actual drums. The villain uses an accordion. Maybe a different drum as in a deaf eardrum being different? Either way, this was a simple filler episode that was still a fun watch.
See you next time as we go from Naughty Gnomes to Pudgy Pigs with Food Fight.