Combo Rangers Retrospective Part 3: Bolinha Episodes 7-9
Series: Bolinha/Ball Phase
Episode 7: O Natal dos Combo Rangers/Christmas with the Combo Rangers
Episode 8: Lisa luta sozinha: terror no parque!/Lisa Fights Alone: Terror in the Park!
Episode 9: Meu, tu não sabe o que aconteceu!/Guys, you’re not going to believe this!
Transcripts and translation available on Google Drive
Episode 7: Christmas with the Combo Rangers
(or, “I Know What You Did Last Christmas”)
It's Christmas Eve in Citytown and Santa's sleigh has broken down. Meanwhile, Fox is speeding down the road in his Combomobile, checking out all the new features, before he hits Santa Claus at 300 km/h.
Mighty Combo: ARE YOU CRAZY!? YOU RAN OVER SANTA CLAUS!?! Do you know how much I’m going to be fined because of you??? Fox: Oh, relax! He was just standing in the middle of the street, what did you expect??
Fox the victim blamer. Also, I'm not riffing here, this is the actual dialogue.
Santa is unconscious just as Fox finds that he still has one more present left to deliver - and out of all people, it's General Pile. So the Rangers morph and head up to General Pile's ship in the Combomobile, wearing Santa hats and beards as disguises.
They originally planned on just leaving the presents and leaving, but General Pile comes out, after having thought that Santa wouldn't come, and invites the disguised Rangers onto his ship, unaware of their true identity despite noting the similiarities.
General Pile gets a Chiquititas soundtrack CD (Chiquititas was a Argentinian telenovela in the late 90s about a group of orphans which also had Brazilian and Mexican adaptations as well). He feels Fox's beard and accidentally pulls it off, but despite this he doesn't realise he's a Combo Ranger.
Anyway, the Rangers get back to the Combo Base, where the Mighty Combo informs them that Santa Claus is awake, but he has lost his memory, so he put him to work serving drinks.
Meanwhile...
White Combo Ranger: Combo Rangers… I need to find the Combo Rangers!
Episode 8: Lisa Fights Alone: Terror in the Park!
(Or, “Amyr Klink is much better than the Schurmann Family”)
Amyr Klink and the Schurmann Family are marine explorers; Klink was the first person to row across the South Atlantic in 1984 and also the first to circumnavigate Antarctica in 1999 through the shortest and most dangerous route no less, while the Schurmann family are the first Brazilian family to circumnavigate the world on a sailboat, three times no less. I don't know why Yabu put that subtitle in there; maybe their kids were nepo babies, the parents neglected their kids' education by going on a 10-year-long adventure when they were of schooling age, or maybe he thought they were just overrated because their second adventure, the Magellan Global Adventure in 1997, was broadcast all over the world. Who really knows what Fabio Yabu thought in 1999?
Fox's group decides to visit a new theme park featuring Chumbrega the Clown, except for Lisa, who has to study for the scholarship so her family can afford for her to go to school. Okay, their school, the Citytown Municipal School, is implied by name to be a public school and public education is free in Brazil. Maybe if it were some bonus welfare subsidy I could buy it, but I don't think Yabu thought this through enough.
Meanwhile, General Pile celebrates another successful plan.
General Pile: With this fake theme park, I’ll turn everyone in Citytown into zombies!! And then, I’ll be the only one who gets to win those stuffed animals for my dear wife! It seems that General Pile’s wickedness knows no bounds… …using children’s dreams to win stuffed animals!
The power of marketable plushies.
Fox and the others arrive at the park, which is also being visited by such Easter eggs as young Goku and the Sailor Soldiers. Just as Tati is about to take Fox on the Tunnel of Love, they hear screams around them.
Meanwhile, Lisa is studying on Ken's computer when a message comes from the Mighty Combo.
Ahh, ICQ. One of those late-90's/early-00's memories I was sadly too young for...
ICQ (Mighty Combo): OMG! I’VE BEEN TRYING TO CALL YOU! Haven't you got a cellphone? GET TO THE PARK RIGHT NOW, YOUR FRIENDS ARE IN TROUBLE!
Lisa morphs while the Mighty Combo watches the situation from the Combo Base.
Santa Claus: Jamanta kill Sandrinha… Mighty Combo: I’ve got a weird feeling about this… Hey Santa, get me another Coke!
Santa's line here is referencing the character Jamanta from the 1998 telenovela Torre de Babel (Tower of Babel), with those words being one of the series' notable quotes. Basically in this storyline, this dimwit named Jamanta has a crush on this waitress named Sandrinha, she rejects him and then that's how that line came about.
So somehow, everyone in the park has turned into mindless zombies. General Pile celebrates his victory when the morphed Lisa arrives to stop him. She fights the Four-Eyed Men and they are defeated one by one. Chumbrega proceeds to hypnotise her.
Chumbrega: Look into my eyes, little lady! Lisa: What the…? I’m getting dizzy… so that’s how he got the others! Chumbrega: Hahaha! Your fate is sealed! Lisa: Nobody can seal my fate, because I’m not even 18 yet!! I’m sorry, guys…
Suddenly, a sword flies and lands near Chumbrega, revealing... the White Combo Ranger.
Episode 9: Guys, you’re not going to believe this!
The White Combo Ranger asks Lisa if she is alright, but Lisa is surprised that the mysterious Ranger knows her name. The White Ranger takes out his Combo 38 to deal with the enemies, giving Lisa a Walkman so she can break Chumbrega's spell on everyone.
In the raw script, the White Ranger's weapon is named the Combo Trezoitão, and for a while I struggled to find out what the word Trezoitão meant because searching for it on Google returned this Bitcoin influencer guy named Renato Amoedo, also known as Renato Trezoitão. After some research I found that the word actually comes from "três oitão" meaning "big three eight", which is Brazilian slang for a .38 caliber gun, and the Bitcoin guy named himself after it - he was in the police force for 18 years and that was a gun he used there, you see.
So Lisa hits play on the Walkman, and it starts playing Nega Vá by the pagode band É o Tchan.
Fox: AAAHHHH!! Anything but É o Tchan! Noooo!!!
Initially I was surprised that this song wasn't viral outside of Brazil because "haha n-word spam", then I heard the full song and looked up the lyrics. Honestly, Fox should be so lucky. If this were made in the last decade the song would be Ai Se Eu Te Pego by Michel Teló.
Lisa has the rest of the Rangers get the civilians away, at which point General Pile has Pum enlarge Chumbrega. Without the other Rangers to summon their Combotrons, the White Combo Ranger proceeds to summon Windows, the White Combotron.
Back at the Combo Base...
Santa Claus: “Hoje sou feliz e canto… só por causa de vocêeeeee!!!” (Beleza Rara - Banda Eva) Mighty Combo: This is impossible, Santa! The White Combo Ranger is wearing a uniform and piloting a robo… …that I invented, but haven’t built yet!!
The White Ranger has his Combotron blow fire on Chumbrega before transforming it into its combat mode. Chumbrega uses his power to hypnotise it, which causes Windows to crash.
Remember back in the old days when Windows was slow and unstable? Haha, wubba lubba dub dub!
Luckily, the other Rangers come to the rescue, forming the MegaCombotron in a sequence brought to you by... recycled footage from episode 2: a Yabu Media cost-cutting initiative. Two against one, the Combotrons zap Chumbrega, who spins out of existence.
As the Mighty Combo notes that the White Combo Ranger's suit and robo are identical to what he was designing, Fox tries to thank the White Ranger and he leaves, reminding Fox to study harder because he failed art class... somehow.
Chumbrega is a famous clown in Brazil and there were two results I found for people who played him. In Parana, he was played by Cícero de Sousa Guedes before he was killed by his own son in May 2025. I won't go into details (you can see for yourself if you want), but let's just say that their relationship wasn't the best and Cícero was good at bringing joy to children other than his own. In Sao Paulo, he was played by Athos Silva Miranda and was one of the oldest clowns in the business, performing with the travelling Circo de Napoli (among others) until his death during the coronavirus pandemic in August 2020. I think this webcomic was trying to homage the latter.
Let's talk about the transcription process. While Adobe Flash is used to create and publish Flash animations and webcomics, the published files (once obtained) can be opened again with the JPEXS Free Flash Decompiler, whether it's the .exe files or the extracted .swf files.
In the decompiler you can see all the assets used in the .swf file, but we're only going to focus on the texts. All the texts can be saved as a plain text file, and after processing the files, I have a rudimentary transcript.
If the transcripts were entirely in English I could paste them into Google Docs and go from there, but because the transcripts are in Portuguese and they have accents on their letters, there are some extra steps I needed to do.
When saved, the text will either come out in all upper case, lower case, or even both cases in one file. Though the fonts in the file do render the accented letters as displayed, the characters in the code are encoded weirdly; in upper case they're half-width katakana characters, or in lower case they're Unicode replacement characters (diamond with question mark). This screenshot is what I mean:
I eventually realised that there was a pattern with the upper case accents as each one would encode to the same character, so I was able to basically Ctrl+F and replace all instances of each accented character. Once I pasted it into Google Docs, however, I'd need to change everything to lower case and fix the capitalisation.
With the lower case accents I'd have to retype them anyway, but the plus side is I don't need to convert the case when fixing capitals. In Microsoft Word, I could press Ctrl+accent+letter and I'd be able to add accented characters (I'm not someone who does this all the time, you see and I'm never going to remember alt codes lol). I can't do that in Google Docs; I would have to go to Insert > Symbols > Special characters or use an extension that would allow me to add an accented character with a click; either way that would require me to put one hand on my mouse.
But then I realised that I was using Linux, and I discovered something called the Compose key, and oh my God, it was a game-changer. All I needed to do was set a keybinding for the Compose key in my KDE settings (I did Right Ctrl) and I was all good to go. I could type in any special character even with a vague impression of what it looked like (particularly for merged characters or foreign currency symbols) and it wasn't limited to any particular program. The Compose key has really helped me when transcribing The Return of Juspion (by hand, no less) and it'll still be of help when I get to the printed Combo Rangers comics. I'm transcribing them by hand because (if you didn't read my explanation in that review) OCR tools can never seem to get the transcription right when all the characters look like they're capitals (typical for the font used). Sometimes Google's spell check kicks in and it's always been able to deduce what the word is based on the missing or incorrect accented character.
So once I have the transcript and paste it into Google Docs, there are two things I need to do; clean up the transcript and identify the speakers. With the webcomic open in one window and Google Docs in another, I condense the split strings into paragraphs and put them in order (similar to PDF files, the lines of each paragraph are split into separate strings), fix the accents and capitalisation, and denote thoughts and narrations. Because I'm making the webcomic raws available instead of screenshotting them (use Ruffle to view alongside the transcripts/translations), I also have to add in descriptions for some scenes (particularly those that have moving things), identify sounds and music that play, and note if pages automatically transition to the next one. I also denote the page numbers as well and it's good that the page numbers are included in the text as well so I have an idea of where they are (but they're not always at the start of a page). Identifying the speakers is exactly what it says on the tin, and if you're familiar with how I format my transcripts, everything should be largely straightforward.
Once I've run through the transcript, I copy and paste it on the same document so I have an extra copy for the translation. Yes, for Combo Rangers, the transcripts and translations are in the same document for each episode/issue. Sometimes during the translation process I'll pick up something that I missed in the transcript and I go back to correct it. I use the Portuguese names for the speakers in the transcript and English ones in the translation (like Poderoso Combo/Mighty Combo and General Monte/General Pile) so those need to be changed, but scene descriptions unfortunately will remain English in the transcript.
Normally it takes a few hours for me to transcribe and translate a webcomic episode (I've been known to do it in 3 hours if I really lock in). I juggle between projects a lot and I'm a chronic procrastinator so when I started working on this series, I decided to dedicate (part of) a day to work on an episode, normally a Saturday (morning) if you follow the translation schedule. Sometimes I can do another episode later that day, or if things free up or I feel like it, I might do another episode on other days. I've been working on the webcomics since the middle of May and I only got around to writing the first review in July after completing the preludes (The Last Princess and The Return of Juspion).
There's a controversy over translations and localisations when bringing Japanese media to the West and a lot of it stems from people having problems with current-day politics being unnaturally shoved into media, leading to the intent of the original work being changed as a result. Fabio Yabu has added pop culture references in Combo Rangers, ranging from American media, Japanese media and even Brazilian media because obviously his main audience is Brazilian.
Given my intent to appeal to an English-speaking audience I have changed a few of the Brazilian references, such as Faustão/Ana Maria Braga to Carrot Top/Barbra Streisand in Episode 4, the Skeletor Havoc Staff joke later in that episode (for linguistic reasons) or the lyrics to YuYu Hakusho's opening theme in the next one. Other times I keep said references, like Pedro Bo in Episode 4, the Chiquititas CD in Episode 7, or "Jamanta kill Sandrinha" in Episode 8. At the time of writing this I've only translated nearly half of the first phase/series so I have no doubt there might be more Brazilian things to change. Whether I decide to change a reference or not, I'll explain what the original reference was. Either way, a lot of research goes into this so I hope you'll keep tuning in and showing your support for this series.
The Combo Rangers series is set in the late-90s/early-00s so obviously I have to keep the pop culture references limited to that era. There shouldn't be any current-day political references shoehorned in, but if you're that worried about it, I've included the original transcripts (and raws) for accountability. If you think you can translate these comics better than I can, then by all means feel free. And if you've still got a problem with that, I dunno, check out this tweet from Fabio Yabu.
Wait, what? The Combo Rangers webcomics were also published in English? Fabio Yabu made an English version of the Combo Rangers website as well? AaaaaAAHHHHHHH-
I got a brand new combine harvester-
Just kidding, any English info related to the Combo Rangers webcomics is lost because it isn't on the Internet Archive. All I could get were the episode titles and synopses for Bolinha and the first three episodes of Phase Zero. Apparently back then, General Pile was called General Piece and Keigh was called Tonsofeyes. Yeah, I'll stick with my translations, thank you very much. "General Pile" came from the reboot graphic novels.
Combo Rangers starts getting serious with the introduction of the sixth Ranger. Next time, the mystery of the White Combo Ranger continues with Bolinha episodes 10-12.
