How the Power Rangers franchise has endured for over 20 years

At the time of writing, it’s only one month until those 1990s kids TV icons the Power Rangers return to the big screen for the first time in twenty years – and, based on the trailers and promotional material, we can anticipate something rather different in tone to what went before.

It remains to be seen just how interested today’s audience will be in ‘Power Rangers,’ but given the box office dominance of superhero movies in the past decade, in many ways it’s surprising it took this long for a new take on the alien-fighting martial arts masters to reach cinemas. However, while it may have been a full two decades since their last big screen outing, the Power Rangers have really never gone away.

So how has the Power Rangers brand endured for so long – and how well do the two existing movies hold up today?

Beginnings

We might tend to think of the Power Rangers as a product of the 1990s, given ‘Mighty Morphin Power Rangers’ first aired in 1993, but the story in fact begins a lot earlier than this. A US-based production from Japanese producer Haim Saban and his Saban Entertainment company, ‘MMPR’ starred a young, fresh-faced cast of all-American actors for the regular day clothes sequences – but when they costumes came on and the monsters came out, the bulk of the footage was recycled from existing Japanese TV action series ‘Super Sentai,’ which began all the way back in 1975.

Watching early episodes of ‘MMPR,’ it isn’t at all hard to see where the older footage has been inserted; the locations and the film stock don’t remotely match, and if you look closely it isn’t hard to tell that the Yellow Ranger, though female in the US series (played by the late Thuy Trang, who lost her life in a 2001 car crash), is actually male in the original ‘Super Sentai’ footage.

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While an immediate hit, ‘MMPR’ attracted its fair share of controversy for promoting fighting to a young audience, particularly here in the UK where censors have always been a bit twitchy about martial arts; we can hardly forget that, only a few years before the Power Rangers showed up, ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ was renamed ‘Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles’ and edited for broadcast on Children’s BBC. ‘MMPR,’ shown on weekday mornings as part of ITV’s TV-AM, had to suffer the indignity of intros from Mr Motivator warning kids not to copy their high-kicking tomfoolery. But we all know how it works: the more you tell kids something is bad for them, the more enthusiastically they will embrace it.

And the kids certainly did embrace the Power Rangers. With a pop phenomenon on their hands, getting great ratings and selling boat-loads of merchandise (including the theme song, which made the Christmas top 5 on the UK singles chart in 1994), the next logical step was an assault on cinemas.

The first two movies

For viewers coming to ‘Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie’ today with memories of the original TV series, one thing that might give pause immediately is that the film does not feature the classic five-ranger line-up of the early episodes (the same characters who will be used in the upcoming movie). By 1995 when the movie was released, three of the original Ranger actors – Yellow Ranger Thuy Trang, Red Ranger Austin St John and Black Ranger Walter Jones – had been fired from the series over a contractual dispute; not an unreasonable grievance on the part of the young actors, as despite the show’s success they were making less than Screen Actor’s Guild minimum wage, with no residual payments from re-runs.

The movie instead features the revised six-ranger line-up of the show’s second season, with Karan Ashley, Steve Cardenas and Jonny Yong Bosch as the new Yellow, Red and Black Rangers. But by this point, the team had a new leader in the White Ranger Tommy, played by Jason David Frank. The long-haired fan favourite is the most unmistakably 90s-looking teen of the pack, and went on to become the longest-serving Ranger.

Happily, unfamiliarity with the source material needn’t be much of a hurdle for ‘Power Rangers: The Movie;’ it’s a very straightforward action-adventure tale, which sees the Rangers in trouble when a new enemy emerges in Ivan Ooze (‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ legend Paul Freeman), who mortally wounds their mentor Zordon and strips them of their powers, forcing them to visit a far-off alien world to have their powers returned.

Made for a reported $15 million, the production values are clearly higher than the rather cheap-looking TV show, but by Hollywood standards it’s still not too impressive on a technical level, in particular the shoddy CGI used in place of the show’s man-in-suit monsters-vs-Megazord action. Still, as undemanding, family-friendly popcorn entertainment it’s hard to fault, and proved enough of a commercial success for a sequel to follow two years later.

Unfortunately, 1997’s ‘Turbo: A Power Rangers Movie’ has not stood the test of time so well; indeed, even die-hard Power Rangers fans seem to agree that it was never something to write home about in the first place. Made on an even lower budget than the first film with a plot that’s considerably harder to follow, it’s not so much a movie as a prologue to the latest incarnation of the ‘Power Rangers’ TV series, and as such it’s largely inaccessible to anyone but devotees of the show.

It’s always Morphin’ time

As ‘Turbo: A Power Rangers Movie’ indicates, the original ‘Mighty Morphin Power Rangers’ gave way to revisions of the format. 1996 saw two new shows, ‘Mighty Morphin Alien Rangers’ and ‘Power Rangers Zeo,’ followed by 1997’s fourth series ‘Power Rangers Turbo,’ 1998’s ‘Power Rangers in Space,’ and 1999’s ‘Power Rangers Lost Galaxy,’ by which point the cast had undergone numerous changes and the chronology was getting very hard to follow.

More small-screen incarnations of ‘Power Rangers’ followed (there have been an astonishing 19 different shows to date), but it arguably wasn’t until 2004’s ‘Power Rangers Dino Thunder’ that the show regained its original charm by returning to the high school setting and casting ‘teenagers with attitudes’ as the central characters. It also didn’t hurt that ‘Dino Thunder’ saw the return of the series stalwart Jason David Frank, this time in a mentor role to a new generation of Rangers.

By this point production had moved to New Zealand, where subsequent shows such as ‘Power Rangers Samurai,’ ‘Power Rangers Megaforce,’ Power Rangers Dino Charge’ and most recently ‘Power Rangers Ninja Steel’ have since been made, keeping the franchise popular among young viewers. Meanwhile, fans of the classic line-up have had a comic book series from Boom! Comics to keep them happy, which recently saw a crossover with DC’s signature super-team the Justice League.

Then, of course, there was 2015’s big budget fan film ‘Power/Rangers,’ which cast Katee Sackhoff and James Van Der Beek as two of the original Rangers all grown up. With its extreme violence and adult content, the 14 minute short from director Joseph Kahn and producer Adi Shankhar proved hugely popular and controversial, though most viewers seemed to miss its satirical undertones, mocking the trend for gritty, adult-oriented reboots of originally child-oriented material – which, we can hardly fail to note, the upcoming ‘Power Rangers’ would appear to be yet another example of.

Based on the first trailers, director Dean Israelite’s take on the franchise would appear to replay the essential premise of the first episodes of ‘MMPR’ but with a more grounded, hard-edged feel; a risky approach, given how brash and light-hearted the series has typically been. More recent trailers may have put more emphasis on the fun, but it’s hard not to be reminded of 2015’s ‘Fantastic Four,’ whose commercial and critical failure demonstrated the danger of treating a colourful superhero property too seriously.

Still, with series creator Haim Saban still on board as producer it seems safe to assume ‘Power Rangers’ won’t stray too far from its roots, and with such talents as Bryan Cranston and Elizabeth Banks among the cast we surely have cause for optimism. Cranston (who has some history with the franchise) has spoken highly of what he’s seen of the film, declaring in January, “this movie is actually gonna be a big deal… I think it’s gonna turn some heads, I really do.”

Cinemagoers will have to decide for themselves whether or not it’s morphin’ time when ‘Power Rangers’ opens on 24 March.

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