Shutting Down The Morphin’ Grid? The Current State Of Power Rangers

The future of the Power Rangers franchise seems to be in trouble at the moment, and it wasn’t (insert your favorite villain here for an overused gag) that’s responsible, but the current rights holders. Hasbro is already putting outfits and other items from the show on auction, and there has been no announcement of a new show despite Super Sentai, the Japanese superhero franchise Power Rangers is based on, continuing to make more shows.

Sentai, Japanese for “task force”, can trace its roots to the 1970s, but only really gained that name in the third series, a project that intellectually spun off of Spider-Man that was originally intended to be Captain America. There’s a lot of weird in that sentence we won’t get into. The point is, Haim Saban tried a few times to bring an American version of the show to Western kids, eventually succeeding with Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers. From there every year had a new incarnation for a new generation, but while the show thrives in Japan, the road in the US has been a more bumpy one.

So what hurt the franchise, and does it have a future? Let’s discuss, and be glad I’m not lame enough to call this article “Stop, Stop, Power Rangers” or some other cringy nonsense.

I’m not going to go over the history of Super Sentai beyond the very truncated cliff notes above. Not enough of you will care except for the people who already are invested in Japan’s spandex champions. What we need to know here is that TV producer and theme co-writer Haim Saban saw a Sentai series while in Japan and really thought American kids would love it. Two attempts were unsuccessful: a parody dub of Dynaman only ended up on USA Network’s Night Flight programming block and started with this:

The first two episodes did air on Nickelodeon. I saw them. They were kind of weak. When Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers was announced my first thought was “please don’t go on about ‘gadget watches’ because I won’t care. Lucky for everyone, Fox let it be campy but not comedic…most of the time, but that’s for later. This final try was a hit with kids and took over the country and other parts of the world.

Now I didn’t grow up with this show. I was in high school at the time, but I grew up with what was essentially the last live-action superhero show for kids up to that point, The Shazam/Isis Hour. Power Rangers would create a return for such shows, leading to other action genres. Some were good, like the remake of Land Of The Lost, and some were misses, like Galidor: Defenders Of The Outer Dimension. DIC tried to get some of that by using computer world footage of Gridman to create Superhuman Samurai Syber-Squad in syndication, plus an original concept, Tattooed Teenage Alien Fighters From Beverly Hills for USA Network. Apparently the budget went into the name because it certainly wasn’t in the US footage.

Saban themselves would try to make the formula of Japanese action footage mixed with American character footage work again, but none of it caught the same magic. It didn’t help that the end of the “Metal Hero” type superheroes in Japan ended VR Troopers and the Beetleborgs franchise while Kamen Rider taking a break killed the already lackluster Masked Rider. 4Kids actually did a better job after the Kamen Rider franchise returned when they took Kamen Rider Ryuki to create Kamen Rider Dragon Knight. Saban also tried to recreate the sentai idea with the Ninja Turtles and a high-fantasy inspired show, Mystic Knights Of Tir Na Nog, neither of which worked out for different reasons.

Eventually Saban wanted to move on and sold the series to Disney, who moved it to ABC Kids and their “Jetix” programming block on ABC Family. The first shows were rough, especially in the audio, but they started to get the hang of things. What they didn’t get was their money’s worth, even moving to New Zealand to keep filming costs down. I guess using someone else’s footage didn’t control costs enough. Saban himself had to save the series by creating Saban Brands, and started a whole new series of Power Rangers before finally selling it to Hasbro, which actually started out okay. Power Rangers Beast Morphers really played well by expanding Ranger lore and the Morphin Grid. Shows like Power Rangers RPM and Dino Thunder were moved to alternate universes so the timeline made sense, and Dino Fury even explored the Morphing Masters, a throwaway reference from the first season to explain that episode’s mcguffin.

Not that the franchise didn’t have a few clunkers. Power Rangers Turbo was hampered by using an official parody sentai, Power Rangers Operation Overdrive had numerous issues, and if you want to see an anniversary series in the hands of someone who didn’t even care about the franchise, Power Rangers (Super) MegaForce was the best example. The last showrunner under Hasbro has since admitted to hating the Sentai format and wanting to do away with it. Moving to Nickelodeon didn’t help because they limited the number of episodes a season, which hurt plans for Samurai, and Cosmic Fury going to Netflix both hurt the number of available watchers and led to an even reduced number of shows, while they wanted to make the kids show for adults, which I was against, and replace the live-action with animation so they could do whatever they wanted, like ignore the formula that worked. And of course the tomboy was a lesbian because stereotypes are how we do “representation” these days, even when past generations pushed back against such negative stereotypes.

This isn’t even the first time this franchise’s future has been in trouble. Power Rangers In Space was supposed to be the last episode of the first Saban run, but boosted the viewer numbers so much that they decided to keep going, this time by changing out the teams each season and building out the Power Rangers universe, a good move as you could only go so far with the same cast. Some people left and the others got too old. We did get to see the original team gain more confidence, start and end romances, graduate high school, and move on to new things while a new team took over. By changing out teams the show became fresh and new, but staying in the same universe (most of the time) was a huge benefit. Still, RPM was going to be Disney’s last attempt until Saban came back to save his creation. Lately fans have been wondering about the future under Hasbro, and this isn’t even my first article on the topic. Back then we only had speculation. Now it seems more likely that Hasbro is ending things, turning the toys to a DIFFERENT toy manufacturer, which is not the same as the licensing of Transformers, which they still make but have let a few other companies play with the nostalgia.

So what happened? I think it was a series of mistakes.

• Hasbro didn’t really want the franchise, the toy creators considering it the enemy for so long and the head toy honchos not being interested. It was purchased by their media division without warning in hopes of boosting their profits. So they didn’t really know what to do with it.
• As mentioned before, showrunners Simon Bennett thought the franchise was dumb and didn’t want to do it. I don’t know why he took the job or why Hasbro hired him with that attitude.
• Moving to Netflix, a streaming service losing subscribers and limiting the amount of people who can see it, also wasn’t a good idea. I’m not sure if Dino/Cosmic Fury shows up on the Power Rangers ad-sponsored streaming offerings today but I know it’s not on the official YouTube channel.
• No, I don’t think it was the lack of evolution. Not every show has to be a long-running epic. We do see character growth in the original series, even before Zeo started running subplots. Billy became more confident, and even started dating. Members left the team. Bulk and Skull went from being bullies to law enforcers before the show just couldn’t find a use for them, and have been the prototype of other reformed human antagonists in the franchise. We saw the original cast graduate and move on to new pursuits in their lives, leaving the protection of Angel Grove in the hands of others until the final defeat of the Alliance Of Evil. Future villains were one-shots and we saw them defeated or reform as well. I actually saw a critic compare it to Degrassi High of all things.

Power Rangers has always been a bit silly and campy, with some shows more serious or darker than others, but this was a show for kids, and still should be. If everything had to grow with the audience most of us would never have known Sesame Street in our childhoods because Big Bird would be on welfare, Bert and Ernie would have gotten a house and moved off the street, or something along those lines. As it is we saw weddings, death, new character arrive while old ones left…there was an evolving state, but it was one done by necessity, organic evolution versus forced evolution, which has hurt that show recently. Trying to change that is ultimately what hurt the show. One commenter pointed to what Boom Studios was doing, but that was reworking a kids properties for the adults who couldn’t go back to watch it and wanted nostalgia to age with them. I didn’t grow up with it so maybe my perspective is different, but it was fine the way it was.

Power Rangers airs on Pluto TV as part of their Forever Kids channel, on dedicated channels on Roku and Plex, and all three services have the shows available on demand, though some may not have them all. YouTube also has streams and on-demand versions of the various seasons individually on their official channel. And of course they’re on Netflix. You’ll have to hunt for the Super Sentai shows thanks to Shout Factory no longer having a free streaming service, but they’ve partnered with Tubi, YouTube, and other services. Naturally, all that depends on the future of the license by the time you read this, so you may want to track down the home video options while they’re still available if you want to keep the memories alive.

So is there a future? Can someone buy the series from Hasbro, continue the Playmates deal since Hasbro’s toy division would rather have a rival company than purchase yet another rival like they did Tonka and Kenner, and restore Power Rangers to a kids property on a network or format kids will actually see it, with enough episodes to make a good series plot and a bunch of standalone episodes that teaches kids and fleshes out the characters? Time will tell but this time it looks like the power won’t protect them.

Okay, I got one in. It’s a rule or something.