Power Rangers: Origins> Did We Dodge A Laser?

Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers has done some pretty amazing things outside of the show’s universe itself. For one, it dethroned the similarly four word named Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as the top kids cultural phenomenon. It brought live-action back to kids action television for the first time since the 1980s began, possibly late 1970s. It also outlasted most kids properties except for Scooby-Doo, Superfriends, and current title holder Sesame Street when it comes to how long the show’s been on. It’s one of the few kids shows with its own 24/7 streaming channels. It got older viewers interested in Japanese superheroes like source material Super Sentai. It’s proof that a kids show can have good writing and not only entertain kids but have adults still enjoy it or at least look fondly on what came before.

However, not every take on the franchise has worked, and some have not even seen the light of day. Not being heavy into the Power Rangers community (I used to be part of a Power Rangers newsgroup until people kept spoiling the season that borrowed too much from the Sentai it was based on) I had never heard of Power Rangers: Origins, an animated take on the original team produced in part by ZAG Entertainment, mostly known for Miraculous: Tales Of Ladybug And Cat Noir. It’s not the first time they’ve associated with Japanese superheroes as Miraculous was co-produced by Toei and certain anime tropes show up in the series despite being set in and produced for a French audience. It’s also not the first time Japan and France have worked together on a project, so I’m surprised none of the Miraculous World movies were set in Japan, but we had one in China. (The heroine is part Chinese.)

A recent article by Bounding Into Comics saw some leaked footage of the failed project. I knew they wanted to shift the franchise into animation but I didn’t know it had gotten this far. So okay, let’s have a look and see how good or bad it is.

First up we have a leaked trailer for the…movie? Show? I’m not really clear on it. Given that it’s an MPAA rating, I’m going with movie, but I thought they wanted to go animated for the series, to cut down on production costs even though most of the fight footage comes from Japanese stock footage.

You had me until the end. Lame joke doesn’t work when you can see the helmets are still designed with the same latches the American costumes had to remove the helmets to see the American actors. Also, if this is supposed to be the origin, and the show already had an origin, why does the Megazord look so different and why are the individual Zords (unless the Rangers are now turning into the components of the Megazord “Mighty Orbots” style) summoned through a wrist-mounted device? Could that be their morphers now? Wrist mounted are something used by earlier and later Sentai teams but not Zyuranger and thus not the original Power Rangers belt-mounted “power coin” activated morphers. Like Trini(?) said, they have a new look, with a half-resemblance to the Zyuranger/Mighty Morphin outfits.

Speaking of Trini, some of the movie posters also leaked and the writer of the article was not happy with the two Rangers solo posters we see without helmets. Trini and Zack(?) have some comments by their helmetless images and it was concerning to the author. While the original team was skeptical at first about whether they could save the world as five ordinary teens, the movie posters seem to up that perspective to a higher level of disbelief. (Also that was resolved before the first episode ended.)

If you can’t read it, even when zoomed in (click to open in a new tab) it says “Save the world…with a toy?”

I didn’t see this one in the ebay listing Ranger Stop linked to (maybe it got sold already by writing time) but it’s in the tweet. Trini, looking a bit too much like Marinette’s cousin (Thuy Trang was Vietnamese, as was Trini Kwan), already made fun of the helmet in the teaser, and here she is making fun of the weapons the Rangers carry. The Rangers never thought twice about the look of their toyetic gear apart of a couple of gags in Power Rangers RPM that worked there as good-natured ribbing. This one comes off a bit more antagonistic to the article writer after then current showrunner Simon Bennet launched a series of tweets voicing his dislike of the tokusatsu formula as being the reason the show was niche. (The tweets appear to be taken down but they show up in the article.) It’s kind of ignorant of the show’s previous success. Nothing stays on the top forever. Just ask the Ninja Turtles.

Presumably Zack has his own problems with their situation…and an odd race change.

“You’re kidding me?…”

We’ll call him Zack is holding the wrong helmet, the Pink Ranger’s helmet. Apparently he doesn’t find the helmets as cool as most kids would, which comes off as further ragging on the Zyuranger designs. Why isn’t he holding the Mastodon helmet? Also, why does he look more Latino than black? I’d blame it on the hang-up of Rangers having the same costume color as their race, but Trini still looks Asian in everything but the eyes. Then again, Marinette has large eyes as well, which appears to be a stylistic choice on Zag’s part given other shows I’ve seen, that makes her only look Chinese, or Vietnamese in Trini’s case, by other features or a lot of “we say they are” being accepted.

The other two posters in the tweet are a helmeted Billy (my favorite of the original Mighty Morphin team) and the new Megazord we still don’t get a very good look against. I’m going to assume some changes are to not have to pay Toei royalties on the designs, but you miss the opportunity to have it release in Japan as an animated Zyuranger movie. The ebay link (as of this writing anyway) shows all the Rangers helmeted in other posters and look a lot better because there’s no dialog.

So are we better off without it? I don’t think they needed it. Much as I don’t need to see a live-action/photorealistic adaptation of a cartoon, I don’t need an animated adaptation of a live-action production, even if history shows that the translation works better to cartoon than from it, and when it comes to some sci-fi and fantasy properties they’re actually a potential improvement. The difference is this franchise brought action shows in live-action back to kids TV, although outside of the Rangers they appear to have mostly gone back into hiding. They didn’t stick to superheroes, with sci-fi mysteries like Secret Of Sulphur Springs or Tower Prep, or straight up sci-fi like The Astronauts, Hypernauts, the 1990s Land Of The Lost remake, and even just normal teen dramas and sitcoms. They even tried a couple of soap operas…”tried” being the operative word.

Not taking the source material some how less seriously than the campy original, or the more serious takes later on, is just odd. No, I don’t think I would have enjoyed this. Kids might, but would they look back on it as fondly as the kids who grew up with the actual show? I don’t think so, but I could be wrong. At any rate, I don’t know this would have been terrible, but I don’t think we miss anything important, either.