Power RangernaticZ

The Power Rangers Set Was a Hotbed of Labor Exploitation

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers was awesome and will live in our hearts forever. Sadly, it was also a completely disastrous nonunion workplace where actors were paid pennies, worked to the ground, homophobically bullied, and nearly set on fire.

To any ’90s kid who raced home after school for morphin’ time: Put those L.A. Lights back on and get ready to run to a movie theater.

When candy-colored Mighty Morphin Power Rangers premiered on Fox in 1993, the TV show’s central characters were spandex-clad “teenagers with attitude” who — in addition to dealing with high school romances and bullies — were tapped by an alien life force to protect Earth from extraterrestrial evildoers.

That premise remains intact in the new big-screen reboot, but both the teens and the action have been upgraded inside and out.

Gone are the TV show’s low-budget fight scenes. (Executive producer Haim Saban used to use footage from a Japanese show.) In their place are special-effects-laden action sequences that could go toe-to-toe with any Transformers movie.

But Saban’s Power Rangers feels much more like a Marvel movie than anything by Michael Bay.

The cast is still diverse, but (thankfully!) the Yellow Ranger is no longer Asian and the Black Ranger is no longer black. Their spandex has been traded in for body armor akin to Iron Man’s. And their teenage angst is a result of modern millennial problems.

Pink Ranger Kimberly (Naomi Scott) is a former popular girl who is shunned by her clique after she shares compromising photos of a friend. Blue Ranger Billy (RJ Cyler) is “on the spectrum” and still dealing with the death of his father. Red Ranger Jason (Dacre Montgomery) is a football star whose school-prank-gone-wrong gets him kicked off the team and earns him a police-issued ankle bracelet. Black Ranger Zack (Ludi Lin) is caring for his terminally ill mother. And Yellow Ranger Trini (“Shower” singer Becky G) is a transfer student whose sexual orientation has made family dinners very tense.

RPM Delivered Relatable Characters Surviving In A Dark World

-As bleak, dark, and entertaining as fans had imagined the 2017 Power Rangers film would be, RPM is a post-apocalyptic series. The show centers on a group of Rangers who are attempting to safeguard the inhabitants of Corinth, the planet's final free city, from the computer virus Venjix. Every turn of RPM is emotionally riveting and tragic, frequently incorporating topics that would have been deemed too serious for earlier episodes. RPM has a cast of characters that feel like real people with believable motivations. Anyone, Power Rangers fan or not, should watch RPM.

White Dino Ranger (Power Rangers Dino Thunder)

Like most Rangers who start out evil, Trent stole the show while working against the team, and became a powerful ally once he started working with them. Throughout Power Rangers Dino Thunder, he feels almost unfair in his abilities—he has the ability to camouflage himself while unmorphed, allowing him to collect information on his enemies.

While transformed, he can move at super-speed, which has been a problem for both the Rangers and the villains alike, depending on whose side he’s on. His main weapon, the Drago Sword, can fire laser arrows making him great as a distanced fighter, and he has control of both the Dragozord and the Stegozord to give him his own megazord. He’s a complete fighter the Rangers were lucky they were able to turn good.

The Power Rangers have been around for 29 years now, giving generations of superhero fans nearly three decades of giant robot fighting, evil moon witch cackling, and the inherent joy of color-coded superhero transformation sequences. But they’d be in a very different place without, of course, the series that helped make them visual icons: Kyōryū Sentai Zyuranger.

First airing in Japan on February 21, 1992, Zyuranger was, and in some ways influentially still is, in the shadow of its predecessor in the long running Super Sentai series, Chōjin Sentai Jetman. The 16th entry in a superhero universe that is still running to this very day, there was a time where Zyuranger may never have happened all if not for Jetman’s radical overhaul of the Super Sentai formula—injecting more intra-team drama, more nuanced villains, and character work beyond the spectacle of the giant robots and super-suited martial arts action—hadn’t revitalized the series, saving it from impending cancellation. While Zyuranger extrapolated and built on some of those elements itself, it also veered off in more fantastical directions.