Those in the know will tell you that Power Rangers is adapted from the Japanese Super Sentai shows, superhero productions that predate the Mighty Morphin’ era by more than a decade. Recent events in Power Rangers land have led to much speculation that the licensing deal may finally be coming to an end and that we may be on the cusp of our first real All-American Rangers. (Guys like Titanium Ranger and Time Force Silver don’t count, and the Hyperforce team, while cool as heck, are kind of a different deal.) On the one hand, it would mean that we don’t see another case where amazing alien hero of pure awesome Gokai Red ends up as the chunk of knotty pine that is Megaforce Red. On the other hand, Saban did create said chunk of knotty pine out of whole cloth, leading to today’s zoku zoku query…
The MS-QOTD (pronounced, as always, “misquoted”) enjoys talking Super Sentai as much as the next gal, provided she’s a close friend of Shotaro Ishinomori, asking: Are you bothered, excited or in no way affected by the idea of All-American Rangers replacing Super Sentai adaptations?
2 Comments
Intrigued. Disney almost did it, and there is some neat artwork for their plans of an original team (though still loosely inspired by Magiranger, it wasn’t a terrible concept).
While I don’t think we’ll be getting a full on abandonment of Sentai source material anytime soon (even with the toy deal changing hands from Bandai to Hasbro, the next series, Beast Morphers, still takes Sentai source material from Go-Busters), I would be interested in some original teams. Who knows, maybe they can fold original Power Rangers into supplementary Super Sentai canon similar to the Korean “Dino Force Brave” (which ended with a really cool hand off with the actual Red Ranger actor from Zyuohger appearing), which was eventually dubbed for Japanese audiences under the Super Sentai banner.
On the other hand, I’m not so sure I would be thrilled with a total break from Super Sentai. Since Saban tries to keep costs down by reusing stuff Toei had from the source, making an entirely original production might suffer heavily in design even if they keep using PLEX as a costume creator.
Plus, getting toys and collectibles of my favorite Super Sentai characters would be a little harder if they don’t have a PR equivalent released. Splurging on imported Ranger Keys, Beast Batteries, Nin Shuriken or other small collectible gimmicks is one thing, but getting the mecha or other larger toys and collectibles will become even more costly to fans.
It might work, it might not. But I can see plenty of reasons both for and against it, so I’m mostly just intrigued.
I’ve not been following current Sentai/Rangers too closely, but it doesn’t really bother me, since I used to watch original version anyway.