Ask any kid who was around in the 1990s, and they’ll probably tell you they watched Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. It was an international success that wasn’t without its controversies, but the Mighty Morphin Rangers have stuck around to this day with an obscene amount of merchandise, rehashes, and even video games.
Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: Rita’s Rewind is such a good game, but…
Mighty Morphin Power Rangers is good. It was a great jumping-off point for the series, and I’m not delusional enough to say that the other series could possibly have been made without its help.
That doesn’t change the fact that people need to shut up about it. After over thirty years and with the show being practically dead now, I am sick and tired of the only thing Saban Brands and most people talk about being Mighty Morphin.
Do you know how long it took for us to get a Funko Pop of anyone that wasn’t from Mighty Morphin? They were just released a couple of months ago, and all we got were the alternate suits of Mighty Morphin Green Ranger Tommy Oliver!
The fact that this is pretty much the only Zeo/DT merch that isn’t a Lightning collection figure is so sad.
It’s just… really sad that to get any kind of merch of a Ranger that isn’t from Mighty Morphin, you have to find fan-made merch or buy things straight from the actors. And that’s not to say that merch is bad! Far from it, it’s absolutely stunning and I’ve spent way too much money on little trinkets that I absolutely do not need.
Power Rangers pins by a variety of sellers. S.P.D. Pins by S.P.D. Executive Producer Greg Aronowitz (@gregaronowitz on Instagram), Time Force and Mystic Force pins by CeeVeeIllustrations (@ceevee.co on Instagram), and Power Rangers Badge/Circuit pins by HenshinVault (@HenshinVault on Instagram).
My favorite Power Rangers, in order, are the Mystic Force, S.P.D, and Time Force rangers. Vida Rocca, Sky Tate, and Jen Scotts are my all-time favorite rangers— and I can’t get any kind of official merch of them aside from the occasional figure if Hasbro decides to be nice.
They never even released Vida and Jen in this line, which sucks.
And aside from just merchandise, it’s the 20th anniversary of Power Rangers S.P.D. and the year that the series takes place, and the only people I see talking about it are the cast and crew of that specific show. No one that actually has control of the show is even bothering to speak about it, or about any of the other anniversaries or events of the show.
And I do understand that most people only have nostalgia for the original Mighty Morphin, but I have to say… the later seasons have significantly better stories, especially in the later Saban to Disney era. When the original Mighty Morphin’s closest thing to a cohesive story was the Green With Evil five-episode special, Time Force dealt with fear, racism, and the continuing cycle of hatred. And I’m not saying that a show has to be mature to have a good story, because Jungle Fury was pretty much a silly, campy, feel-good romp most of the way through and I adore that season. But the episodes of Mighty Morphin simply… don’t feel cohesive, and the characters are so one-note that when three of the main characters left in the second season, the story barely changed because their replacements were practically exactly the same. Adam is widely regarded as one of the coolest rangers, but he doesn’t even become cool until In Space, when he’s not even a main character anymore!
Adam’s so cool in In Space. Not so much in MMPR.
Even things as innocuous as the Power Rangers table-top role-playing game are so obsessed with Mighty Morphin that they assign the colors roles and characterization based off the original Mighty Morphin team. The blue-rangers are “science-minded,” despite Madison Rocca, Sky Tate, and Dax Lo having passions that lie in areas that are certainly not scientific. Black Rangers are “the life of the party,” but Dillon spends the first few episodes getting into prison fights. And I’m still upset about how it calls Pink a “supporting energy.” Does Jen Scotts, the leader of the Time Force rangers and the coolest Pink Ranger ever to exist, mean nothing to you?!
You dare to call her color a supporting energy?!
The point of a TTRPG is to make your own character story, but to put the colors into such strict categories makes no sense, especially when the show itself contradicts it!
Plus, we’ve had a truly obscene amount of comics starring the Mighty Morphin team, but the other teams barely get a glance unless it’s to tie into Mighty Morphin! The only comics that don’t star the Mighty Morphin team are the Sins of the Future, The Psycho Path, and the Hyperforce comics, which are exclusively based around the Saban era and are very hard to find anywhere but Amazon.
And there’s just the fact that MMPR is so painfully 90s, and not in a good way. A comic relief character grabs at and at one point forcefully kisses the pink ranger, and this is played off as a joke. Combining that with the Korean Adam Park having a family heirloom that is visibly Japanese, Trini Kwan being ambiguously Asian, and them straight up making up a culture for a “respect other cultures” episode, it’s clear that the era’s biases bled into the show a lot. It’s definitely the PR that aged the worst.
I know Bulk and Skull get better, but women don’t get borderline sexually assaulted at all after In Space— even if they’re near sexist men.
This doesn’t mean that I hate the show or that it’s irredeemable, but it’s certainly not so uniquely good that it’s the only show that has a fandom. And it’s certainly not like Winx Club versus The Magic is Back, or classic versus modern Star Trek, where the newer version is actively worse and has significant backlash against it— in fact, it’s the opposite. MMPR laid an amazing groundwork to help the later seasons become better.
MMPR is not bad. But it’s not better than most Power Rangers seasons, and it’s certainly not the only thing we need merchandise of at all times. At this point, it’s nostalgia bait, and those of us who grew up with the Disney and Neo-Saban era are now adults with disposable income. And the truth is, we still like our favorite seasons. I promise you, anyone who’s a fan of a later season rewatches it constantly.
Please, we’ll buy the merch. We’ll watch the tie-ins. You just have to give it to us.
On a quick final note, this is the last blog post that I’ll be writing for class. However, this isn’t the end— I’ll still be writing whenever the mood strikes me. Thanks for joining me on this journey, and I hope we’ll continue on together. In the immortal words of Ever After High, the end is just the beginning.