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National Power ⚡ Rangers Day 2024
What more awesome way to start wrapping up the month of August than to celebrate National Power ⚡ Rangers Day?
⚡ Mighty Morphin Power Rangers ⚡
QUIET! Those Power Rangers are nothing but mere infants! You were defeated by children! You dare call yourself an Empress of Evil? You are not fit to destroy a cockroach! ~Lord Zedd
We met a number of the Power Rangers, their archenemies and side-characters at ComicCon quite a few years ago. It was an interesting experience to meet all these various actors who portrayed some of our favorite characters in a variety of shows and movies.
In your brain, you know this is just some dude in a costume reciting lines, but the willing suspense of disbelief draws you into the magic. Maybe it’s a big name actor like Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man, but for those hours in the theater or watching a screen he is 100% Tony Stark. Maybe it’s a largely unknown actor and the only role you associate him with is whatever you’re seeing on the screen.
The interesting thing about the Power Rangers in particular is that their scenes were paste-overs for pre-existing Japanese footage. The Power Rangers are a generational phenomenon in Japan and the shows we’re familiar with are licensed adaptations of the existing Japanese material.
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Brennan Mejia said in the video above, the experience of being a Power Ranger (despite being fun and memorable) was totally not what you’d associate with being a central character of a wildly popular show. Their contracts sucked egregiously. It was harmful to their career because it took them out of Los Angeles for several months. Even so, he doesn’t regret his experience as the Red Ranger of the Dino Charge team.
You’d think being a cultural phenomenon would be a big gold star on your actor’s resume, but that’s Hollyweird for you. From what my son has told me, if you’re an actor on Power Rangers in Japan, you’ve got it made. It is what you’d expect. In America, it was a ridiculously exploitative production where actors got a two season contract and no percentage of the toy sales.
If the behind-the-scenes catastrophe of the Power Rangers could serve as a lesson of what not to do going forward, that would be great. Unfortunately, it seems like that might actually be considered a model for producers to follow and double down on. Not sure if this year’s SAG-AFTRA strike made any steps toward actually fixing that, but I seriously doubt it.
Go! Go! Power ⚡ Rangers!
Mighty Morphin Power Rangers The Movie 1995
My nephew was absolutely nuts about these guys. I’m fairly certain that my son never got to see any of their shows until he was in his teens, but he’s still wild about the whole Power Rangers franchise.
I’ve seen a few episodes over the years. Some are better than others. Truth be told, I’d really like to see a dubbed version of the Japanese originals. If the pasted over stuff is even marginally entertaining, I’ve got to believe that the original stuff is absolutely captivating.
For me, I grew up with original Japanese content. I watched Johnny Sokko and his Flying Robot, Ultraman, Speed Racer and Star Blazers. Granted, it was dubbed and the characters were renamed for an English-speaking audience, but the original storylines are largely intact. The dramatization of the characters is primarily in the Japanese style.
I think there was a certain level of jingoism involved in the bastardization of the original Power Rangers material, but it still managed to remain interesting enough to enchant a whole generation of kids. It’s just a shame that while they were diluting the source material, they were also diluting the star power of the performers who participated in the paste-over material. These shows are beloved by an entire generation of kids. It would be more than fair if the cast were as popular and prosperous as actors in other wildly popular franchises.
Power Rangers | All Opening Themes | Saban’s – Hasbro (1993-2022)
⚡ Able To Dare ⚡
Power is given only to those who dare to lower themselves and pick it up. Only one thing matters, one thing; to be able to dare! ~Fyodor Dostoevsky
That sounds like the very heart of a hero. The term derring-do sounds an awful lot like daring do or daring to, primarily because that’s what the original term in Middle English meant.
Being able to dare can be heroic or churlish, in fact.
It’s daring for a firefighter to rush into a burning building in search of people to rescue. On the other hand, the fire might have been started on a dare by a kid keeping bad company.
Daring can be positive or negative. Rescuing or victimizing can both be daring. Train robberies in the Old West were certainly daring, but they weren’t good or heroic.
Interesting how daring has its mirror image. That’s very evocative for a hero / villain dynamic.
Certainly, this can lead to the dreaded “we’re not so different, you and I…” that so many AuthorTubers bemoan.
But that’s not necessarily poison fruit. It’s fertile territory for subverting a trope.
Switching things can likewise be done well or poorly. There’s a lot of talk on AuthorTube about subverting tropes as if it was inherently daring.
Well, as with actual acts that are meant to be daring, if you fail it can go catastrophically.
Whether a villain dares to rob a bank, only to find that the bank has been configured by someone who has been robbed repeatedly to be an insidious trap for would-be robbers ~or~ whether our intrepid firefighter sweeps the burning building for innocent civilians to rescue, only to find that the arsonist has deliberately configured the accelerant to burn deadfalls in the structure of the building to either drop an upper floor on his head or to collapse the floor from underneath him.
Not all dares pan out. Just search YouTube for “epic fail”, “brutal faceplant” or even “Darwin Award” to see what I mean.
So, remember, it’s exciting to see an action hero dashing from one close call to another, but it’s relatable for one of those close calls to hit a bit too close to home.
That’s all for today. I hope your week is productive and not beset by teams of putties or screeching space witches.