10 Things You Might Not Know About POWER RANGERS - Warped Factor - Words in the Key of Geek.

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10 Things You Might Not Know About POWER RANGERS

Geek Dave has the ability to morph and to even up the score...


1. The Power Rangers owe an awful lot to Spider-Man. Japanese Spider-Man that is! Back in 1978 the Japanese Toei Company produced a Spider-Man television show which lasted 41 episodes and spawned a movie. Clearly when you make a TV show for another country some things are going to have to change, Spidey still walked on walls and captured crooks in his webs, but instead of swinging through city streets on his webs he had a flying car! Also, Japanese Spider-Man went up against a newly created nemesis called "Professor Monster" who would create a new monster every week for Spider-Man to fight. These monsters would grow to giant size, and then Spider-Man would get into his own giant robot-spaceship which came equipped with a sword named Leopardon. Check out the intro...




...I'm guessing the robot-fighting-a-giant-monster scene looks a little familiar, right? Well when Spider-Man came to an end Toei incorporated many of their ideas into the already established Super Sentai show, which itself was used as the basis for the many Power Rangers series.


2. That Super Sentai show began broadcasting in 1975 with a series entitled Himitsu Sentai Gorenjā (which translates as Secret Squadron Five Rangers), by 1980 the format was perfected and the Japanese show was a huge success. Power Rangers itself did not begin until 1993, but you'd think that in all those years someone might've tried to make a Western version wouldn't you?

Well it turns out that someone did, and surprisingly it was Disney! They purchased the rights to the series in the early 1980s and held them for a decade. Unable to get a project off the ground the rights returned to Haim Saban, who set about producing the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. But just think, if Disney had got their act together we could've had this...


3. The first legendary Power Rangers series, 1993s Mighty Morphin Power Rangers incorporated footage from the sixteenth (yes sixteenth) season of the Japanese Super Sentai show. Basically when it came to the fight scenes with the Rangers in full costume, and all the Zord scenes, the footage you see is recycled from 1992s Kyōryū Sentai Zyuranger.

4. When the original Japanese shows arrived in the US for incorporation into Power Rangers they came with no translation, and so the makers of the US series literally made up completely new stories around the footage they felt could be used.

5. In Kyōryū Sentai Zyuranger, the Yellow Ranger was male and went by the name of Boi. But in Mighty Morphin Power Rangers the Yellow Ranger was female and called Trini Kwan. This is why the original Pink Ranger has a skirt and the Yellow one doesn’t. The publicity material featured the actual American actors in costume, the producers did their best to disguise the obvious bulge of the Gentlemen parts in the recycled footage, but if you really pay attention there is more than one scene when it is noticeable.


6. Mighty Morphin Power Rangers was such a success that the original episode order of 40 was increased to 60. Trouble is the American producers had used up all the available footage from the 50 episodes of Kyōryū Sentai Zyuranger so they asked Toei to film some more fight scenes especially for them. They obliged, and even went so far as to include some of the American cast’s personality quirks into the newly shot scenes - such as Billy’s intelligence and Trini and Kimberly’s friendship. However, from season 2 onwards the Power Rangers did the same as Super Sentai and basically rebooted every year (season 2 used the footage from Gosei Sentai Dairanger). That's why the original Mighty Morphin Power Rangers changed costumes a lot, and also why nowadays every season has a totally different theme.

7. Want to hear Walter White on Power Rangers?...



...Bryan Cranston voiced two villains in the first season of the show, Snizard (above) and Twinman.


8. Walter Jones, who played Zack the Black Ranger in Mighty Morphin Power Rangers is missing the middle finger on his left hand. He lost it in an accident as a child.

Also, just how 90s is the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers? Well the African American on the team plays the Black Ranger, and the Asian team member plays the Yellow Ranger - that's how 90s the show is!

9. Mighty Morphin Power Rangers and all it's subsequent incarnations have been sold around the world and gone on to become massive hits globally. But not every country believed it was an appropriate show for their youth to be watching. The Power Rangers was pulled from television in New Zealand after the first season saw a record number of complaints from concerned parents who thought the show taught kids to solve their problems with violence. It remained banned in New Zealand until 2011!

Plus Malaysian television had a huge problem with the shows title, believing that the word 'Morphin' sounded too much like 'Morphine', and so changed the title and heavily edited the series to avoid any 'Morphin time' in case it persuaded Malaysian children to take up drugs - I kid you not!


10. The original Pink Ranger, Kimberly Ann Hart, was played by Amy Jo Johnson. She left the series in 1995 but almost 20 years later, on November 7th 2014, she performed in her Power Rangers costume on the streets of Toronto after being challenged by her former cast-mate, David Yost who played Billy, the Blue Ranger...

...not quite sure what Batman's doing there, but OK!

Maybe she was singing this...




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