The trailer dropped this week for the Netflix special “Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: Once & Always”, which will premiere on Netflix on April 19. This special is to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the original show and brings back several members of the cast from Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. So naturally, now felt like a good time to talk Power Rangers.

Like a lot of children of the 90s, Power Rangers was my jam. It had superheroes, kung-fu, dinosaurs, giant monsters, and a ton of explosions. You couldn’t have made a show more targeted to a kid already versed in Godzilla, Spider-Man, X-Men and so on. So today, I wanted to cover the weird history of the show and how real life affected both production and story of the show.

We’ve mentioned some of the properties inception earlier this year during my tokusatsu retrospective, but to recap: Producer Haim Saban, while on a business trip to Japan, caught a broadcast of the eighth series in the long running Super Sentai series titled Choudenshi Bioman. As noted in that previously, the Super Sentai series would feature a group of people in color-coded uniforms that would transform into superheroes with wrist-worn or handheld devices to fight a monster of the week.

After learning that a French dub of Choudenshi Bioman proved popular outside Japan, Saban sought to bring this style of programming to American audiences.

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers was made combining scenes filmed with American actors, while utilizing the footage from the sixteenth series: Kyoryu Sentai Zyuranger.

In the plot of the series, a pair of astronauts accidentally open a canister on the moon containing the evil sorceress Rita Repulsa and her minions Goldar, Squatt, Baboo and Finster. After 10,000 years of imprisonment, Rita sets her sights upon conquering Earth.

Fortunately for Earth, Zordon, a being trapped within a “time warp”, has set up a Command Center along with his robot assistant, Alpha 5, in the event of Rita’s escape. As part of his precautions, Zordon has Alpha 5 recruit five “overbearing and overemotional humans” (you know, teenagers) to become the Power Rangers.

The original Power Rangers gain their abilities through the use of morphers powered by a corresponding power coin. The rangers are as follows: Jason Lee Scott - Marital artist and leader of the team, he is the Red Ranger and pilots the Tyrannosaurus Dinozord.

Zack Taylor - Wise-cracking dancer and marital artist who become the Black Ranger, and pilots the Mastodon Dinozord.

Billy Cranston - The brainy Blue Ranger and pilot of the Tricertops Dinozord.

Trini Kwan - The soft spoken environmentalist, and resident translator for Billy’s techobabble; she becomes the Yellow Ranger and pilots the Saber-Toothed Tiger Dinozord.

Kimberly Hart - Valley girl and Pink Ranger who pilots the Pterodactyl Dinozord.

These five would fight various monsters sent down to Earth by Rita week after week. Episodes would usually focus on a particular ranger or two, have some fighting involving Rita’s army of goons known as Putty Patrollers, the rangers would fight/destroy the monster, Rita would make the monster grow, and the rangers would summons the zords to combine into the Megazord to destroy the monster.

Honestly, going back and watching the show, it is amazing that they managed to blend the Saved by the Bell slice-of-life stuff with the more action oriented Sentai footage. The five teens didn’t really have too much personality and were generally all “goodie-two shoes” types involved in so many fundraisers and activities you wonder how they had time for anything else.

The show was pretty solidly popular for the first 16 episodes…then came Tommy.

It can’t be understated how much of an impact the character of Tommy Oliver has had on the franchise. His introductory story saw him introduced as a new kid whose martial arts prowess rivaled even Jason’s.

The rangers aren’t the only ones to take notice of this, and Rita kidnaps and brainwashes Tommy into becoming her evil Green Ranger.

The brainwashing would eventually be undone and the rangers would gain Tommy as the first sixth ranger on the team (a tradition that carries on to the present). Tommy would shake things up by providing the team with more firepower in the form of the Dragonzord, a Godzilla-esque zord that Tommy controlled via a dagger that was also a flute; he would also have a long lasting romantic relationship with Kimberly.

Rita would utilize a magic green candle that would slowly drain Tommy of his powers. There is a real world reason for this, the original Zyuranger footage that Power Rangers pulled from had limited appearances from their Green Ranger (Burai) due to that character essentially being undead and living on borrowed time.

To prevent Rita from gaining the powers again, Tommy transfers them to Jason, and those powers would be used to fight a giant floating head name Lokar and Goldar’s zord Cyclopsis in the faux-finale of the first season.

Now this wouldn’t be the end of season one, and it would start a trend that the producers of the series needed to adapt to…a lack of new footage. You see, Sentai would always change the teams out year after year, but Saban had a brand they needed to maintain and felt kids might be resistant to change. To this end, the company contacted Toei (producers of Super Sentai) and Rainbow Productions (the company that made the monster suits) to produce new in-suit and zord footage. About 25 episodes worth of footage was filmed in Japan and spliced together with the American footage as always. This footage would earn the fan nickname “Zyu2” to differentiate it from the Zyuranger footage, and with new Green Ranger footage, Tommy was also able to return.

Season two premiered in 1994 and shook up the foundation of the series even more.

The first of these changes was the introduction of the first American original villain created exclusively for Power Rangers: Lord Zedd. Lord Zedd was introduced as Rita’s superior that was dissatisfied with her performance against the rangers and throws her back into containment.

Lord Zedd would prove himself to be a legitimate threat to the rangers, forcing them to upgrade their zord into new Thunderzords. The real world rationale being that Saban chose to utilize the zord footage from the series following Zyuranger, Gosei Sentai Dairanger.

Zedd had an active strategy of seeking to eliminate the Green Ranger, who was already running on a limited amount of power anyway and would actually succeed in this endeavor, resulting in Tommy losing his Green Ranger powers all over again.

But that wasn’t the end of the character, for there was a two-part episode that saw Zordon and Alpha create a new White Ranger to battle Zedd. This ranger’s identity was initially kept secret from the characters and audience with several red herrings introduced throughout, but eventually it would be revealed to be Tommy. The White Ranger suit comes from Dairanger, and fortunately for the show runners, the suit has many of the same design elements as the Zyuranger suits and fits in very well. Tommy is now armed with a talking sword called Saba, and the new White Tiger Zord that can transform into a warrior mode, or combine with the other Thunderzords.

Mid-season, things would shake up with the departure of three of the original rangers: Jason, Zack, and Trini. In the show this was explained as them being chosen to attend a peace conference, but the reality was that actors Austin St. John, Walter Jones, and Thuy Trang, all wanted the show to become unionized as Austin St. John shared in a 2014 interview that he could’ve worked the window at McDonald’s and made the same amount of money.

The three actors were canned and Saban replaced them with a group of new teens: Rocky, Adam and Aisha (Steve Cardenas, Johnny Yong Bosch, and Karen Ashley respectively).

Rita would also eventually return and use a love potion on Zedd. The two would get married during the season and make things much worse for the rangers.

By the time of the third season, the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie had debuted in theaters. The film was shot largely in Australia and for all intents and purposes exists in its own separate continuity.

In the third season proper, Rita’s skeletal brother Rito Revolto would come to Earth and destroy the ranger’s zords which also damaged their power coins beyond repair. This would result in them having to leave the planet to seek the aid of Ninjor, the being that apparently created the power coins. The rangers would receive new ninja based abilities and new zords to boot (courtesy of Ninja Sentai Kakuranger).

This season featured a long story arc in which we see the departure of Amy Jo Johnson (Kimberly’s actress) from the show. Unlike the abrupt departure of the last three rangers, Kimberly was given a proper send off where her character is given the opportunity to follow through with her personal athletic dreams, but expressed her worries about neglecting her duties as a ranger. Zordon gives his blessing to Kimberly to follow her dreams as he never intended to keep the rangers from having a normal life.

This season introduces the character of Katherine “Kat” Hillard, an Australian girl that was brainwashed by Rita into spying on the rangers. Her brainwashing was eventually broken and Kimberly selects Kat as her successor as the Pink Ranger.

Things get more complicated (imagine that) when Rita and Rito’s father, Master Vile, come to Earth. He uses his power to reverse time which turns the rangers into powerless children.

This results in what fans deem to be a bit of a mini-series within the series where the Alien Rangers from Aquitar (using the ranger footage from Kakuranger) come to assist the rangers battle Zedd and Rita, while the rangers search for an object called the Zeo Crystal.

This hunt for the Zeo Crystal would ultimately lead to everything being restored to normal, but Goldar and Rito had placed a bomb within the Command Center resulting in its destruction as the rangers are teleported out at the last minute. This cliff hanger would lead into the next series: Power Rangers Zeo. And it would be in Zeo that Power Rangers would start to change out the suits along with the zord footage.

Now that is probably more information about Power Rangers than need, but it goes to show the kind of weird changes a show of this nature goes through, and how real life sometimes affects the plot of a show.

We’ll revisit this topic again before the 30th anniversary special drops, and continue with the subsequent Power Rangers series.