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10-21-2012, 09:17 AM | #1 |
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Join Date: Jul 2012
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As is probably clear by now from some of my previous posts i'm still a big mark for the original mighty morphin days i grew up with so i admit i may have a biased view on certain things, but it got me thinking...yes mmpr wasn't that great and had many errors,things that could bug you to no end, was very cheesy and well, every other negative remarks that can be thrown at it probably has truth to it. But then again, for all it's faults and cheesyness, it DID end up being massively popular and even haters would be hard pressed to argue there is a huge shift in reckognision and ,well, importance in popculture i guess you could say.
I also chuckle when i think back at all the knock ranger toys that were everywhere back in the day...cou couldn't even walk in a freakin grocery store without seeing some sort of ranger clone in the toy isle..some were even quite cool but i mean, anything that even slightly looked like a power ranger sold like hot cakes and every store was in on it,that's how huge it was...i haven't seen a knock of ranger toy in stores since,hell like i said even real ranger toys are tucked away in between beyblade and ben 10 and amazing spiderman toys in our toystores. a far cry was the walls of PR toys i got to witness as a child. in the MM era, litterally EVERYBODY knew power rangers, is was everywhere, even your 90 year old grandma was able to tell you what a power ranger looked like.Toys were everywhere, every kid was talking about it, just like turtles and tim burton batman movies, it was an undeniable phenomenon. So PR never stopped and is still going yet i thinks it's safe to say that the majority of people,when you say the name power ranger, will STILL think of MM's. toystores carry very little PR stuff these days ( at least over here..). back in MM days, even non fans or adults knew the goddamn theme song,which is also something that has never been achieved again afterwards imo. yes we, the people that care enough to visit boards like this and talk about it, and still watch it, we still care and know about the franchise, but realisticly speaking we are just a minority. Even kids these days hardly play with rangers, i can tell from family experiance, some of them don't even know what a PR is even tho they might've seen a glimps of samurai on tv.They just don't care like we seemed to used to as kids. Now again, i speak from a Belgium standpoint, i can not accuratly judge what it is like in america or elsewhere but i still think that no matter where you live, the visibility and impact of PR is just a shell of it's former glory even tho some seasons were hundred times better than what we got with MM...What would it take for power rangers to be HUGE again in an overall broader sense ? i mean, Batman has always been popular by fans but after the Burton movies his impact on the "world" was pretty low key,aside from comic readers who kept up every other person when hearing the word Batman instantly got an image of keatons batman in his head. it wasn't untill the Nolan films, hate them or love them as you please, that the world of Batman, and batman himself, was catapulted to a worldwide phenomenon status again, to the point even non fans wear dark knight t shirts and your parents know the movies even tho they don't care for batman per sé. Anyway to wrap this up,part of the magic of MM for me, and why i still think of it so fondly, was the memories of how huge it was, that in itself was part of the charm for me,it wasn't just watching it on tv that made it fun, it was the overall visibility and awareness they got, that added that special flavour to it. These days aside from us die hard fans, nobody gives a s..about PR IMHO,aside from a few kids. but i don't think kids these days will think of samurai as fondly in 20 years from now like my generation does about MMPR. Can lightning strike twice like it did for batman ? or will PR never reach that level again ? Was it just the fact that it was a new idea at the time for our audience, that made us love it so much in the first place ? Last edited by wrestlemaniac; 10-21-2012 at 09:27 AM.. |
10-21-2012, 09:34 AM | #2 |
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Join Date: Jul 2012
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Another funny memory about the MMPR days is the fact that you couldn't even walk into a freakin grocery store without seeing some kind cheap knock of ranger toy on sale, stores that didn't even normally carry toys had something power ranger like on display at the counter, even if it was just sille things like some sort of pogs ( over here it was called "Flippo" with a fake ranger image on it, and darn if it didn't sell...i used to have quite a bit of knock off power rangers as a kid..another testament to the fact that everybody was in on it back then even to oddest of places/stores.
in our local toy stores around the city and neighbouring towns, have like 4 or 5 ranger figures and perhaps 1 of 2 megazords on display, tucked away between ben10 and amazing spiderman stuff and other nonsense. A far cry from the walls of MMPR i got to witness and drool over as a kid for sure. |
10-21-2012, 09:59 AM | #3 |
Sentai of the Ages
Join Date: Jan 2012
Location: Pennsylvania
Posts: 16,715
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Power Rangers is still a phenomenon. Samurai did alot to help bring that back, after the years we had under Disney's uncaring. Toy Sales are through the roof, ratings (When they actually show the damned episodes) are up by alot. And there's PR toys everywhere. Giant, a supermarket here, had Super Samurai toys on the shelf before K-Mart! And that's saying something since K-Mart usually has the new toys before even Bandai makes them. Dollar General has Samurai merch, it's everywhere. This isn't the RPM year where ABCKids put RPM on at five in the morning. The channel may not care about the series by how they act, but, they do put it on when they know people will watch.
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10-21-2012, 09:59 AM | #4 |
TN's Resident Gunpla Nut
Join Date: Jan 2012
Posts: 8,955
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Regardless of how we feel about Samurai as a show, there's no denying that it did something to bring a new audience, I think Power Rangers right now is more popular then it has been in recent years. Definitely feels like Saban wants PR to be the sensation that it was in the nineties.
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10-21-2012, 10:05 AM | #5 |
Sentai of the Ages
Join Date: Jan 2012
Location: Pennsylvania
Posts: 16,715
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Quote:
Regardless of how we feel about Samurai as a show, there's no denying that it did something to bring a new audience, I think Power Rangers right now is more popular then it has been in recent years. Definitely feels like Saban wants PR to be the sensation that it was in the nineties.
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10-21-2012, 10:07 AM | #6 |
Kawaii 5-0
Join Date: Oct 2011
Location: Cardiff, United Kingdom
Posts: 12,851
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Yeah, whether you consider it a phenomenon or not I suppose is personal preference, but this is the most popular I've seen Power Rangers in a long time. The toys seem to sell like hot cakes (now that they've decided to release the Super Samurai waves) and thankfully Nickelodeon seems to care about it here. When you combine this with parade floats, convention appearances and all the other big PR stunts Samurai has had, this has definitely been a big boom for the franchise.
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10-21-2012, 10:44 AM | #7 |
New Member
Join Date: Jul 2012
Posts: 22
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ok that's great to hear,i might have to check out some more of samurai then, i honestly don't even know when or even if it is on tv over here lol, and it's not just me being older and not being as big into childrens tv blocks as years ago because i do know airtimes for other cartoons and kid shows i don't even watch. Seems like belgium is behind on the samurai thing, it has harldy gotten exposure on tv or commercials or toys in this area, i hope it gets good ratings here so our stores start to care more again, it's massively under represented compared to other toys in this region.
i do have faith now that the franchise is back with saban, i didn't even dislike the disney era that much tho,but saban know what worked in the past so that fact alone makes me put confidence in the series future |
10-21-2012, 10:53 AM | #8 |
Master of Water
Join Date: Jan 2012
Posts: 6,246
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Yeah as others have said, regardless of what we may think of Samurai, it is the closest Power Ranger has ever come to replicating the early Saban era in terms of popularity. Good as RPM was, almost nobody knew it existed. Now you see Samurai on everything, from food containers, to pasta, to appearing in gigantic parades. Countries which have stopped bothering to air Power Rangers (such as New Zealand, of all places) are now showing Samurai, and the toys are found everywhere. I dare say Power Rangers now commands a shelf presence the size that Transformers did last year.
If nothing else, Saban succeeded in reviving the popularity of Power Rangers, and I can only hope it gets even better for Megaforce. I simply can't wait for it.
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10-21-2012, 02:53 PM | #9 |
Neon Blade Outlaw
Join Date: Jun 2012
Location: Californa
Posts: 2,725
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It's back in the spotlight, but I doubt it'll ever be as big as it was before. There's a lot more out there and to be honest, a good sized chuck of it is better than Power Rangers. (2012 TMNT F.E.)
But you never know: Maybe Saban'll learn something and put some work into this series and we'll get good writing again. Thou I doubt that will happen anytime soon. |
10-21-2012, 04:32 PM | #10 |
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Join Date: Jul 2012
Posts: 22
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Well good writing...it's not as if mighty morphin was leaps and bounds better than any other series, so it's more then just the writing that did it. i kinda feel like a big part of it was really just the fact that MMPR was for most of us the first time we saw a tv a show like that as kids, it was diffrent from anything else on tv and anything that came before it. so perhaps it's just the unavoidable issue of that new shine being worn of so badly the general audience is immune to it's appeal nowadays.
I feel like the moments the suits changed (zeo) a lot of people collectivly said ( that's not our PR anymore..and slowly faded away,altho new fans got hooked and some big fans stayed) western audiences tend to be picky about change and accepting it, we had known the original suits and actors for so long and many of us felt so attached to them that the sudden design change and roles changing,altho it is a tradition of sentai (but 95% of us had no clue back then) put them of actually. i'm basing this on how i felt,altho i was mixed on it as a kid, i liked to see new stuff but i also never really got over the fact that everything was so diffrent all of a sudden, and also on how my schoolfriends reacted, almost none of us really liked zeo and it always felt a little weird seeing our rangers like that, and just by the time we got a little used and warmed up to it,it changed again into turbo and that's when it became painfully obvious that PR became more of a yearly fashion show rehashed instead of the bad ass show we knew it to be. Yes there is more and better things on tv which doesn't help the cause but there is more behind it imo, it's not as if we had no other good tv shows back then, with gi joe being a craze, transformers, turtles, you name it, we were spoiled as kids just as much as they are today. i think it's also because we got 3 seasons worth of MM AND a movie, that the suits and actors meant so much, this was bigtime,their place in peoples minds was cemented and then they went and changed suits and colors and the world let out a collective "HUH??" it seems and something got lost forever. even in 2012, when i go to a comic convention and there are cosplayers dressed as the original MMPR, they get swamped by people, adults & kids alike, that want to hug them and take photos, infact yesterday we had our annual F.A.C.T.S convention which is something like our european comic con i guess, and there were red,green,blue,black and white MMPR cosplayers, they had to stop every 2 minutes to pose it seems, then another red, gosei red ( i think it may have been the same guy as mmpr,i think he brought 2 suits and changed mid day) and when he walked around, well...sure some pics were taken but it night & day. and it's not just because a lot of people don't reckognize that suit yet,i've seen other rangers cosplay at facts before and the result is always the same, no MMPR = not much interest by onlookers, MMPR = you own the place.. |
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