Will PR ever be a phenomon again ?
 

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 ?

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.

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.

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.

Kiryu. Your avatar makes me giggle. Just thought I'd mention.

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.

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

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.

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.

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..

That was a very interesting editorial. Here's my opinion:

1- Power Rangers is still what I would call a Phenomenon It's 36 years old in Japan and going on 20 years here. THAT'S HUGE. That puts just the BRAND itself in to the same category of other toy and franchise Juggernauts like : GI Joe, Transformers, and Star Wars figures. That's a difficult feat to accomplish especially in this tough economic climate. I have lived 20 of my 25 years with Power Rangers. That's a lifelong fandom for many. Those don't just disappear and fade away.

2- It's still popular with all ages. Anyone who has netflix streaming could tell you in the "Popular on Netflix" Catagory right next to Doctor Who and Marvel Movies is MMPR. I have a large collection on display in my office in my house. When I have guests of all ages over they instantly recognize my Power Rangers and often ask to check them out.

3-Kids still love it. My Girlfriend is a Program Director at a school and I work there part time and the kids love to talk to the "Power Ranger Guy". I'll bring in older toys for them to play with and they go crazy. My three year old niece begs to come to my house so she can play with some old Ranger and Samurai Syber Squad toys.

4-Universal Appeal I live in New York City which in itself is like a tiny version of the planet with all countries represented in some way. There are stores devoted entirely to Tokusatsu merchindise and more "Clubs" for PR than I can count. I feel it's because the Rangers transcend any Racial,Language, or Ideal barriers and they give people a great entertaining story and remind everyone of what that wonderful child like awe and wonder felt like when we first heard "IT'S MORPHIN' TIME".

5- Things Change I understand what you're saying about the toy displays yes they are a 1/8th the size they where in the heyday of MMPR, this I think has to do with a few things, Kids don't play with toys as much as they used to. When we where younger our older siblings would play video games or go out and we would play with our toys. Your friends would bring their toys over or vice versa and you would play together and that's just the way it was. Console and Hardcore Gaming have ravaged the Toy market. HARD. I worked for Gamestop and TOYS "R" US when I was in college, most of the customers in the Toy Store where adult collectors and in the Gamestop most of the customers where kids. You can't sell things to people who don't want them.

6- It Depends on You It is our duty as fans to immortalize our fandom and keep it running strong. Support Power Rangers, Support Super Sentai. Send emails to the producers and film studios tell them how much MMPR means to you and thank them. Support the show any way you can. Support = Life for franchises.

7- Remember, Dream, ShareI have already begun assembling a small MMPR/Tokusatu time capsule for my future child. I don't think Toku is going anywhere but I want to able to share the magic and joy I had as a child growing up with these heroes. I want to be able to give my child a toy and say "That was mine when I was your age" And Thanks to MMPR I will be able to that.

So I would say no the Phenomenon is not over, as long as we keep it alive.

I'm just getting back into things, so I'm not sure I've seen enough to give a proper answer. From what I have seen I wouldn't quite call PR a phenomenon anymore. I'm glad to see it's still around, and still has a bit of a following, but I don't think it's nearly as culturally relevant anymore. I'd love for it to reach that status again. I also want to see someone make a serious, or as serious as Power Rangers could ever get, movie reboot. Though that's probably a bit...unrealistic, lol...

Thanks for the input everyone, great reads and diffrent takes on things, that's exactly what we're here for :)

The sole fact that PR is going on 20 years is definatly a statement in itself, that it IS still a phenomenon, because indeed, you don't "just" last 20 years.

But i'm also still of the opninion it's nowhere near MM levels,even when i take off my rose tinted nostalgia glasses. But i'm really excited that samurai is doing well and the upcoming megaforce has a lot of promise it seems, i already really dig the costumes and i have watched the epic sentai battle recently so even i am anxious to see how that will be done for american audiences. i'm not really into sentai but i had read so much raving about that special/movie i had to look it up. I don't dislike sentai and i regularly try watching it but i will never be really into it, i'll always be a PR guy i guess, i grew up being a Power ranger fan not a sentai fan,it's hard to shake that out of my mind when watching japanese stuff. Bad as the cheesy american acting can be,it's part of the charm somewhat for me.

But it's not just power rangers that gives me that vibe tho, it's the same for many of the stuff i grew up with that has lasted, like turtles..i LOVE the new show, i even loved the previous show but i don't think anything will knock the 90's cartoon of it's throne anytime soon and there are still loads of people that don't even have clue turtles is still in existence even tho the fanbase can argue till the cows come home how it was never gone. These days it just seems harder for anything to reach "that" status it seem, maybe the world is indeed just too spoiled.

i often wonder what a new movie could do to help that, i personally would LOVE a new big budget movie that is perhaps a little darker. maybe go the other way this time, instead of movie based ona series why not reboot a movie and then follow up with a series of it ( altho the sentai footage issue will prevent that from ever happening i guess)

and i'm not even saying dark knight levels of darkness because i agree with the fans that say that that is just not power rangers and shouldn't be done. BUT, for example, i loved the TMNT movie and thought that was failry gritty at times even tho it still kept its typical humorous charm...you had turtles being apart,not even a team anymore, and having to learn to be one again, which was done brilliantly imo, with them having troubles listening to a leader again,and the face off between leo and raph on the rooftop....that movie was, IMHO,the perfect blueprint of how i would love to see a movie version of power rangers. keep the charm and even the cheese, but add that few layers of grittyness and show that they are not all BFF's all the time and it would be amazing, AND make the moment where they are truly a team again and on the same page, mean that much more in the end. Also, special effects are much better now then ever before, if you see what tey achieved with transformers and iron man, i almost instantly get a wet dream imagining what they could do with zords on the big sceen today.

rember pr megaforce is coming on tv

Pretty sure its still morphinominal :)

there arent as many tokusatsu stores for sentai as much as they were back in the 90s in NYC now though only a few small ones.

for the fandom its still popular to this day.you can wear a mmpr shirt and you will get kids and older people looking at the shirt and say something about the pr universe.had that many times already.its not as big as it was back with MMPR where toys were selling out and all that stuff.you can find the toys in almost any toystore or toy aisle kids will still buy them but do remember its a new generation of kids now and they have ALOT more other things to show since technology has gotten far more advance than back in the days.

not as long as the zords are lame and the rangers outfits are stupid looking.

i don't know exactly what it is, but MMPR will always be the best for me. they had GREAT zords, i mean, the dragonzord is probably one of the coolest ever, then being able to combine it with the megazord and titanus, it really doesn't get any better than that.

and the outfits.. they just looked awesome, nice and symmetrical, but the helmets, the helmets are where all of the coolness lays. they don't have stupid ass looking shapes or whatever.. they were all awesome a trex head with the teeth around and whatnot, same with the green rangers dragon helmet, the sabertooth with the cool teeth over the glass (or whatever the hell you wanna call the black on the helmet) ..

anyways, they will never be as cool as they used to be as long as the zords are lame and the outfits just look ridiculously stupid. the MMPR helmets had some edge to them, they were cool and much more intimidating.

You've obviously never seen dinothunder...

Personally I think there have been infinitely better zords since the first season of MMPR.

Thanks for all the great responses, love reading them all.

I like some of the later series costumes a lot, especially the series that also had animal themes. just because Mighty morphin had the animal theme, i always sorta looked at that as one of the key trademarks for a power rangers team, every time they had another theme, like the cars in turbo or the in space designs, even tho in itself they looked good, i always felt it lacked one of the key components of what i knew to be power rangers. also, some people hate the silver mounth pieces but i always loved them, infact the helmets that don't really show a mounth always threw me off a bit, even the ones that did show a mounth sculpt but not the explicit "mounth area" always made me feel a bit awkward about them and it's one of the main reasons i didn't like the zeo suits, i missed the silver mounth areas a lot!

Power rangers without an animal theme going on is like a Batman design without a bat symbol on his chest, it would still obviously be batman, but it's missing something.

Also, many of you will not agree with this, but i think the low budget and cheap effects hurts power rangers these days whereas looking back at mighty morphin,back then as a kid i didn't know any better and special effects were hardly ever good back then anyway so these days the tacky effects are part of the charm about MMPR, yet when i watch a more recent series and see it is still so cheap...well it turns me off because now we HAVE seen better and we HAVE seen what is possible, if that makes sense.

a lot will disagree since fans like to argue that the cheepness of a PR series is one of the trademarks in itself, those are the same fans that are opposed to a big budget PR movie because it wouldn't feel like power ranger..i am not in that camp, i'm the opossite and i would like to see it explored, i don't understand where the notion that power rangers SHOULD be cheap is coming from tbh. Look at smallville and the flack it got online about the cheap ass special effects...if that show had aired in the 90's people wouldn't even notice and took it for what it is, yet because by the time smallville aired people had seen so much better effects and it made it uncomfortable for many to look at smallville and accept them in this day and age and i think that is the same reason why a lot of older people can't get more into PR these days and still clamour for there mighty morphins...the same issues that form part of the charm there, are what's hurting the show today. i know a lot of my friends would still be into it if everything didn't STILL, after all these years, look so cheap. when a cgi zord looks worse than ps2 videogame grpahics in 2012, it's very hard to overlook it for a lot of people that might otherwise still like the concept and the suits etc.

the dino thunder suits just look goofy.. to me, it looks like someone who is just trying to get kids attention.

i guess i'm just nostalgic.. but i don't think anything can beat MMPR.

i mean.. they're simple, cool, the zords were awesome, and the combinations were awesome.. combining megazord with the dragonzord and titanus.. no other combination even comes close for me.

this doesn't quite compute with me. i understand that the original megazord doesn't have very good articulation.. but why aren't the newer ones any better?

i mean, toys have come a long way since the original. it should be standard practice for megazords these days to have complete articulation. it really isn't that difficult. plus, for the amount of money these things cost, and how cheap some of them look... the least they could do is give the damn things more movement.

If PR keeps up this momentume the we will see another boom in popularity like in the good old days.

While I don't disagree that Zords were superior back in the day, I really do think it will ruin the charm for Megazords to be super-articulated. Many of us love the blocky brickiness of Megazords (or we buy the miniplas). It's also great for kids, because it provides stability and durability. Just a cursory look at Amazon's reviews show how much parents complain about Hasbro's Transformers and their complicated transformations. Of course, we fans love it, but the average Joe hates having to work out how to transform the figures and having lots of joints to work with.

I do admit though, this doesn't stop them from at least providing elbow, knee, and neck articulation, especially since they've done it a few times before. :)

i think if they can keep the same charecters like the did the MMPR's they can. 3-4 seasons for real charecter devlopment and maybe the could but 1 season isnt enough for developments in charecters and story.

Nah. 1 season is plenty for Character development as well as writing a story.
Honestly, requiring 3-4 seasons to develop characters as well as tell a story tells that they have way too much filler.

I agree, most Super Sentai shows accomplish far more in one season than the entire Zordon era in terms of character development. It's not too hard if there isn't that much filler.

has there ever been a ranger with no maartial arts skill but is a real bruiser? kinda like hulk in avengers. i think that might help just have some random guy run into a crap load of whatver henchman guys and rip them to crap and beat down whatever monster f the week maybe actual have a guy on the team with additude and not a goody good that just makes a 5 yr olds angry face?