Morphitudinal!
It’s hard to live in an English-speaking country and not
know anything about the Power Rangers. Probably a lot of non-English-speaking
countries, too, but I can’t speak about them. Not from personal experience
anyway. Whether the extent of your knowledge is teenagers in skin-tight suits
doing karate, or you can name each Ranger from each season, something certainly
comes to mind when you hear those words.
Power Rangers, man. They’re not a choice. They’re a
lifestyle.
Okay, maybe that’s a little
extreme. But the fact is, as much as they’re designed for kids, there are older
fans. I’m not the only one at all, I assure you. It wasn’t some tech savvy ten
year old who set up the Power Rangers Wiki. Chances are, it was someone around
my age, because people my age have had Power Rangers thrust into our formative
DNA.
As with most things, there are detractors. Older fans
obviously have no taste. We’re watching kiddie shows. We’re stuck in the past.
We’re somehow or another socially unacceptable because we like a TV show. We
should be watching Keeping up with the Kardashians and Duck Dynasty instead.
I call bullshit on that, if you couldn’t tell. Complete
bullshit. I’m absolutely a Power Rangers fan, even at age 24. To a lot of
people, that probably seems obvious. I’m just a kid, anyway. But I’m old enough
to catch crap for being a fan, so I’m old enough to argue against it.
See, there are a few points that are raised against us fans
over and over and over. Often enough that we’re all pretty familiar with them.
The big one, of course, is that it’s for kids. That’s a stupid argument,
because it doesn’t raise any points. It never says why it’s for kids, just that it is.
If you make it past that, you get the plots. They’re weak.
It’s a bit of a sweeping statement, though. I dare you to watch Power Rangers
in Space and not get into the whole thing with Andros and Karone. It’s powerful
stuff, and that season saved the entire franchise. Yes, the plots aren’t deep
when compared to, say, a show like Empire or Once Upon a Time. That doesn’t
mean they have no value. And, during the sort of halcyon age of Power Rangers,
when they had it figured it out, but hadn’t yet sold it to Nickelodeon
(Shudder), the stories were pretty damn good. And not just that, they were
universal. Even played out on these grand scales the way they were, you could
always relate to them.
Let’s take, I don’t know, Power Rangers Dino Thunder. A
bunch of kids fighting against human/dinosaur hybrids to stop them from
plunging Earth back into the Jurassic Age. I don’t know about anyone else, but
this isn’t a daily occurrence in my life. But you see a kid dealing with stress
from his father. You see dating. You see people trying to make friends. Yah,
it’s all pretty bog-standard for a ‘kid’s show,’ but that doesn’t mean we don’t
all get it.
But what is it specifically
that still captures the attention of so many adult fans? Well, that’s less
universal. There’s definitely some level of nostalgia for a lot of us who
watched it as kids. We’re getting to go back and see these things again. Yes,
there are flaws, but look at how cool thing X is. Remember watching that on
antenna television fifteen years ago? Wasn’t it cool?
It’s not enough, though, to explain the number of active
fans, and the devotion. Now, I’m just firing off ideas, here, but this is what
I think. Power Rangers has serious ass-kicking. It has magic. It has cool,
advanced tech. It had aliens. It has family drama. It has clear good and evil
in it. And it’s half an hour long. We can devour an episode without completely
losing a day. Because they aren’t so in-depth, we don’t mind leaving after one
or two to carry on with normal life. Not that I, and many others, haven’t
binge-watched Power Rangers. It’s dangerous, having every season on Netflix, I
tell you. But you can always stop… well, except during the Green With Evil
plotline. That’s a non-stop, two-and-a-half hour commitment. Accept it and move
on.
Then there’s the ‘Pokemon Factor,’ as I’ll call it. You can
collect all the Rangers, so to speak. In fact, that’s what Super Megaforce was all about: collecting
all the other Rangers (Okay, not technically, but there was certainly a good
bit of appeal in getting to see past Rangers returning.). There’s a crap-ton of
them, let me tell you. There’s the stupid TV effect, which is the same reason
fifty year olds watch Spongebob: sometimes you just need something simplistic
to fill the house with noise, or to decompress at the end of a long day.
And really, is Power Rangers the worst thing? It’s hardly
the only thing adults enjoy that wasn’t marketed at them. The Hunger Games. The
Chronicles of Narnia. Avatar: The Last Airbender. Digimon. But Power Rangers
catches so much more flack than any of those. Every single one of those is
great. I love them. I’ve dissected A:TLA a dozen times to look at different
aspects of it. I devoured The Hunger Games in two days, easily. They weren’t
made for me at the time I got into them, but that doesn’t make them invalid. No
one tries to invalidate them, either. Not the same way they’ll try to
invalidate a love of Power Rangers.
It’s hard to make non-fans understand why we love it so
much, but I’m here to tell the other fans out there that it’s cool. Power
Rangers is still cool, after all this time. Whatever you like about it is
awesome, no matter what anyone says about it.
And to those who aren’t fans (yet), I have a challenge: find
that friend you think is a little weird and ask them to give you the best of it.
Whatever they think is the number one season or episode, or the one they think
you would personally like the most. Whatever it is. Let them take you on a
journey. Take that first Power Rangers joint, drag deep, and see if it’s not a
gateway drug.
Voss
