I can't understate how important Power Rangers is to my development into the nerd I am today. When the first season of the show aired on Fox Kids, I was 3 years old, and I became a crazy fan almost immediately. That lasted until, oh, Power Rangers In Space, when I soon moved onto other things. But I still love those early seasons to death, and I love watching all the Sentai shows that were adapted into Power Rangers. I mean, no season of Power Rangers ever had this:
Really, do I even need a caption for this masterpiece? |
Then Bryan Cranston was announced to play Zordon, which is awesome not just because it's Bryan Cranston, but because Cranston actually got some of his earliest roles providing voices for some of the monsters in the original show. It's a cool little full-circle thing with a hint of self-awareness that made me hope, at least, the movie wouldn't suck. And then I saw, under the trending section of Youtube, that a teaser trailer had been released, and I just had to watch.
Quick aside here: we need to stop referring to every goddamn popular thing under the sun as "trending," lest the world become like Twitter, at which point we can never have peace. Fuck Twitter. End of aside.
Now, I didn't want to do some sort of shitty "reaction" to the trailer, because I don't want to end up in the same category as any of the assholes featured here:
If you couldn't tell, there's an obvious pattern going on. Everything is dark and edgy. I suppose, though Power Rangers is a show for children, that the studio is trying to target people like me who saw the original show when they were kids, and so naturally made it a little more adult. But why the hell are they trying to make it dark and edgy?
Power Rangers is the antithesis of dark and edgy. It's ridiculous and goofy, and it revels in that. That doesn't mean there can't be drama - the original Power Rangers movie, made in 1995, had Zordon almost get killed. And still, it decided to open the film with a scene of the Power Rangers skydiving set to a Red Hot Chili Peppers song, because, why the fuck not. That's the kind of show this is.
And this gets to a deeper problem facing a lot of American made action movies, as well as TV shows and video games. They all need to have this dark and edgy veneer, or else, and I'm trying to put myself in the head of a studio executive here, nobody will take them seriously or think they're cool. This is taken to ridiculous extremes. Even the motherfucking Ninja Turtles, a franchise about motherfucking ninja turtles, have to be given this treatment!
I'll give you a video game comparison: look at Bayonetta, the Platinum Games action epic, alongside God of War, the beat em up based on Greek mythology. I like both games, but I prefer Bayonetta hands down. God of War gets tiring after a while - Kratos as a character is nothing but anger, and even though you're literally killing gods, its unironic no-laughs-ever attitude just makes it feel like a chore. Bayonetta, meanwhile, has no pretensions of being taken seriously - it's a completely unhinged thrillride that doesn't leave you hanging for one second. It's, oh my god, an action game that tries to be fun! And it succeeds! Here's the trailer in case you haven't played it:
To end this post: based on the trailer, am I going go see the Power Rangers movie when it comes out? The answer is a resounding no. Once upon a time I had at least some hope, but after seeing it, I have none remaining. The film won't be terrible, I'm sure. But it also won't be Power Rangers, which, in this case, is a far greater sin.
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