The New ‘Power Rangers’ Movie Got Them Wrong, and That’s Okay
Yesterday Collider let loose what they claim to be an exclusive look at the character bios of the titular heroes in 2017’s Power Rangers, which will have Project Almanac director Dean Israelite at the helm. I’m not going to copy and paste them here, partly because we could use the clicks to our pages and also because it defeats the purpose of what Derek wrote before I could.
Based on this information that we’re trusting Collider to be legit, these new 2017 Power Rangers are missing the things that made us love the original Power Rangers in the first place. And maybe that’s all right.
To anyone outside of Power Rangers fan circles, they sound great. They sound troubled, complex, insecure, and flawed. Basically, they’re teenagers. Of most note to me was that the descriptions strictly discussed their emotional state. But to anyone who still cares about this silly show twenty years later, they’re largely unrecognizable from the Angel Grove teens we grew up with.
These character bios, perhaps intentionally, sound incredibly ambiguous. Does Jason know karate? Can Zack dance? Is Billy smart? Aside from stuff about Jason being a star football player (he wasn’t — more on that later) and Zack living in a trailer park, there’s really not many surface details that give these heroes better shape. It’s funny that most blogs reporting on these details deride how paper-thin the original characters were — and no, they’re not wrong, they weren’t very complex — but the original Rangers had far more potential for growth than the 2017 Rangers, whose backgrounds, while interesting, have predictable trajectories. In the end, we know Jason will get over his football injury, Zack will accept who he is, Billy will get his swagger, Trini will find her place, and Kimberly will move on from her past. If they don’t, they can’t become the Power Rangers.
Again, the bios are ambiguous and perhaps not telling us everything, but I kind of wish they told just a little more. I miss the individual talents the Rangers had. They all made sense. Jason’s martial arts, Kim’s gymnastics, Billy’s brain, all that shit were their superpowers. The Rangers never relied on conventional superpowers to save the day, they only had themselves, but at their peak.
It’s not a bad lesson to teach kids and adults that the only power they need are the gifts they have already, and many of these gifts the Rangers had came from sheer dedication and hard work. Jason earned his black belt, he wasn’t bitten by a radioactive karate master to get it.
Still, I’m excusing it. If Power Rangers 2017 sweeps everything we loved about the original guys under the rug, I’m okay with that. Being a slave to the source material is creatively restricting, and these bios show that the film’s creative team are putting effort to think outside the box. I’ll be crossing my fingers that Jason is still something of a martial arts expert (Austin St. John himself said he always saw Jason as kind of a younger Bruce Lee, not an all-American bro out of Friday Night Lights). But if he’s not, I don’t see it as spitting on the show I loved twenty years ago. I see it as willingness to evolve.
