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Once upon a time, Power Rangers were insanely popular. In fact, you could argue they still are. It’s a super franchise that’s spanned two decades, multiple reboots, and has no less than 26 separate titles on Netflix alone.
Do you think we’re joking? This is only a partial view of what you see on the streaming platform if you search “power rangers”:
So, the Power Rangers are definitely a thing. But they’ve never been a dark, gritty, bloody, “cool” thing until today.
Director Joseph Kahn (whom you may know as the man behind Detention, Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space,” and the single best theory about what actually happened to Hae Min Lee on Serial) has unveiled a short film that reboots the notoriously cheesy Power Rangers as a super violent dystopian action thriller. James Van Der Beek helped co-write the script and appears as “Rocky,” one of the original five characters and Battlestar Galactica‘s Katee Sackhoff plays a decidedly less girly version of Kimberley, aka the Pink Ranger. We don’t want to ruin any of the twists or turns, but let’s just say it’s totally worth twelve minutes of your day.
Kahn states in the video description that it’s “..not a pilot, not a series, not for profit, strictly for exhibition. This is a bootleg experiment not affiliated or endorsed by Saban Entertainment or Lionsgate nor is it selling any product. I claim no rights to any of the characters (don’t send me any money, not kickstarted, this film is free).” So why make it? The short film’s producer, Adi Shankar, has some answers here. Basically, he realized that if you were a Power Ranger, you were no better than a child soldier, and that you’d probably grow up to have some serious PTSD. And I guess, get into expletive-filled gun fights?
WARNING: This is some serious R-rated stuff and is probably not suitable for children or the faint of heart.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vw5vcUPyL90]If you’re feeling nostalgic for the family-friendly Power Rangers, might we suggest you start with the original series, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers? Which you can stream here.
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