When it first appeared on American television sets in 1993, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers was like nothing else on TV. The brainchild of Israeli music producer Haim Saban, the show stitched together segments from the Japanese children’s program Super Sentai with newly recorded live footage, and its unexpected popularity quickly anchored Fox’s daytime programming block and further cemented the network as a innovative pop-culture powerhouse. Garish, heartfelt, utterly strange, and bursting with irrepressible energy, the show was a dramatic departure from the animated fare that dominated children’s programming at the time, and came closer than any program before it to being a “live-action” cartoon.
Three decades later, Power Rangers is a pop-culture icon and a billion-dollar franchise. The show regularly premiered episodes on U.S. networks through December 2021, after which streaming juggernaut Netflix brought new airings under the “exclusive” umbrella on its platform. Netflix and Hasbro, current rights-holder of the Power Rangers brand, also announced in late 2021 the development of a Power Rangers TV and film “universe” spearheaded by Jonathan Entwistle, whose dramedy series The End of the F***ing World won a Peabody Award and British Academy Television Award for Best Drama Series. Power Rangers, it seems, is trying to grow up.
In Morphinomenal, journalist and lifelong Power Rangers fan Joshua Moore will deliver readers a deeply researched narrative history of Power Rangers – from its inception to the present day – and offer comprehensive retellings and analysis of milestone moments for the brand and show, as well as insights into its still-thriving toy line and an adult fandom that yearns for its favorite spandex-wearing superheroes to share a bigger piece of the spotlight with the likes of Batman and Wonder Woman. Moore will tell this story through a combination of original interviews and existing news coverage, academic research and recorded audio and video appearances by cast and crew members from throughout the show’s 30-year run.
