The POWER/RANGERS Debacle

So there’s this new fan film out now called Power/Rangers. It’s around fifteen minutes long and features a grim and gritty reimagining of Saban’s Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers and stars Katee Sackhoff as Kimberly and James Van Der Beek as Rocky. SCG Power Rangers LLC, the company that owns the rights to the property, demanded it be taken down.

 

Adi Shankar, who created the short, isn’t backing down. In a response, he wrote: “I consider this an outright infringement on freedom of expression and individualism. … Films like my Power/Rangers ‘Bootleg’ are vital expressions of creativity in our troubled world. If we suppress this creativity and become passive participants in the consumption of the culture we live in, we implicitly allow a dangerous precedent to be set for the future of the internet.”

 

Some of the Internet chatter around this has thrown accusations at Haim Saban that his reaction to Power/Rangers is nothing more than jealousy that he can’t make something as good as this, or that he’s envious of all the attention it’s getting. To which I respond with three simple words: It. Doesn’t. Matter.

 

Saban and Power Rangers LLC own the rights to these characters. These are their toys. And if they don’t want anyone else to play with them without their express permission, then guess what? That’s their right! People have claimed that Saban is “whining” about this, but I say that Shankar is the real whiner here. He’s coming out and saying that he should have the right to use characters he doesn’t own in any way he sees fit, and if the copyright holders tell him to stop, then that’s stifling creative freedom. What about the freedom to control the properties you own? Why is that freedom not important to Shankar?

 

I’ve written fanfic, so I get Shankar’s desire to create something with characters he has a passion for. But every time you commission an unauthorized work featuring characters you do not own—regardless of whether or not it’s for profit—you run the risk of pissing off the people who own those properties. And if they tell you, “we don’t like what you’re doing with our characters, take it down,” then you have an obligation to respect their rights.

 

Growing up watching the Power Rangers doesn’t grant you ownership over them that supersedes the rights of the people who actually own the intellectual property. And no, just because you’re not making money off it doesn’t give you the right to do whatever you want.

 

But beyond that, there’s a larger question of appropriateness. Power Rangers is a show for children. And it’s still around today. Imagine you’re a parent and your kid is a fan of Power Rangers. He goes online and Googles Power Rangers and this video pops up. You walk in on him and see him watching a video where the Black Ranger is in bed with topless women (depending on which version you saw), where comic relief characters Bulk and Skull are portrayed as meth addicts, and where people are being murdered in bloody, gratuitous ways. How would you react? My guess is you’d be pretty pissed. I know I would be if I found out my young nephew stumbled upon this.

 

In the past, when kids would grow into adults, they would leave behind those books, movies, and TV shows that no longer appealed to them as adults. You don’t see anyone who grew up with Hanna-Barbara cartoons demanding that the cast of Scooby Doo be updated to portray Scooby and Shaggy as heroin addicts, Fred snapping the necks of their antagonists, or topless scenes of Velma and Daphne.

 

This demand a lot of modern-day fandom has for properties they enjoyed as kids to be updated as grim, gritty and violent is something I just do not understand. And hey, I love grim and gritty, I love violent movies and shows. My favorite directors include Quentin Tarantino and Takashi Miike and I think Breaking Bad is one of the greatest TV shows ever created.

 

But those things were created for adults and were meant to be enjoyed by adults. Power Rangers was created for kids. It’s bright, it’s colorful, it’s campy. It doesn’t need to be turned into nightmare fuel.

 

If Shankar wanted to create his own violent property that draws influences from Power Rangers, I’d have no problem with that. Because that’s his own original property and influences come from anywhere and everywhere. When Guillermo Del Toro wanted to do something that was inspired by Godzilla or Voltron, he didn’t just make a movie with those characters—he drew influences from those things to come up with Pacific Rim. But to just outright steal a kids’ property and twist it into something completely unrecognizable isn’t only a slap in the face to the rights of the owners of Power Rangers, it’s just flat-out crass.

 

If you enjoyed Power Rangers as a kid and now find it cheesy or campy or uninteresting, then guess what? That property is no longer for you. Leave Power Rangers for the next generation of kids and move on to find something that appeals to your adult sensibilities. There’s certainly plenty of adult-oriented sci-fi material out there to choose from. But don’t demand that Power Rangers grows up with you—that’s just selfish.