It's Morphin' Time: Cultural Changes Over 20 Years of Power Rangers

Mighty Morphin' Millennials

In the spirit of formula, the heroes-and-villains storyline of the 1993 show was straightforward. In the series premiere, true to her archetype, the gut reaction of the Blonde―I mean, Pink―Ranger to her sudden teleportation into space station is: “Excuse me, but will, like, somebody come back to Earth and pick me up? Because I am totally confused.”

The writers seemed to think that Kimberly, along with the audience, needed little by way of explanation. The wizard Zordon (a giant holographic head) answers, “It’s quite simple, my dear. The planet is under attack, and I have brought you here to save it.” He vaguely describes an evil sorceress planning to conquer Earth with the help of her innumerable hench-monsters. Within minutes, each teen is sporting a Power Morpher, a now-gaudy but then-impressive device, which gives its owner the arcane ability to literally call on a designated dinosaur and promptly turn into a Power Ranger. (They are also given sorta-dinosaur-shaped battle machines, or “Zords”, which snap together to turn all the Rangers into a giant robot, or “Megazord”.) The impressively calm youth are reluctant for all of 30 seconds, until they are attacked by an army of putty men and forced to try on their new jobs for size: “Mastodon!” “Pterodactyl!” “Triceratops!” “Saber-toothed tiger!” “Tyrannosaurus!”

This unquestioned diegesis reflects the target market of the time, or at least the assumptions made about it by producers. Like other children’s programs of that year, such as The Adventures of Pete and Pete and Mighty Max, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers featured surreal or nonsensical events, but neither character logic nor audience disbelief had to be addressed in detail. The show’s rudimentary narrative held the episodes together, as plot holes were easily overshadowed by robot fight scenes and special effects sequences.

Twenty years later, children are perhaps not so easily impressed. At a minimum, kids of the Information Age seem to demand more of their television fantasy worlds, more elaborate plots. A Power Morpher belt buckle would never work today, and has the additional disadvantage of being unfashionably low-tech in appearance. A group of regular high schoolers, however gifted they may be in karate and hip-hop, might not be handpicked by a prehistoric wizard to save the world. And having grown up with Google, Generation Zeds would likely scoff at the dubious science of the Mighty Morphin world, where everything is credited weakly to, uh, sorcery or something.

Thus, 2007’s Operation Overdrive ups the ante with copious amounts of futuristic technology, replacing the garish Morphers with Overdrive Trackers, which are sophisticated smartphones with built-in morphing capability and probably Snapchat. The Rangers’ enhanced strength and intelligence now comes from DNA resequencing, and the teens are also skilled specialists: a spy-for-hire, a film stuntman, a racecar driver, a Mensa-level genius. (I used to volunteer at the public library, so that’s cool, too.) In 2011’s Power Rangers RPM, the Rangers spend the season battling a sinister computer virus spreading across the world. Don’t open attachments from strangers, kids.

An exceptionally apparent technological change is found in Operation Overdrive’s Red Ranger, a curly-haired teenager named Mackenzie Hartford who wouldn’t look out of place in a boyband. While Mighty Morphin featured a comical, beeping robot named Alpha 5 whose catchphrase was “Ay-yi-yi-yi-yi!”, Mack, as it turns out, is an android. Artificial intelligence and the recurring question “What makes us human?” grew increasingly prevalent in media at the turn of the millennium, with films like The Matrix (1999), Bicentennial Man (1999), and A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001).

To have a robot that looks and thinks exactly like a human as one of the Power Rangers—first-in-command, no less—is indicative of society’s now-close relationship with those concepts of advanced technology. While adult viewers are uncomfortably thrust into the Uncanny Valley by Mack’s presence, children grow accustomed to the notion of human-machine co-existence, especially when (spoiler alert!) Mack is granted a Pinocchio-esque transformation into a real boy in the season finale. It is certainly a notable twist after the series’ long-standing tradition of ranger-to-robot metamorphosis.