Austin St. John Explains His Issues With The ‘Power Rangers’ Reboot Zords

The Power Rangers reboot divided some fans who weren’t so enthusiastic about the alien looking Zords. That group includes the original Red Ranger, Jason Scott.

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers actor Austin St. John was asked about his thoughts on the recent reboot at San Francisco Comic Con, and while he liked multiple things about the film, he did take the Zord designs to task (via Steven Alvarez).

“I thought the new Zords looked like Chia Pets or something,” St. John said. “In the TV series, we towered over skyscrapers as we crushed them in downtown Angel Grove. In the movie, they were barely taller than a three-story Dunkin Donuts? I was like what did you do to the Zords? Are these Chihuahua Zords, what is that?

While he wasn’t a fan of the Zord designs overall, there was one that stuck out even more.

“And then the Mastodon had six legs,” St. John said. “I’m pretty sure 25,000 years ago they only had four legs. They were hairy elephants with four legs, not six. I’m just sayin. For those of you into archeology, I’m sorry, it’s not a hairy elephant, but it was elephant-like and it had a lot of hair. I kind of thought the Zords were off.”

It wasn’t all bad of course, and his favorite part of the film happened to be thanks to the Red Ranger.

“My favorite part of the movie was where my character, or the new Jason, completely pimp slapped the bully in detention for being a jerk,” St. John told fans at Tampa Bay Comic Con. “I was like that is something I actually wanted to do myself, good job!”

St. John was also a fan of the Rangers’ mentor. I loved Zordon,” St. John said. “I loved what they did with Zordon.”

Hit the next slide to find out why the Zords came out that way in the reboot!

Reason Behind The Zords

Power Rangers director Dean Israelite wanted the Zords and Ranger costumes, in general, to stick out from the crowded superhero space, and going with something more organic seemed the right way to go.

“A big part of everything for us was to try and create a universe unto itself in Power Rangers – to try and come up with a design aesthetic that felt original to us. And what I mean by that [is] … Transformers, Star Trek, Star Wars – there’s a lot of angular design shapes that are going on. We wanted to bring a more organic design aesthetic and shape-language into the movie,” Israelite told Collider.

“And so everything, you’ll notice, is very organic – from the ship to Alpha-5 to Zordan and the suits – there’s a very organic nature to them, [down to] the Zords,” Israelite added.

Israelite knew that design choice would bring comparisons to other franchises, but stressed that the two aren’t the same upon closer inspection.

“And the Zords become bio-mechanical in a way – and yes they’re going to draw comparisons to Transformers because they’re big dinosaur machines,” Israelite said. “But, I think if you take a real close look, the designs are actually very different, and we are trying to be really focused on these organic sort of shapes and bigger pieces to these machines so they don’t feel … hard to decipher. So that bio-mechanical philosophy entered into everything that we were trying to design.”

As for that eight-legged Mastodon, you can find out why that made it to the screen in the next slide!

The Mastodon

One of the biggest departures was their take on the Mastodon Zord, which featured a design featuring eight legs.

Israelite explained that while the Zords take after the life on prehistoric earth, they don’t necessarily mimic it exactly.

“The idea is the Zords are machines that take on the form of the most powerful organisms of the planet they’re on,” Israelite told Collider. “When these Zords came to Earth, dinosaurs reigned supreme and so they took on the image and the spirit of these dinosaurs – that’s the mythology that we’ve put into the movie.”

That doesn’t mean they can’t take liberties though. “But in the concept that we’ve created they’re meant to be inspired by those animals – not an actual, literal, version of it, and so we decided we wanted to take certain liberties, too,” Israelite said.

While part of the reasoning is lore based, there is a practical reason as well for the change.

“The other component of it is almost more of a practical component,” Israelite said. “We look at these renderings and we create a 3D space and we look at how they should move, and you learn a lot from that. And the mastodon is so big that we realized that with added legs it would just move better in a CG environment, and we’d be able to make it a more nimble machine. So it felt kind of like practical; if you were an alien creating this machine, you would want those added limbs.”

The reasons make sense, but whether you still like how it all came together is extremely subjective, and there isn’t really a wrong answer.

You can judge it all for yourself, as Power Rangers is currently available on Blu-ray, DVD, and digital.