33 Years Later, This Unique Superhero Show Just Can’t Get a Reboot Made

It’s been 33 long years since Mighty Morphin Power Rangers first made its original TV broadcast debut, but it can’t seem to just get an official reboot project off the ground thanks to all sorts of shenanigans behind the scenes. Power Rangers is one of the most unique superhero franchises to ever make its way to TV screens. It’s hard to really emphasize just how big it was in the 1990s unless you were there to experience it, but there was really nothing else like it at the time. Outside of Japan, at least.

The Power Rangers franchise just might be so unique, in fact, that while it had been able to reinvent itself many times over the course of its three decades on television, it’s never really been able to come back in the modern era with a truly updated version of the franchise. Failed feature film efforts were not able to build into a franchise, and multiple reboot projects never made it further than the development stages. There’s just something that’s holding it back after all these years.

Power Rangers First Premiered on Fox Kids 33 Long Years Ago

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers first made its debut with Fox Kids on August 28, 1993, and eventually reached a point where it was airing every single afternoon after school. It sparked a whole mania of obsession kids in that generation, and that was further boosted early on by events like the “Green With Evil” saga that offered kids their first real serialized story rather than the episodic nature of other episodes. It was just something different for kids in the United States, but it was something kids in Japan had been experienced for many decades before.

The series actually had been in pitching stages long before as co-creator Haim Saban had been inspired by Toei’s Super Sentai tokusatsu franchise in Japan, and wanted to bring it to the United States. The end result revealed a series that stitched together footage from the Japanese show, Kyoryu Sentai Zyuranger, with brand new footage production in America with American teens and original stories tying it all together. This became the franchise we all know today, and then this model was subsequently replicated across many decades and iterations to come.

The Power Rangers franchise might have run on TV for 30 years, but it was always a bumpy road. It had been passed across many different rights holders with it running on Fox Kids for its first ten or so iterations before moving to the Disney umbrella for a few more, before being outright cancelled for a while. Then it came back with Saban on Nickelodeon for a few years, then moved to Netflix where it eventually released its final TV episode with Power Rangers Cosmic Fury. And during all of this time, an official reboot had been trying to get off the ground in some form.

What Happened to the Power Rangers Reboot?

It was recently reported that Disney+ is no longer moving forward with their reboot of the Power Rangers franchise, and this is unfortunately news that fans of the series are far too familiar with. For one reason or another, Power Rangers has just become a toxic brand to the world at large. Not only has Super Sentai ended its 50 year long run on TV in Japan, but Power Rangers is no longer moving forward in any form. The TV series isn’t active, and this Disney+ was the only new option that fans had been able to look forward to.

This was after reports of a reboot series with Netflix was in production, and was subsequently cancelled too. This leaves Power Rangers in a fugue state with no signs moving forward. Even when it was able to make its way to screens with a new version in 2017, it failed to capture what was special about the original series and subsequently bombed so hard that it made any hopes of a future dead on arrival. And with its rights all over the place (its owned by Hasbro, but has no dedicated streaming platform of its own), there’s not really going to be any incentive for a platform to try and craft their own version.

Power Rangers is an expensive, and unfortunately dead property at this point. It’s something fans of the TV series have experienced before as there were many years where the TV series was also dead in this way. But this time just feels different. Given how expensive shows are to make these days, and the disparate way shows are distributed compared to how they were 33 years ago, there’s just no real upside monetarily for a company to take it on. And even if they do, there’s a chance fans would hate the end result just because that’s usually how things go in these cases.

For many, many reasons Power Rangers just can’t seem to get a reboot off the ground. At this point, it’s looking like it never will. It’s all just even more ironic considering that the TV franchise itself has been rebooted many times over the course of the last few decades, and doesn’t even look remotely like the way Mighty Morphin Power Rangers did years ago. So many things will need to line up to make it happen, and that’s just not really possible anymore.

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