That Power Rangers Video? Yeah, About That
Written by Ric Chetter on February 25, 2015
If you haven’t seen it. You should. Especially if you were at all a fan of The Power Rangers. Give yourself about 15 minutes of time and enjoy this little short. It was re imagined by Joseph Kahn and stars James Van Der Beek and Katee Sackhoff. Take a look at here and then finish reading this article.
We suggest you watch this full screen. If it were rated, consider this an R rated film. There is language so keep that in mind.
When this thing took off, people understandably went crazy wanting more. Here’s the thing, that won’t be happening. This short was a spoof of how Hollywood has had this strange fetish of taking “innocent” franchises and making them kinda dark.
What Kahn was attempting here (and to great affect) was to take something beautifully innocent and pushing the darkness factor way too far.
In a recent interview, he had this to say about the project;
“It’s funny… I’ve seen repurposed stuff on the Internet where they take a property that’s serious and make it even more so, like a Batman fan film or something like that, or a video game or whatever. I’ve actually seen stuff like where they’ve taken ridiculous stuff like Mario Brothers and then tried to make the dark and gritty version, and they obviously play it for laughs.
I think the trick that I really wanted to do with this was to make that dark and gritty version that everybody keeps talking about, but really do it. Really see if I could totally accomplish it with essentially a really incredible incredibly silly property.”
There is no arguing he committed the perfect movie crime here. Fans of The Power Rangers freaked out after seeing it and demanded a full length picture. But that’s just it. Kahn proved his point with this short.
“The irony here is that I wouldn’t even want to make “Power Rangers: The Movie’ for real. Like if I had to make a ‘Power Rangers’ movie, this is it. It’s 14 minutes long and it’s violent and this is what I have in me. If they offered me the 200 million version, the PG-13 version, I literally wouldn’t do it. It’s just not interesting to me.”
By the way, Saban who holds the copyright on The Power Rangers was none too pleased with this video. It was originally hosted at Vimeo who was forced to take it down. So, better watch it while you can.