If you’re of a certain generation, then you’ll vividly remember getting into trouble on a regular basis for roundhouse kicking your nearest and dearest square in the face during the height of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers mania.
The long-running franchise is still going strong today, with Netflix even in the midst of developing a brand new cinematic universe designed to tap into the rich vein of nostalgia the industry loves to mine so much, but for a lot of people things never got any better than they did in the mid-1990s.
To capitalize on the craze, the imaginatively-titled Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie was released in the summer of 1995, and it went on to recoup its production costs more than four times over at the box office. Thanks to a recent Reddit thread, we can state without a shadow of a doubt that the love for the undeniably cheesy and incredibly dated slice of martial arts madness retains undying support from its original target audience, the majority of whom are willing to overlook its many flaws in the name of a good time.
The script is diabolical, the CGI is even worse, and it’s basically a standard episode of the TV show with a much bigger (but still not huge) $15 million budget. And yet, those are among the reasons why everyone seems to hold it in such high regard more than a quarter of a century later. Oh, that and the scenery-chewing Ivan Ooze, who still endures as a hammy delight.
The failure of the recent reboot underlined that dark and gritty is not the way to go with Power Rangers, so let’s cross our fingers that Netflix ladles on so much cheese that a disclaimer will be needed for those with a lactose intolerance.