Why did the mighty morphin power rangers reboot fail?

Back in the day, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers was insanely popular. It was the first, the one that started it all, and even people who weren't fans at least had some idea of what it was because it was literally EVERYWHERE!

But that was back in the 90's and as we all know, the passage of time can be a tricky beast. I think the reason why the MMPR reboot - which I shall henceforth call a "re-versioning", because that's what it was actually called - failed is because of the fact that this particular incarnation of the franchise is a product of its time. A time when preachy pro-environmentalism shows like Captain Planet had a home on the airwaves. A time that is now long passed.

The early episodes in particular say a lot about this decade: The stories were simplistic, formulaic, cheesy camp, with some sort of moral or message - whether it be pro-enviroment episodes like "Clean Up Club" or teaching the use of excessive force only as a last resort (which was one of the original crew's big rules) within. The franchise has grown a lot since then (heck, the preachiness saw a noticeable downward slope as early as Zeo)and seeing it regress like this could possibly have left a lot of young viewers confused at what they were seeing.

The onslaught of visual effects - several of which were apparently inserted as a form of censorship, according to the TV Tropes article on the series - only served to make Mighty Morphin even cornier and sillier than it already was.


For the record, 32 episodes were aired over the course of the re-versioning, which is just over half of the Season 1's original 60-episode count. And unfortunately, it wasn't until some time after those episodes that some semblance of an ongoing arc showed up, with Tommy gradually beginning to lose his Green Ranger powers.

We all have our problems, some just hide it better.

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Well if I recall correctly this show was the number 1 kids show in America for kids 2-11, and 6-11, they aired in 142 markets, including all the top 10, covering 92% of the country, and reaching 5 million kids a DAY. They also started a power ranger club in which they visited schools around the world and taught anti-drug messages to over 25 million kids and had over 600 thousand members. They had over 250 licencees for merchandise making in their first year of business billions of dollars. They were also the number 1 home video seller with over 8 million units sold of their first 10 releases. Their first day on tour they sold 50,000 tickets at Universal Studios and backed up the free way for 10 miles out. I don't think it will ever be that popular again so I don't know why they would try to reboot it.

It woudln't be as popular, but I could see an updated version working. Expeically if they used the same characters. Only thing they would have to change to prevent racisl complaints is the colors of the Asian and Black members. Maybe make Billy the black ranger and Zach the blue one? And Trini the pink and Kimberly the yellow? That's the only thing I see struggling with the reboot if it were to be made.

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