Nostalgia can be a powerful thing. It causes us to look back on aspects of our childhoods and think of them as the greatest things ever. It's only when we really go back and look at them as adults that we realize how low the quality actually was. That's what the new Honest Trailer for Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie intends to point out, and it definitely succeeds. Check out the trailer for the campy 1990s movie below to see for yourself.
So yeah, that trailer serves as a pretty solid reminder that Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie isn't great. The production value was terrible (particularly for the Megazord), the characters were paper thin, and the story made little to no sense. Looking back, it's also pretty clear that the movie was designed to sell toys -- which I'm sure most of our parents already knew at the time of the film's release, even if we didn't.
That said, it's relatively easy to see that there's ultimately quite a bit of love for the Power Rangers source material here, regardless of the fairly obvious flaws. Yes, the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers movie is cheesy, campy, and downright bad at times, but that's always been a significant aspect of the Power Rangers charm. Does it make any sense that a group of teenagers somehow has a competitive skydiving team? Absolutely not. Do we even care? Of course not.
If there's one particular aspect that this trailer definitely gets right, it's the sheer amount of darkness that was always lurking behind the scenes of the original Mighty Morphin Power Rangers series. Although everything seemed like a fun experience on the surface, classic characters like Zack were eventually replaced when the actors engaged in a bitter contract dispute with Saban, and Blue Ranger David Yost has famously railed against the production of the series for how he was treated for being gay. Yeah, things got pretty dark on that colorful series, and it wasn't just Ivan Ooze's fault.
Of course, the folks in Hollywood seem to have picked up on most of the underlying issues that plagued the original Mighty Morphin Power Rangers movie, because the upcoming Power Rangers reboot is a very big step in a different direction. The new Rangers are a bit darker, less campy, and generally more relatable to average teenagers in ways that the original cast members simply weren't. With a new core thesis driving this franchise, let's hope that the Power Rangers stick around for years to come.
Dean Israelite's Power Rangers reboot will hit theaters this weekend on March 24. If you're on the lookout for more information related to the rest of 2017's remaining theatrical debuts, make sure to take a glance at our movie premiere guide as well!
