Power/Rangers: A New Vision

[Update: Due to the DMCA rules, Vimeo & Youtube pulled the short film but you can still view it here for now on Shankar’s Facebook page]

I was never a huge Mighty Morphin Power Ranger’s fan growing up. I was always more of a Ronin Warriors kinda child. That and things like Pop Warner football got in the way. But I understood the gist of it and the universe was built as well as could be expected. But this.. this takes those nagging questions I had as a child and still as an adult about what would have happened to the Power Rangers when they grew up and sets it in a dystopian setting that makes so much sense. The tongue in cheek Machine Empire (I’ve been informed while writing this that this is actually an enemy from the Power Ranger series from the same season as Van Der Beek’s character) has taken over a part of the planet, if not all of it, and the look has the traditional Cyberpunk feel. We get glimpses of the disenfranchised while James Van Der Beek is in a military outpost interrogating Katee Sackhoff of Battlestar Galactica fame.

Sackhoff is portraying Kimberly, the pink ranger. She is in custody and Van Der Beek is asking her where Tommy is while also building the story of what has happened to the other Rangers. We find out that Zack (black ranger) has turned into a Billy Blanks type instructor while also having joined the Machine Empire as a hitman which results in a pretty neat little fight scene with some Korean resistance. We find out that Billy (blue ranger) became an entrepreneurial millionaire based in the industrial military complex. It’s a fascinating future built for the rangers while also making logical sense based on their previous incarnations.

James Van Der Beek is portraying Rocky from what is called Power Rangers Zero. I was told this is from the fourth season and that is pretty much all I can say about that. I at first thought it was Tommy but then Sackhoff’s line of, “You were never really one of us” destroyed that assumption followed by a glimpse of the past where Kimberly was married to Tommy and the Machine Empire essentially murdered him only eight hours after their nuptial. It’s a crazy look at who were once beloved children characters.

There’s much more to this short film than what I’ve described but I want to leave that to you for discovery. It’s a logical progression of what would have happened to five (six) teens recruited into an universal militia. Shankar recorded why he chose to take on this project which you can watch below. Shankar touches on the PTSD that the rangers would most likely have been diagnosed with after fighting their intergalactic enemies and probably lead them down much darker paths than what would have been assumed by children back in the 90s.

A really fun ride with some great visuals and a stellar team that if you’ve seen some of Shankar’s or Kahn’s previous work wouldn’t surprise you. Enjoy and let me know what you think in the comment section.