We look at the true stories behind Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers: The Movie…
Part way through the filming of the first season of Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers, producers Haim Saban and Shuki Levy found themselves in a quandary. The show was pulling in huge ratings and the merchandise was flying off the shelves to the point where they’d made over $1 billion in their first year, but three of its stars felt they were being underpaid for what they were doing. Austin St. John (The Red Ranger), Walter Jones (The Black Ranger) and Thuy Trang (The Yellow Ranger) felt their non-union contracts for several movies and forty more episodes were unfair, and as a result left the show to be replaced with stock footage and stunt doubles while their characters left to attend the World Peace Conference. “I could have worked the window at McDonald’s and probably made the same money the first season,” St. John would later tell The Huffington Post. “It was disappointing, it was frustrating, it made a lot of us angry.”
The trio leaving was problematic for the show, but it also caused some issues surrounding the development of Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers: The Movie.
Among those looking to be cast in the TV series (and by proxy the movie) was Steve Cardenas who had heard about the auditions through a radio show. “[Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers] had already been on for a year, so I was familiar with the show,” he recalls. “I was a karate teacher, and I heard they were looking for people who could do karate so I decided to go down and try out for it. I never thought I’d get it ‘cause there was, like, 4,000 people at the audition.” He adds: “. I was not an actor and had no aspirations of being an actor. It was really on the job training. I had to get an acting coach. I was definitely out of my comfort zone in that respect, but the action side was easier for me. The acting side, not so much.”
Cardenas was cast as the new Red Ranger alongside Johnny Yong Bosch as The Black Ranger and Karan Ashley as The Yellow Ranger, and it was during their contract signings that the bombshell was dropped. “On the day we got hired they said, ‘congratulations you guys are the new Power Rangers, we’re going to film for a month and a half to get some episodes in the can, and then we’re gonna shut down production so we can go to Australia to shoot the movie’”, Cardenas recalls. “They told us all of that in the same sentence.”
The development of Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers: The Movie had been ongoing for some time. Saban and Levy had used their contacts at Fox Kids (who were airing the TV show) to meet with 20th Century Fox’s Chris Meledandri about a big screen version along with producer Jon Landau. Joining them was Suzanne Todd, and they hired in nine writers to come into Levy’s house and pitch their visions for Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers: The Movie. Among those writers was Arne Olsen. “I had done a movie called Red Scorpion, which had gotten made, and then I wrote a script called Cop and a Half, which was about a kid who becomes a cop,” Olsen remembers. “And then after that I got to be known as a kid’s writer. They quickly peg you in Hollywood. The latest thing what you sell, that’s what you do. So I was known as this kid’s writer, and Cop and a Half didn’t do all that good and it’s not a good movie, but I had done another spec that had gotten into the hands of Chris Meledandri – who is a god in Hollywood with all his animated movies – who was the executive at Fox. He basically said, ‘do you want to come in and pitch on this?’”
Olsen’s pitch was to take the Power Rangers into space. “The TV series is contained to this town, and we’re doing a movie so we’ve got this opportunity to open it up and take them somewhere else. It lends itself to these kind of adventures anyway,” he says. “So it was this space adventure, and something dire happens back home and they have to save them.” The producers liked Olsen’s take, and chose him to write a script along with John Kamps and a third writer but eventually passed on Olsen’s draft in favour of Kamps. “They liked it, but they liked this other one better,” he says.
However, the producers didn’t just take Kamps’ draft and run with it, instead combining elements from his and Olsen’s draft. They retained Kamps’ villain Ivan Ooze and several of his story elements, but felt that it was missing something. “It was a mess,” Olsen admits. “And they asked if I wanted to come in and re-write it , and of course I did.”
Olsen’s first task was to make Ivan Ooze more interesting. Kamps’ version of the character was very straight-laced and serious, while Olsen’s villain was more cartoony. “I ended up using a lot of my villain with his villain,” Olsen recalls. “I wanted to have a really funny villain, with one-liners and that kind of stuff. [Kamps’] was more straight-ahead.” Olsen’s new version of Ooze had him as a shape shifter, who would mould himself into new versions including one scene where he transformed into a woman. This aspect of the character was very appealing to the man they looked to cast in the role, Paul Freeman. Best known for his role in Raiders of the Lost Ark, Freeman jumped at the chance to play a role with such a creative range – even though it was eventually cut. “The original script that I was given to do an audition was much crazier than it eventually turned out,” he told the audience at Power Morphicon 2016. “Ivan kept changing and becoming other people, which eventually gave me the idea of the different voices. At one point he changed into a woman during the course of the original script. So when they cut all that and decided he was going to look one or two ways, all these changes went out of the script but I kept it in the voice. I had fun with it. Normally you wouldn’t get the chance to do that in a role.”
While the show had well-established villains in Rita and Lord Zed, the producers wanted to bring in another character for the film. “I thought it was smart and a good thing to do, to have a villain who wasn’t cannon from the TV show,” Cardenas argues. “And the film was all about introducing the new toys, so it was necessary.”
Due to the popularity of the show and the fact that they’d signed contracts, the stars of Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers were excited to make the leap from the small to the big screen. However there were rumours floating around that this might not be the case. “We got the deal with 20th Century Fox, and there was this small, slight rumour that might have been true, that they were going to re-cast the movie,” Jason David Frank, who played The Green/White Ranger in the show, recalls. “We were like, ‘nah that’s got to be a rumour – they can’t recast us!’. They do it now, but at that time, we were a little concerned. I wanted to do this big budget movie and they’re talking about a recast! I think, because it was a studio movie, that’s what studios want to do. They pull in big names for movies. But we were the Power Rangers, they couldn’t recast us.” Olsen, on the other hand, is not sure there is any truth to the rumours. “As writers, they really don’t include you – unless you’re a big name writer – they weren’t going to include me on casting decisions or things like that,” he says. “I might hear things on the periphery, but I never heard that one.”
While writing the story was no issue for Olsen, there were some shackles holding over from the series that were hampering his script. “You weren’t allowed to have any character arcs, or any conflict,” he recalls. “This is a terribly difficult thing to do as a writer! It’s almost an impossible situation to overcome. They were squeaky clean kids who all got along. [The showrunners] just had this rule from the TV show to keep it simplistic, and they didn’t want characters that fought or characters that were flawed. So that was one of things that the movie suffered for. You have the fun adventure aspect, but it’s always more satisfying to have characters who go on a journey. And also characters who have conflicts with each other and learn from each other.”
Olsen eventually finished his draft which was handed to the cast of Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers: The Movie. “I liked the script,” Frank recalls. “I was just looking through for my lines and to see who got the most lines. I remember thinking that this was a big budget movie, and that was great.” Someone else who was a fan was Australian model and actor Gabriella Fitzpatrick, who had been cast in the newly created role of Dulcea. “The producers told me they did a worldwide search, they didn’t just audition in Australia and America they did the whole world,” Fitzpatrick told Pink Spandex. “I got it and I was very happy to get it, it was a few auditions. I had to meet with the director and Jon Landau, and he was the deciding factor. They wanted me, but if he didn’t like me as a person I wasn’t going to get it.”
Production of Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers was moved to Australia, where the crew stayed for several months. “I was twenty years old, and I’d never been out of the country before,” Cardenas recalls. “So that was interesting! And to go to Australia of all places, it was amazing for me. One of the brilliant things about Australia was that the drinking age was 18, whereas here it’s 21. So I was like, ‘yes! Let’s have some fun!’.” But pretty quickly, the differences between shooting a TV show and a film – with first-time director Bryan Spicer – became apparent. “Seeing the costume was so different, going from the TV show to the movie. It was bigger and broader,” Frank recalls. “It was fun, but it was a lot slower than the pace we shot the TV show. We’d shot a page a day on the movie, but on the TV show we’d shoot ten pages a day. Which was pretty good movement for the time. The movie was much slower, there was a lot of waiting around 98% of the time.” Cardenas adds: “With the TV show, we’d get one or two takes and that was it, with the movie we’d do ten or twelve takes from every angle in every scene. I kind of appreciated that because it gave us chances to make it better.” Cardenas also argues it helped Spicer as well as the cast who had never made a film before. “All of us were kind of learning things together,” he says. “We all a common goal to make a movie that could last or stand the test of time. And in the end, I think we did that.”
An issue that arose quickly was the design of the new suits. The original series used stock footage of fights from its Japanese counterpart Super Sentai, but Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers: The Movie would allow for the cast to be seen in the suits while doing the martial arts they were known for. These new helmets had visors that slid back to reveal the actor’s faces (see above), but they were eventually scrapped as they didn’t quite fit to anyone’s face. “The helmets were stuffier too, but they had a little vent at the back,” Yong Bosch told the audience at Power Morphicon 2016. “They didn’t always work though. It was a great idea, they just didn’t work.” The problem was that they had already begun filming with these helmets, which meant everything had to be reshot. “We filmed without visors and mouth pieces, so there was a lot of inconsistencies going on,” Frank recalls. “It took a little longer than the TV show.”
Someone else who was unhappy was Amy Jo Johnson, who had portrayed The Pink Ranger since the first episode of the TV series. During the pre-production of the movie, she had been told that she and Jason David Frank would have larger roles, which was changed and played down as the script went through its re-writes. “She was supposed to have a bigger role, and there was a thing where she was upset that didn’t happen,” Olsen recalls. “It was still a team effort. I think her and Tommy were supposed to really take the lead. That was a bit of an issue, but they worked it out.”
However the biggest issue that came up was Gabriella Fitzpatrick as Dulcea. After the first month of filming, Fitzpatrick threw a kick during rehearsals and fell down screaming in pain. Everyone rushed to her aide, and it was clear she was having issues. “I had a cist on the ovaries,” she told Pink Spandex. “A lot of women have it, but it was big enough to stop me working because it was so painful.” With Fitzpatrick now in hospital, the producers and director brought in TV actor Mariska Hargitay to replace her (see below). “They brought her in to finish filming,” Fitzpatrick adds. “I think they filmed with her five months.” This also meant they had to reshoot all of the scenes Fitzpatrick had previously shot, which pushed back the already delayed production.
However, no one was happy with Hargitay’s performance. “I think she was too cerebral,” Olsen says. “They needed more of that superhero, larger than life, a bit more playful. And I think Marishka Hargitay is gorgeous and all that kind of stuff, but there wasn’t enough chemistry and bounce.” During the Christmas break from production, Fitzpatrick came out of hospital and the decision was made for her to return and replace Hargitay. “During that time the production had decided they didn’t like the direction they were going and they didn’t like her in the role, and the other girl got better so they brought her back,” Cardenas recalls. “And we reshot everything.” Frank adds: “They changed their mind and went back to the first Dulcea. So there was a lot of inconsistent shooting. We shot with this girl and they got rid of her and we shot with this new one. We filmed with her and then went back to the original.” Olsen argues that Hargitay was a great choice for the role, but it just didn’t work out. “It’s one of those things where it’s like, here’s this incredible actress but for whatever reason we’re not getting it. In these superhero movies, there are these bigger than life sparks that heroes have, and it wasn’t just there.”
The delays also caused some havoc with the planned second season of the TV show, which was set to begin as soon as production on the film ended. “During the movie, we were filming the show at the same time,” Frank recalls. “So during our breaks, we would go and film the TV show. It was kind of hectic.”
The costumes for the Power Rangers also sparked slight issues for the cast, as the switch from spandex to suits was drastic. “I thought the suits looked great, but they were nightmares to work in,” Frank recalls. “They weighed about fifty pounds. They looked cool, but it was a nightmare to move in them.” Bosch added during the Power Morphicon 2016 panel, “It was different from spandex. They were twenty-thirty pounds heavier.” But it wasn’t just the Power Rangers who felt the pain. “Because of the costume, which was immensely heavy and I couldn’t sit down in it, they erected a special chair which was basically a back and a slopping seat so I could sit back,” Paul Freeman noted in the Power Morphicon 2016 panel. “And because I had false teeth in and the make-up went up my top lip and bottom lip, I couldn’t eat either. So every lunchtime, they came up with these smoked oysters [which] was the only thing I could eat. I would open my mouth and they would drop them in.”
For Jason David Frank, it wasn’t the suits that gave him the most grief. “We were filming in Kiama and it was pretty hot out there, really hot,” he recalls. “And we were waiting for this shot. We were waiting for this cool water to go behind me and Amy, and it was taking forever. So we’re waiting forever for this big water to come behind out this blow hole. And I didn’t know what these things were. And I had just been wired up with this brand new microphone. It cost a lot, I just remember the sound guy saying, ‘hey don’t drop this microphone’. And I was like, ‘yeah it’s fine’. I used to blow dry my hair with a flat iron for the movie – but I didn’t for Turbo: A Power Rangers Movie, which is why my hair is super curly in it, that’s natural. So I spent ages blow drying and flat ironing my hair so it was perfectly straight. And water and my hair don’t mix. So, like an idiot, I thought, ‘there’s no water coming out of this, I’m gonna take a look’. And they were like, ‘I wouldn’t do that’ and I was like, ‘guys trust me there’s nothing coming out here’. And their getting ready to film, and the only time water comes out of the blowhole is when I look down it. I heard the water coming and I tried to run away, and I slipped and that microphone that guy gave me fell off and hit the rocks! And, of course, I had to go and do make-up again and blow dry my hair and use the flat iron again.”
One actor who seemed to be enjoying themselves was Freeman. “I’m a big Wizard of Oz fan, and one of the things when reading the making of books is that the nicest person on the set was The Wicked Witch,” Olsen jokes. “And Paul Freeman was the one guy I got to know quite well. And it’s the irony of the bad guy was a really kind and gentle person.” Cardenas agrees, saying Freeman would work with the younger, inexperienced actors to help them improve. “He’d work with us and give us the freedom to spread our wings a bit and kind of play off what we were doing,” he says. “That was really generous of him.”
Further on-set re-writes kicked in after Olsen left the set. “When I left they added in this whole new scene,” he recalls. “I think John Landau had an idea for the sequence where the battle all the rocks that come alive.” This wasn’t uncommon, as Olsen had already dealt with Chris Meledandri bringing in new writers to work on his draft. “At one point he brought in another writing team and paid them to work on it for a week,” he recalls. “Just to punch up dialogue. And then he’d sit in a room with me and go, ‘what about this line, what about that line’. Sometimes there would be a good line that we’d throw in, or a bad line we wouldn’t.” Cardenas, however, says that the on-set re-writes were more drastic. “The scene where we were fighting the purple guys in the construction site? Before it was giant rats we were fighting,” he jokes. “But they thought that the rats looked too cuddly and stuff, it looked weird. So we reshot all of that. We reshot everything. There was a whole training sequence with Dulcea that we shot but cut out of the movie. There were scenes that went longer that were cut out.”
Olsen argues that while there were a lot of re-writes during production, nothing major changed within the story or character. “It’s always a disaster if you start a production without a solid script,” he says. “We had one, it was just a case of, ‘how can we tweek this’ and ‘let’s just keep playing with this’. I’ve directed a movie since and it’s wonderful to see when an actor challenge you and say, ‘how about I throw this in’. That’s great! It’s a spontaneous moment! That was happening, but by the time we started production it wasn’t a case of ‘we don’t have a script’. It was all laid out. And it needed to be laid out because of the CGI and special effects. You can’t just change that one the day. You need the stunt guys to flip and cars and imagine the Zords coming in.”
Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers: The Movie was released on June 30th 1995 to mostly negative reviews. The New York Times called it, “Noisy and meant for children only” while San Fransisco Chronicle noted, “Hokey dialogue is invested with an intensity that takes you out of the movie and into the psyches of the actors.” However it wasn’t completely negative, with Los Angeles Times and Washington Post both printing positive reviews. “I was hoping it would be a big blockbuster hit,” Frank recalls. “I used to love watching Siskel and Ebert, and I believe we got two thumbs down from them so I was pretty bummed about that.” In total, Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers: The Movie earned $66 million at the box office, with many experts pointing to the figure as a sign the show’s popularity was waning. “The movie should have been released a little sooner, but looking back at the box office we did good,” Frank adds. “I was just happy we beat Judge Dredd. That wasn’t that good of a movie, but I was happy to beat them. So I think it could have done a little earlier.”
For Cardenas, seeing his face on the big screen was a surreal experience. “I was more critical of my performances and stuff back then because I was really self-conscious about my acting,” he says. “Like I said, I had never done much acting so I was more critical of my performance, but now as the years have gone by I’ve liked the film more now than back then. The movie holds up. It’s not as bad as I thought. I’m more proud of it now than I was when we first did it.” Frank agrees. “Going to the premiere and seeing my face on the big screen. The first thing I saw – and I was so insecure – is that my teeth aren’t straight. And now on the big screen my tooth is like one story big! So I tried to look for all these imperfections, so it was hard to see yourself blown up on the movie screen. You could see the pours in my skin! But that’s just an actor thing. Apart from that it was really cool.”
Reflecting on the movie, Arne Olsen – who now teaches screenwriting – is surprised at how many of his students praise the movie. “I’m touched by that,” he says. “I don’t know what it is. Was it just the series, or was there some chemistry that connected with them? Or was there something in the movie that had a little bit of a quirk to it, a je ne sais quoi that was invigorating and uplifting in some way. I can’t put my finger on it, but it’s like, ‘that’s kinda neat that you were moved by it!’ They’ve watched it 10 times. I don’t get it myself, but that’s nice.” Cardenas argues that Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers simply had the right formula, and that was duplicated onto the big screen. “Imagine yourself as a four-year old kid,” he argues. “You turn on the TV or go to a movie screen, and you see a lightning bolt shoot down and this crazy rock music begins playing, and you say crazy karate people in bright colours doing flashy martial arts. And you see aliens and monsters and all sorts of crazy powers. All of this stuff, with a diverse group of people from all walks of life and every different race working together as a team to overcome adversity. That combination of all those things together, visually that’s stimulating for a kid. How could you not be excited about it? That formula just works. And [with the film], they didn’t try and change that, they kept it the same.”
One issue with the film’s release was the same one that had plagued the series. The TV show had been banned in several countries, and many outlets posted stories of angry parents who were refusing to let their children watch such a violent show. “Mrs. Weil, the mother in Wayne, N.J., said her 4-year-old son, Seth, ‘would start jumping around the room, punching pillows and acting wild’ after watching the show,” a New York Times article from 1994 reads. “She will not let him watch now. The show ‘sends a message to children that violence is a way of life and that it’s a good way to solve your problems,’ she said.” Cardenas recalls, “A lot of parents wouldn’t let their kids watch it. Most of those parents now say to me, ‘I don’t know why I didn’t let them watch it – it’s so harmless!’. Sometimes people jump on bandwagons. There was a little outcry of people, but sometimes those little outcries make the bigger voice than the rest of the people. That was our burden we had to deal with. We had to convince people it wasn’t as violent as they thought. The story and the message outweighed any of the violence seen in the show. I was always like, ‘sit down and watch a show with your kid and explain the difference between TV and reality’. It can be a good teaching moment. I think parents had a missed opportunity there, and they didn’t take advantage of that. Instead they jumped on the bandwagon and said it was too violent.” Olsen agrees: “I’m a parent now, and all of those superhero movies that I grew up on and things like Star Wars, they all have violence in them. I was a little surprised that it was such a big issue. I mean to me, it was too squeaky clean! It was too moral, and everyone was so good that I wanted to have more of an edge. It was never violence for the sake of something diabolical, it was just kids defending themselves.”
It’s been 25 years since the release of Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers: The Movie, but there were never any plans for a second movie. When the show moved to Power Rangers Turbo, Saban Entertainment and 20th Century Fox released the much lower budgeted Turbo: A Power Rangers Movie to worse reviews and poorer box office, and it would be the last time the “teenagers with attitude” would grace the silver screen (a standalone movie reboot unconnected to the TV series was released by Lionsgate in 2017). But even with dozens of other Power Rangers iterations, the adoration for the original film is still strong with fans. “I like to think there’s something more in there than nostalgia,” Olsen argues. “The critics at the time were like, ‘this is nothing more than extended version of the series’, but I thought it was more elevated than that. It wasn’t this great phenomenon, but it was more than that. It did what it was supposed to do. It was exhilarating and there’s some good laughs in there. Paul Freeman was great in what he did. It was a good adventure story.”
Luke Owen
