Media Musing Counter Factuals: Power Rangers Animated
- cepmurphywrites
- Jun 6
- 8 min read
By Charles EP Murphy
For the best part of a decade, the Power Rangers franchise was owned by Disney. They didn't realise they had bought it when they acquired Fox Kids Worldwide from Saban in 2001, but once they did, they made a go of it in the hope of getting a 'boy franchise' to go with their 'girl' franchises like the Disney Princesses – this was one of things they felt they lacked. Some of the Disney series are considered by fans as among the best. The company also moved production from California to New Zealand to cut costs and this would give a few young Kiwi actors like Rose McIver their first breaks on a US show.
In the end, Disney gave up and cancelled Power Rangers after 2009's format-breaking post-apocalypse series Power Rangers RPM – and sold it back to Saban! In contemporary news reports, Disney said Power Rangers just wasn't a good fit after all, and the New York Times (probably getting this line from sources at Disney) said the company had been put off when focus group testing found mums thought Power Rangers was too violent. That perception put the brand at odds with the company. It didn't help that ratings were dropping on Disney's channels, as they had for Fox before, and the audience was getting younger than Disney wanted. They spent a year looking for someone to sell it to before Haim Saban himself, according to Power Rangers: The Visual History, heard and came knocking on their door.
In an interview for Joshua Moore's Morphenomenal, former Disney executive Jermaine Turner said the ratings meant "it was harder for [boss Bob] Iger to justify having it as part of the umbrella" in the face of disgruntled parents, and so it was kept off the Disney Channel. He also recounted Toei and Bandai, the Japanese partners who provided footage and toys respectively, asked if Disney intended to lean into the younger audience and air the show in a preschool block. "I'm like, 'I can't put Power Rangers next to Mickey Mouse Clubhouse.' That doesn't work".
Speaking to Moore, former showrunner Ann Austen said she felt the execs had already assumed it couldn't fit under Disney, "they were looking for something else", and stuck to that even though "it was successful" and the toys were still selling. As Saban's Power Rangers Samurai ran on Nickelodeon and got higher ratings than Disney had garnered, Austen appears to have been right: the show would have done better if it had been put on cable, where the kids were then going, instead of dismissing it as 'not right'.
Since the sale back to Saban, Hasbro has bought it, aired it on Netflix (as streaming displaced cable for kids), put the show on 'hiatus', and in late March of this year was reported to be working on a new version run by the Percy Jackson TV show crew and airing on... Disney+! History rhymes, like many of the Power Rangers theme songs.
But before Disney gave up on outright owning the franchise, it almost created a Power Rangers animated series.
What would that have been like? Are you imagining a reboot of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers done in a cool, contemporary, serialised style, like the contemporary Thundercats reboot or Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes? Are you imagining anime-style all-new action? Are you imagining done-in-one comedy tales like Teen Titans Go or Regular Show? Something weird and groundbreaking like Adventure Time?
Well, here is the grand sum of knowledge about the Power Rangers animated series before May 2025:
In February 2007, musician Ron Wasserman, the man behind MMPR's hard rock, told a fandom forum that a friend of his was doing the sound effects on a 2-minute promo for it.
In May 2013, artist Brandon Ragnar Johnson revealed on Deviant Art that he’d been hired to redesign the Power Rangers for a cartoon they were considering, and posted a picture (currently in his portfolio).
A Facebook page that no longer exists may have mentioned a pilot or promo.
That’s it.
It's in May 2025 that Morphenomenal came out and revealed Turner was the one behind the cartoon, pitching it as the best way to revamp and rebrand the show. As well as Johnson, Turner brought in Mike Moon to help develop it: a co-developer of Cartoon Network's recent hit, Foster's Home For Imaginary Friends.
Due to Wasserman’s post and Moon's involvement (Foster's ended in 2007), we can extrapolate some of what was going on behind the scenes. The spring of 2007 is when Power Rangers Operation Overdrive has started airing and is preparing a 15th anniversary story where veteran Rangers return to help battle Rita & Zedd's failson. Late 2007 is when production starts on Power Rangers Jungle Fury, making it ready to air in early 2008, and gossip from production sources has long been clear that Jungle Fury was meant to be the last live-action show, with RPM only being made because Disney found it had contractual obligations to fill. RPM's initial showrunner Eddie Guzelian, brought in from Disney’s animation studios, stated to Visual History that “because it was the final season of the show” he was given a mandate “to ‘swing for the fences’… because the show was essentially already cancelled.”
From this time frame, we can surmise that the live-action show was partly being cancelled to make way for the cartoon – and that these plans were dropped by late 2008, hence the need to make RPM instead.
This time frame means we can guess where the show could have aired: the Disney XD channel. The Mouse House decided to take their boys-aimed channel Jetix (where Power Rangers aired) and relaunch it as XD, with more brand-new shows. The channel launched in America on 13th February 2009, with early programming including Aaron Stone by the outgoing Rangers producer Bruce Kalish. A Power Rangers cartoon started in 2007 would be ready to go for early XD! (RPM would remained dumped on ABC and was barely promoted. As long-time Rangers writer Jackie Marchand pithily told Morphenomenal, Disney had told Guzelin to swing "but they didn't give him a bat".)
Cancelling the live show in favour of a cartoon would make sense because Power Rangers was a notoriously weird and difficult show to make. It blended stock footage from Toei's Super Sentai shows from Japan and added all new footage from the US/New Zealand, usually footage of teenagers with attitude having chats but also footage of unmorphed fights, new scenes of the villains, and some extra morphed fights. What the sentai footage would look like, what the bulk of the villains would be, and what toys would be promoted? Power Rangers had no say in that. And for most of the show's run, the latest Super Sentai was still being made when the latest Power Rangers started so they had no idea what they'd be getting! As Austen and her co-showrunner Doug Sloan told Visual History, they got the job to do the 2003-04 shows because they’d worked on Power Rangers before, and Disney needed people who understood how it worked.
It's also known that Disney didn’t get on well with Toei. The Henshin Grid blog recounts a fan's voyage on a Disney Cruise in 2009, where he spoke to a Mouse marketing man and was allegedly told Disney had ideas for the show that Toei didn't agree with and so couldn’t do. (When it came to a cartoon, the marketeer "laughed and said he had no idea what I was talking about" before saying it "may" have been one of the ideas.) A fan rumour from the time is also printed, that Disney didn't like Toei getting so much in royalties and while we can't confirm that, it sure sounds like a plausible corporate spat!
An animated series would be free of all this hassle and allow Disney's creators to do whatever Mickey wanted done. (It would also mean not having to pay for all the crew, sets, crew, pyrotechnics, crew, props, and crew in New Zealand.) Brandon Ragnar Johnson’s character designs show that the cartoon would not have been an animated reboot of MMPR but a whole new team, with their own costume aesthetic. Whatever the finished product would be, it was going to be all new.
What killed it? Toei, who had some say in how things went and had indeed not agreed. Quoth Turner, Toei "politely and in a very Japanese way, was like 'f*** off'."
The decision to not make the cartoon doomed Power Rangers. When the NY Times said Disney "had been quietly shopping the franchise for more than a year", that meant they'd been shopping it when RPM had only just started airing! The shopping also started before the acquisition of Marvel Comics (Disney had changed its mind on mums and violence!), so the Rangers were seen as surplus to requirement as soon as Disney realised it could buy that "something else" it really wanted, never mind waiting until it had actually bought it.
So given all that, what happens if Disney is somehow able to swing Toei on this idea?
Part of that depends on what the cartoon’s like. If it’s not very good, or if it is very good but whatever reasons doesn’t click with the right target demographic, then it gets cancelled by 2010. It’s a weird little side story in the Power Rangers history, possibly blamed for killing the ‘real’ show. If it does well, that’s a few years of an animated show in its own continuity and bringing in all new young fans. Power Rangers lives but with multiple continuities (just like other properties) instead one main continuity lasting thirty years. From Moon's track record, however, we can assume it would be something the kids like and watch.
Either way, this means no Saban buyback as Power Rangers is no longer unwanted goods to be fobbed off but a show Disney have just put some effort into again. Even if they're not happy with the performance of the cartoon, it's now explicitly a Disney-branded show. They're going to squat on that trademark.
No escape from the Magic Kingdom means none of the shows from Samurai to Cosmic Fury, no 2017 film, no purchase of the franchise by Hasbro, and unfortunately, it most likely means no openly lesbian Power Rangers in 2021 – while Disney would allow LGBT characters on its cartoon The Owl House around the same time, this took a lot of lobbying by the creator Dana Terrace and she expressed frustration about this on social media. (We should note Izzy the Green Ranger being out is definitely not happening if Saban still owned it instead of Hasbro, as high-ups told one of the comic relief actors in 2017 to stop playing his role as gay) While Boom Studios may still license Power Rangers for comics, they'll be comics approved by different people and will have different post-2008 media to draw from. This would go on to impact further on comics, as Image’s popular "Massiveverse" imprint of tokusatsu-inspired superheroes are done by former Boom Rangers writers and so will be different depending on who makes it at Boom.
Alternatively, Disney retaining ownership could mean a different 2017 film for the 25th anniversary. It almost certainly means another reboot of the franchise as one of the meals fed into the ravenous maw of Disney+, though that could mean anything from a high-budget effects extravaganza like The Mandalorian to a madcap boundaries-pushing cartoon like The Owl House to “oh yeah that was on I think” like Turner & Hooch. And if you’re unlucky, it's like Willow, cancelled and purged off the service for all time. Just like Hasbro’s not currently doing anything with the franchise, Disney might not be doing much with it either – or it could be doing a lot with it, with Power Rangers as one of its heavy hitters.
And let’s say the cartoon, the Disney+ show, or both end up doing really well. Disney’s going to wonder if it can make something else that’s a bit like Power Rangers and have that do well too. And what else did it buy from Saban? VR Troopers, Masked Rider, and Big Bad Beetleborgs, any one of them waiting to be dusted off and redone…
Maybe the Percy Jackson team are making one of them.
Charles EP Murphy is an author who, among other works, wrote the books Chamberlain Resigns, and other things that did not happen and Comics of Infinite Earths for Sea Lion.
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