Saban, Hasbro Wanted ‘Power Rangers’ To Ignore ‘Super Sentai’ Props And Costumes They Felt Were “A Bit Too Silly” For American Audiences
In giving vocal confirmation to a disappointing fact that franchise fans have long since acknowledged and begrudgingly accepted, former Power Rangers director and showrunner Simon Bennett has admitted that late series brand owners Saban and Hasbro both intentionally avoided adapting any Super Sentai elements they believed were too “silly” for American audiences.
Bennett, who served as the director for Saban’s final three series, Power Rangers Ninja Steel, Power Rangers Super Ninja Steel, and Power Rangers Beast Morphers before going on to serve as the showrunner for Hasbro’s Power Rangers Dino Fury, Power Rangers Cosmic Fury, and the Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers: Once & Always Netflix special, provided this insight into the American take on tokusatsu during an interview with YouTuber Kezza Henshin, as recorded last year but just recently published on July 31st.
Amidst a larger discussion regarding his time in charge of the Morphin’ Grid, Bennett was at one point asked by his host as to whether there was “anything you wanted to keep from Super Sentai, or did you think everything had to change?”, as well as how he went about choosing “what to keep to recontextualize or even change completely?”
In turn, Bennett recalled, “There are a lot of factors involved in this, and it depends on the season.”
“We never think we’re going to keep the story from Super Sentai,” he explained. “It’s always an original premise and story but utilizing the design elements from Super Sentai. We look at those things and we try and invent characters that reflect what Super Sentai have already designed, that will serve the story that we’re trying to tell. And what elements we keep, it’s basically the elements [that] serve the story that we want to tell are the ones that we keep.”
However, Bennett then admitted there was one factor that would override a given element’s ‘story relevance’, and that was the fear that Super Sentai‘s more campy elements would be a complete miss with Power Rangers‘ intended American demographic:
“If, suits or props are a bit silly in our eyes or in Hasbro’s eyes, brands eyes, you know, might not go down well through a US lens, then we tend not to adapt those. For instance, there was a Burger Morpher, I think in Ninja Steel [as adapted from Shuriken Sentai Ninninger] that we never actually used. And you know, the Camera Blasters in Beast Morphers [as adapted from Tokumei Sentai Go-Busters], we had to use because they appeared in footage that we were using, but they really weren’t featured strongly or made as toys -and the rationale for that was that no one at Saban thought that the kids who the show was made for knew what SLR cameras look like because everyone took pictures on their phones.
“There’s very much a sense of what’s going to work for the sensibilities of American kids who are the target audience of the show. And whoever owns the show, whether it’s been Saban Brands or Hasbro, their brand teams have had quite strong input into what elements are going to work or what elements they believe are going to work for their audience, as well as tone of the show and and what’s going to be suitable for young kids. “
To this end, Bennett then closed out his thoughts by noting that in terms of the series’ aforementioned “suitability”, the hurdle was the pearl-clutching nature of American’s broadcast sensibilities:
“A lot of the Super Sentai material is considered to be too violent given the children’s regulations for television. Like, we can’t have people destroying monsters execution style. Anything that looks like fire that characters are wrapped in, we have to color it so it looks like magical fire or magical explosions rather than realistic ones. We can’t do penetrating injuries. Although obviously for Once & Always, because the intended audience for that was older than the usual Power Rangers audience, we were able to take a lot more liberties with what we could show and say.”
