Red Ranger Forever

We watched Power Rangers on Saturday morning television with an intensity that should probably have been directed at something more productive. Overpriced merchandise we absolutely had to own. Episodes we’d already seen twice. The ritual of going outside afterward and jumping on bags of dirt while screaming dinosaur names across the neighborhood, because that was obviously how the morphing worked. The neighbors thought we were completely insane. They weren’t wrong.

Disney cancelled the show in 2009, after seventeen years and what felt like a thousand seasons. Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, which had been a defining artifact of the nineties, just stopped. No real explanation, which somehow made it worse. A show that ran that long, burned through that many rotating cast members, and sold that much plastic garbage deserved at least a proper ending. Instead it got a press release.

I was always the red ranger. My first girlfriend—the one where neither of us really knew what we were doing yet, which is the only honest way to describe it—was the yellow ranger in my memory. Whether she agreed to that assignment I genuinely can’t recall. But the color-coding felt essential at the time, part of a world that made coherent sense in a way the actual world never quite did: five teenagers with attitude, a robot made of dinosaurs, the absolute certainty that we were chosen and that it was our job to protect things.

That certainty didn’t entirely leave. Go go, Power Rangers.