Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Official Fan Club Video

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers depended on a rabid fandom to find the success it had. The fans came in early and stuck with the show through many Power Rangers seasons of varied quality. If the show could survive a season like Power Rangers Turbo without losing the entire fanbase, it could make it through anything. That was what made The Fans Power Up so special. It celebrated the fans who celebrated Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.

The people behind the show created a fan club for everyone interested in the show. Through that fan club, they got certain episodes early. Sometimes there were even special videos just for the fan club. Alpha’s Magical Christmas was one of those special videos. Another one was what this post will cover. It was called…

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Official Fan Club Video

Jason, Zack, Trini, Kimberly, Billy, and Tommy were hanging out and talking to the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers Fan Club. The video was broken into three main components. Each section was cut into different segments that were interspersed with the segments from the other sections. That gave some variety to the video instead of being all talking heads followed by all talking heads of another section followed by the other section. There was more energy in the intercutting.

Before those main sections, Alpha gave an overview of what Mighty Morphin Power Rangers was. He summed up the show in about five minutes. Most of the footage was from the first season, though there was a little bit of season two in there, too. That made sense. Jason, Zack, and Trini were there and Zack had his season 2 hair. This was clearly a special from early season 2 of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. After that, the video began the intercutting of the three sections.

The first was behind-the-scenes footage. Throughout the Fan Club Video, audiences witnessed some of the goofy antics that went on behind the scenes of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. It was mostly people standing around the cameras without any on-set sound. There was music placed over it to keep it from being silence, but it would have been nice to hear the actors on set.

The second section was a series of talking heads where the characters described different aspects of their lives. They talked about friends, love, and what it was like to be a superhero. Most of the characters got their own specific things to talk about, as well. Billy got to talk about his fear of fish. Tommy spoke about his kata. Trini talked about stuffed animals for a while, and Zack talked about hip-hop kido. For children who were fans of the show, this was a great way to better connect with the characters. It made the characters even more relatable.

The final part of the interspersed segments was the tips for how to be a Power Ranger. There were six tips on how to be a Power Ranger. The Power Rangers went through the tips one by one. It took a strange turn when the final tip was to say no to drugs, then a two-minute DARE PSA began in the middle of the Fan Club Video. They were trying to warn children about drugs, but that whole thing was a major tonal shift from the rest of the Fan Club Video.

Finally, the video wrapped up with a music video set to the song I Will Win. It wasn’t good. Mighty Morphin Power Rangers was pretty skilled in their editing. They managed to take new American footage, blend it with Japanese Sentai footage, and have nothing feel majorly out of place. Yet, the music video felt slapped together with no sense of editing techniques. The cuts didn’t match the song. The footage felt random. It didn’t tell a story. It ended the Fan Club Video on a downer note.

The people behind Mighty Morphin Power Rangers knew that their success depended upon the rabid fans they had. The show wouldn’t have been the same without the fans. They decided, early in season 2, to give back to the fans. That’s what the Fan Club Video was. It was a video made for the fans who joined the fan club. It had all their favourite characters sharing more about themselves. It had some of the music that was all throughout Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. And it had a good message.

There were a few things that didn’t quite work, as was the case in anything that Mighty Morphin Power Rangers did. There was, of course, the music video that ended things off. The editing wasn’t the greatest, which made it feel like music placed over a video instead of video to go with the music. But the more troubling things came in some of the throwaway lines during the talking heads. Some of the characters said some strange things.

Everyone mentioned that Zack was the fun guy. That made sense. He was the one who always got up to the wacky hijinks. Jason may have stepped over the line into a little bit of light racism for a moment, though. When discussing his favourite type of music, Jason said it was rock music. Then he said that he also liked hip-hop. He specifically said it was because he was spending too much time with Zack. It wasn’t much. He wasn’t insulting Zack or anything. It just made it seem more like he was forced to listen to it because of his one Black friend than him actually liking to listen to it.

The other notable throwaway bit during the talking head portion of the Fan Club Video came from Trini. Mighty Morphin Power Rangers always had trouble giving Trini a personality. She was always just there as the other friend. Kimberly’s best friend or the Billy translator. Outside of that, she would get her episodes but never really have her own personality. That changed a little bit when Richie came into the show in season 2. Trini got a love interest. That was definitely after this Fan Club Video, though, since she was saying how she didn’t have a boyfriend and didn’t feel the need to have a boyfriend. It’s only strange knowing that shortly after the video was released, she would be pursuing a relationship. Not that anything came of the relationship. She left the show mid-romance arc and Richie just up and disappeared, never to be mentioned again.

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Official Fan Club Video was a good enough video for the fan club to get in 1994. It gave the kids insight into the Power Rangers, showed them part of how the sausage was made, and taught the children to be better people. It was the perfect supplement for Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. Did it feel like a side project that not much thought went into? Sure. That was to be expected with the amount of episodes that were being churned out, and the pre-production that was surely being done for a Mighty Morphin Power Rangers movie. But for what it was, it was decent. That’s what mattered.

There were two more supplementals in the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers box set to get to after the Fan Club Video. The first of the two was The White Ranger Kata, which will be coming up very soon. Then there was the compilation of the Zeo Serials. Those were shorts that aired after episodes of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers season 3, leading up to Power Rangers Zeo. And once those are done, it’s onto Power Rangers Zeo. So keep coming back, keep checking out these posts, and I’ll keep watching and writing.