I call upon the power of the Ultrazord.
[WHIRRING]
Fire all weapons.
The Power Rangers are one of the most recognizable brands
in the world, having run continuously
for close to 20 years, some of the most beloved children's
properties of all time.
But what if the Power Rangers you know and love
weren't really the Power Rangers at all at the very beginning?
In fact, what if they weren't the second time around either?
What if this was the third?
See, the origins of the Power Rangers is a little Weird.
And the story of how it radically
developed over its journey to the small screen
and specifically how its name was almost something
entirely else, at one point even being Bioman, well,
that's a story that's even stranger.
Let's start at the beginning.
Super Sentai is one of the longest running
and most successful TV shows in Japanese history,
boasting nearly 50 years of consecutive programming.
The action adventure series pits a team of brightly colored
superheroes against a recurring cast of monsters and robots.
This is the show that would eventually
be brought to America and, well, would eventually
be the Power Rangers.
Believe it or not, the first attempt
at bringing Sentai to America actually
happened during the '70s when Marvel comics
and the Japanese production company Toei
carried out an intellectual property trade.
Toei took Marv Wolfman, Gene Colon's Tomb of Dracula,
Captain America, and Spider-Man.
And Marvel took various concepts one of them being Sun Vulcan.
Stan Lee was purportedly very enthusiastic
about the idea of adapting Sun Vulcan as a comedy series
and putting together a pitch.
But regrettably nothing happened.
No bites.
Toei's Spider-Man actually had a massive impact on Tokusatsu
and Sentai as a whole.
In the show Spider-Man has a massive robot
he controls named Marveler.
And this toy proved to be so popular with children
that when Toei started to develop the next Sentai show,
it was obvious that they should include a massive robot, which
is how you get the formula that basically created every Sentai
and Power Rangers show since and really a lot of things.
You can see the influence of what you have on your screen
right now almost everywhere you look in modern day media.
So almost a decade after Marvel failed
to bring Sun Vulcan to America, surprise, surprise.
Haim Saban, the man who would eventually
succeed in bringing Sentai to the US, entered the picture.
This was a man working in Japan on a business trip
when he saw a Super Sentai on Saturday morning TV.
He became obsessed with the idea of using the suit
segments of the show and refilling the unmasked segments
with English speaking actors, thereby
gaining all the production value of the original show,
with only a small fraction of the actual cost.
Say what you will about cutting corners,
but this was a creative way to do.
We should note that he also received widespread critique
over his business practices, regarding
compensation for actors who were involved with all his projects.
And if you're interested in that, well,
there's a video here.
I put the link in the description.
But that's not what this is about today.
He was eventually able to strike a deal with Toei.
And he began the process of attempting
to get American companies on board,
which is notoriously difficult for Japanese properties.
In 1985 after running into dead end after dead end,
he decided he needed to really show
people what his vision was instead of just articulating it
verbally in pitch meetings.
Thus, he needed to produce a pilot for the series
independently.
And so you take a look at the 30 television shows housing
the Sentai banner and you pick one to adapt.
He settled on Choudenshi, Bioman, roughly translated
to Super Electron Bioman.
This show ran for 51 episodes from February 4, 1984
to January 26, 1985.
At the time, it was the most current Sentai
show on the market.
It also had a large following in Europe, France to be specific.
And this led Saban to place all his chips on, well, Bioman.
The cast for this pilot is bizarrely impressive.
The red Ranger, a.k.a.
Biorhythm Red, in this version referred to as Jason Lee,
was played by none other than the martial arts
legend, Mark Decascos.
The character of Zack Taylor, who
would be playing Biorhythm Green would
be played by Miguel A. Nunez Jr., who genre fans will
recognize from Return of the Living Dead, Black
Dynamite, and Jowanna Mann.
First the cast was filled out with Tricia Leigh Fisher,
Thomas Silardi, and Rebecca Staples.
In a more bizarre turn, the footage
for the pilot that's leaked since its release
has some weird references in it.
Miguel Nunez can be seen talking to a portly blond haired man
in that very pilot, who is in fact comic icon Chris Farley.
So this pilot became a do or die thing for Saban.
After production was completed on the full pilot,
he took to every major network, who
did not share his enthusiasm for the material
and passed on the project.
The full pilot for Bioman has not
surfaced online to this day.
Various actors involved with the Ranger
have attested that they have seen it.
But no one else really has.
After five years of continually getting nos from people
after that pilot in positions of power,
Saban decided it was time to retool the idea altogether.
He went back to the drawing board feeling
that Biorhythms was something the development execs were
probably bumping off of.
He needed a cooler name for the individual Sentai characters.
And he was absolutely right.
Eventually he landed on the Rangers,
finally rebranding the show to Galaxy Rangers.
Yep, Galaxy Rangers.
He retooled the pilot footage, cut it down, turning it
into only a 2-minute pilot pitch presentation ostensibly,
and opening credits for an episode of Galaxy Rangers
and began making calls in May of 1992
attempting to find someone who would listen to this idea.
He was able to finally set up a meeting with Fox Kids.
And in an enormously strange twist of fate,
the executive that Saban was going
to be pitching his remastered Sentai pitch to
was Margaret Loesch, the head of Fox Kids
and the former head of Marvel Productions, the company that
had tried to sell Sun Vulcan as a show
some 20 years prior so someone that understood his position.
Loesch watched the Galaxy Rangers pitch presentation
in a discussion with Saban and then
quickly decided that this would be a great way
to jump start a new era at Fox Kids.
And the rest is history.
20-something seasons, three movies, a sale to Disney,
a name change, a purchase back from Disney,
a partnership with Hasbro, a sale to Hasbro,
a mountain of toys, and one of the most visible brands
of all time.
This isn't all that abnormal, right.
Game of Thrones completely reshot their pilot
after HBO got a look at it.
Same thing with Star Trek, the original pilot episode
titled The Cage was deemed too cerebral by CBS.
And a new pilot had to be commissioned.
The entire crew of The Enterprise
was recast, even the Captain.
The only surviving character to make it
into the broadcast pilot was Leonard Nimoy's Spock.
Point being is that a lot of times,
specifically in visual mediums, perseverance
is the key, not a key, the key to success.
What would have happened if at any
of the junctures along the way, where people
were telling Haim Saban that his idea was bad, had he stopped?
Not only would we not have Power Rangers, but all of that work
would have been for naught.
This is a lesson in what to do when confronted with rejection.
If you have something you genuinely believe in,
you do what he did.
You knuckle down and you work harder.
You don't get prideful.
You change.
You adapt, do option concepts, negotiate rights deals,
independently produce pilots, and then
repackage those ideas over and over
and over again until someone, that one person,
that one meeting finally lands.
You've heard the saying a million times,
don't take no for an answer.
Now let me be the first to tell you,
that is a horrible way of thinking.
Do take no for an answer.
Do you understand no, not in life exclusively but art
specifically.
No is good.
When you learn to understand what no means in art,
you learn to understand why you're hearing it.
And sometimes look, you have the greatest thing in the world.
And you're just talking to the wrong person.
And in that case, well, in your heart of hearts to keep going.
But a lot of the times, no means there's
something that could be just a bit better.
Maybe it's just a word in the title.
Maybe it's just the length of your pilot.
Maybe it's a page of your script.
Maybe it's a color of your piece.
But no is good.
Take no for an answer.
Learn from it, compromise, adapt.
No is a key to success.
Failure is a key to success as long
as you understand how to use it.
Well, guys, this is it for today's episode of Nerdstalgic.
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