I know so little about the Power Rangers I thought I'd Google it to
see if there was anything I should know and "Oh boy!" what a can of
worms I dug-up! Homophobia, exploitation of non-unionised actors, racism, a US
TV-show using stock-footage of three other Japanese shows crashed together with
A-Team like footage shot on the backlots and in the valleys round LA (funny how
the 'City of Angels' has so much filth and darkness attached to it), umpteen
companies and or marketers involved, several license and character
switches/arguments and, yes; it should have been 'morphing' with a 'g'. . .
'cos they morph into Power Rangers!
Anyhoos; the real reason for my Googling -
what each colour means/represents and/or whether they have specific names - turned
up that there were various people in each colour and one chap had three colours,
so we can ignore the whole sorry mess and just look at an overview of the [non-action-]
figures out there . . .
My sample in its entirety (actually that's
not strictly true, there may be some more, somewhere else?), bottom row are all
20mm oddities, which I assume are from gum-ball/capsule machines, top row will
be looked at last in this post and we're about to look at the larger ones but
the lone yellow chap in a Ranger'esque bodysuit (far right middle row) is, I
think, from a Mega Bloks set - they clip into the gap between four studs?
These were probably also capsule 'prizes'
although whether they all came originally in a key-ring casket or not, I don't
know. I suspect that - in common with a lot of this stuff - they had as many
marketing iterations as could be thought-up for them, in various parts of the
world, by various wholesalers!
Full-on 54mm Power Rangers, I need to find a pink one, and a lose blue one would
be useful for the full set, produced for Kellogg's
Frosties by Crocco (who also
supplied other stuff to the rival Weetabix I think?),
there is a glow-in-the-dark white one to find as well; the usual likelihood of
finding a green one or a white one are unlikely, both are the unloved Power Rangers in Toyland, so it's
refreshing to see Crocco doing one of
them!
Galoob
Micromachines, except, not MM size, closer to Action
Fleet/Battle Squads, but without the action figure element. Red's trike is
a trike, but Blue and Black both get sidecar combinations which can be
converted into plain motorcycles for a bit of variety! I'm missing a blue with
both hands up - like Yellow (below).
Black (who was African American!), and the
two girls; Yellow (Asian - Red was a Native American!) and pink (her parents
probably vote Trump!). Black was the last of the original line-up to leave
(citing racism), upon which a member of the production crew suggested he'd
never got on with the rest of the cast & crew - despite lasting longest?
Read the whole thing on Wikipedia, it's everything that's wrong with capital, marketing, pop-culture
and licensing!
Putty
Patrollers - yeah, well; whatever was happening behind the
cameras, it WAS aimed at kids! These are the bad guys. Galoob never got round to green or white Power Rangers.
If anyone can help with ID's on the smallies,
that would be appreciated, they may be like Kinder, with little simplified
vehicles, but with 7,000+ results for 'Power Rangers Figures' on evilBay I wasn't
going to hang-around and try to find out!
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