First Look At New Big Screen Power Rangers

Ay-ay-ay! The young heroes of 1990s television are on their way back to the big screen, though not quite the way you remember them.

Entertainment Weekly just premiered the first group photograph of the core quintet from the new ‘Power Rangers’ movie, currently in production.

Left to right, they are RC Cyler as Billy, the Blue Ranger; Naomi Scott as Kimberley, the Pink Ranger; Ludi Lin as Zack, the Black Ranger; Dacre Montgomery as Jason, the Red Ranger; and in front, Becky G as Trini, the Yellow Ranger.

Okay, so we’re not getting to see them in their ranger suits just yet - but we wouldn’t want them to give everything away this early, would we?

While ‘Power Rangers’ has never left the small screen, enduring in a long series of different iterations over the past two decades, this new movie from Lionsgate is directly modeled on the original line-up of first series ‘Mighty Morphin Power Rangers,’ introduced in 1993.

A popular sensation, ‘Mighty Morphin Power Rangers’ spawned a marketing empire, two theatrically released feature films in the mid-1990s, and no less than 21 more ‘Power Rangers’ TV shows to date.

Fans of the original series may note that the new line-up has changed the ethnicity of some of the characters (in a rather wince-inducing move, the original series cast a black actor as the Black Ranger and an Asian actress as the Yellow Ranger).

Director Devin Israelite tells EW this was a very deliberate move: “From the very beginning, diversity was a very important part of the whole process.

“We switched all of the races around, but we made sure that the essence of each of those characters are who they were in the original show, and this really will be an origin story of those characters.”

Whilst the original Rangers were a perpetually upbeat bunch with a can-do attitude, Israelite says the characters will start the movie as “disenfranchised and disparate” teenagers, who are not friends initially.

Of the as-yet unseen suits, the director promises they will have a ”really modern, edgy, badass, aspirational quality. We’ve really pushed ourselves to make them feel different from any other superhero costume that’s out there.

“One key that’s different to the Power Ranger suits is that they’re not really suits that people get into. They’re suits that morph onto our kids, so they already have this almost metaphysical quality to them.”

Okay, just as long as they’re not all CGI - remember how ‘Green Lantern’ turned out…

‘Power Rangers’ is due March 2017.

Picture Credit: EW/Kimberley French, Saban

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