Power Rangers on YouTube might not be working for you, but it is for Hasbro.
Guest Editorial by Josh Moore (@KentuckyJAM on Twitter)
A year ago, I used a random episode generator to watch episodes from 10 different seasons of Power Rangers on National Power Rangers Day, the official-ish Aug. 28 holiday celebrating the show’s anniversary. Of course, despite owning the entirety of what’s available to purchase on DVD, I fired up those episodes on Netflix, the show’s definitive streaming home for the better part of the last decade. It was easier, after all.
I did a similar exercise earlier this year on Jan. 31, the final day that the majority of Power Rangers was available to stream on Netflix in most countries. As of Aug. 28 of this year, only seven full seasons — all three seasons of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, Ninja Steel, Super Ninja Steel and both seasons of Beast Morphers — and the first 11 episodes of Dino Fury, are available on the most widely-used streaming platform. Most of the Power Rangers canon was wiped out in a blink, and with little head’s up.
Why that change happened is subject to speculation. I’m in the camp that believes Hasbro, the brand’s steward, wants to more narrowly define what Power Rangers is by controlling what stories from its 28-year canon are readily accessible to the most people. Some think Netflix just didn’t want to bother with the less-recognizable parts of the brand anymore. Hasbro might have valued those parts of the brand more favorably than Netflix, and didn’t bend to the streamer’s will when it came time to renew a licensing deal. The conspiracies, then and now, are irrelevant; where is the only thing that ultimately matters.
Hasbro a couple weeks after the Netflix exodus unveiled its plan to upload the remaining 600-plus Power Rangers episodes in their inventory to YouTube. On paper, that’s about as good as it could get: YouTube’s free to use, and while it lacks some of the bells and whistles of a Netflix presentation, it’s a platform with as much or more visibility, particularly when it comes to SEO potential. It will be, for the foreseeable future, the only streaming home for most Power Rangers content produced before 2019.
“While some of our most popular and recent seasons of Power Rangers remained on Netflix for fans to enjoy, including Mighty Morphin, Beast Morphers, and now Power Rangers Dino Fury, we plan to continue to roll out new seasons with our (subscription video on demand) and/or broadcast partners while making available legacy seasons of the series to fans and new audiences around the globe via our Official YouTube channel,” – Hasbro said when reached for comment about the brand’s streaming decisions.
Power Rangers on YouTube
Six months in, Power Rangers on YouTube (PROY) appears more hazardous than the rubble left behind following a Megazord fight. Episodes are regularly uploaded to the primary account — “Power Rangers Official” — with no readily apparent order in mind, and sans closing credits. Sometimes a season’s episode number is present, sometimes it’s not. Playlists exist for some seasons, but the ones that do are unreliable. Take Jungle Fury’s premiere, “Welcome to the Jungle,” a two-parter. The first part, uploaded May 6, is in the playlist encompassing full episodes of the season. The second part, uploaded May 31, is not. (The episodes that “premiered” between the split season-opener? Two from Dino Thunder and one from Wild Force. As of Aug. 25, the final 20 episodes of Jungle Fury had not yet been uploaded.)
As of this article’s publication only one season, Dino Super Charge, has been fully uploaded to YouTube. It is not available on the main account, though; they live on the “Power Rangers Kids” channel, which has 8 million fewer subscribers and about 8 million more emojis in the episode titles. The subscriber discrepancy, it’s worth noting, doesn’t seem to impact viewership; episodes on that channel have performed as well, and frequently, better than uploads to the main one, in terms of total viewership numbers.
According to Hasbro, the “Kids” channel, launched this year in coordination with eOne, currently aims to “focus kids towards our current series, Power Rangers Dino Fury,” hence the presence of those dino-centric seasons. The primary channel, on the other hand, “exists to deliver full episodes of fan-favorite seasons that connect audiences to current themes and content happenings in the Power Rangers universe” in support of what it recognizes is “a robust fan audience.”
At a glance, Hasbro has morphed its Power Rangers backlog into a series of commentary-free “Let’s Play” videos, released daily and with a variety of games (seasons) represented in order to placate the YouTube algorithm. Daily uploads are complemented by concurrent live streams for viewers desperate enough to catch a glimpse of their favorite episode from whatever seasons are in the spotlight in a given week. The episode uploads are interspersed with all the YouTube fixings — think top 10s and “best of” highlight reels — you’d expect to see from any entertainment-focused YouTuber on the platform.
For fans wanting to re-watch all of their favorite episodes on demand, it’s an indisputable disappointment. But for a corporation looking to bolster and maintain its most followed social-media account (2.8 million users “like” the Power Rangers Facebook page; the Kids YouTube channel already has about 40,000 more subscribers than the official Twitter account, which has been around since 2010), PROY has been, more or less, morphinominal. The numbers tell the story best: “Revenge of Zen Aku,” the 13th episode of Wild Force, an often less-regarded season among fans that aired in 2002, had nearly 130,000 total views a week after it made its channel debut on Aug. 18. It’s probably not unfair to wonder if that same episode reached 100,000 plays on Netflix in the entirety of 2020.
Both channels are succeeding in their intended missions.
“We believe the content choices on both channels allow both fan and kid audiences to view current and relevant Power Rangers content and provide an additional connection between the entertainment and toy worlds,” Hasbro said through a spokesperson. “The YouTube channel allows more audiences [free] access to Power Rangers content for old fans looking for nostalgia and new fans discovering Power Rangers for the first time. In addition, legacy seasons and episodes will continue to be featured weekly on our Power Rangers Official Channel.”
The future
Hasbro (and eOne) say they want PROY to be a discovery platform for new fans and a way for existing fans to re-discover old favorites, but their terms of engagement are clearly directed at the former group. You will be allowed to see only what they offer, and on their schedule, which for Gen Z on-boarders is gonna be just fine. For a longtime fan, the thought of possibly having to wait until November to see the final episode of Jungle Fury uploaded might be excruciating; for people experiencing the season for the first time, Hasbro likely has reason to think they’ll meet each upload with anticipation — that every “new” episode will to be an event unto itself.
PROY offers a possible window into what it might look like if a child were asked to program a 24/7 Power Rangers network. The result is a rainbow-coated sugar rush that, really, is not that much different from the experience I sought to achieve last National Power Rangers Day. If you’re a newcomer to the brand — or a returning fan who hasn’t engaged since Mighty Morphin, even — I can see the appeal of a scattershot, “What am I gonna get next?” approach, even with the occasional 15-second ad sprinkled into the equation.
However, as a 30-year-old who’s never strayed from the show, it can be difficult to cope with the decisions of an entity as it tries to re-tool and refocus the brand. What Hasbro wants Power Rangers to be, and how it wants it consumed, is going to be different from what I’d like to see. It spent $500 million for the right to make those calls; I’ve only spent what feels like that much on toys they’ve churned out.
Longtime fans don’t have to be happy with PROY — in its current state, I’d argue they shouldn’t — but it’s part of our streaming reality. Don’t like it? Track down the Shout! Factory collections and a DVD player. But make haste; as we’ve seen in the last year, change can occur at Lightspeed.
Josh Moore is a journalist based out of Kentucky. You can follow him on Twitter @KentuckyJAM.
Edited by Eric Berry (@trekkieb47)
