'Power Rangers' Fan Film Is Dark, Gritty, And Definitely Not For Children - #Power/Rangers

You no doubt remember the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, but there's no way you'll remember them like they appear in this fanmade short film. That's mainly because producer Adi Shankar and director Joseph Kahn have completely reinvented the franchise with Nolan-esque grittiness.

Called POWER/RANGERS the bootleg fan film stars James Van Der Beek and Katee Sackhoff (Starbuck from the Battlestar Galactica reboot) and follows the premise of what happened to the Power Rangers once they grew up from the colored-saturated world we all know them from.

What would happen to them seems to be darkness, lots of it. And violence. It's all very bleak and very different from the kids TV show from the 90s.

Speaking to Hitfix director Kahn explains why he choose to get involved:

"There were a couple of things that were appealing to me. One, as opposed to like taking something like Barney and doing your dark version of Barney, there's at least a mythology there. The original mythology is really expansive and kind of silly in how many different…" Kahn collapsed into laughter. "I mean, these guys turn into dinosaurs. How do you take that seriously? But there's enough of like a groundwork of the original source material that they based off this repurposed Japanese show that has like norms of anime and kung fu and all that stuff that appeals to me because I'm an anime and kung fu guy anyways. I just took pieces that I liked and then streamlined it and made a bare bones version and really expressed the versions that seemed like they naturally fit within the down-the-middle dark and gritty reboot. And by the way, the dark and gritty reboot thing is such a cliché that the intention was not only to make it dark and gritty but make it even darker and grittier than you could possibly imagine, hence the brains, the blood and the violence and the sex.

You can learn more about why Shankar decided to reboot it in the video below: