See Behind The Scenes Footage From Joseph Kahn's 'Power/Rangers'
The short film Power/Rangers, directed by Joseph Kahn, has become a huge talking point over the past week. Posted for free online, the unauthorized vision of the Power Rangers TV show was quickly targeted by Saban Brands, owner of the Power Rangers license, for copyright violation. Pulled from Vimeo and YouTube before eventually being reinstated with slightly new opening credits and disclaimers, the very adult-oriented short is back online. And now you can see some Power Rangers making of footage, courtesy of the producers.
The footage is on YouTube via the short's producer, Adi Shankar.
As that shows, the Power/Rangers short was more or less a full-blown production — just one with a different intent than most film shoots. Seeing some of the fight choreography is pretty neat, as is the evidence that this was all captured quickly, in a week-long shoot.
Kahn is also doing some interviews about the short, and says that he was never a Power Rangers fan in the past, as he was well past the targeted age range when the show debuted, and that he has no interest in making an official feature film based on the property.
He told io9,
And yes, there is also a definite agenda from me to technically outshine the source material. That's part of the bootleg experiment. Most fan films are failed attempts to match the quality and ideas of their desired properties. Guaranteed creative stalemate and the fans know it, so the fans let their guard down and willingly humor a sub par experience. So I wanted to sucker punch them with a "real" movie while they were being gentle. By making the short actually good, it's sabotaging the audience's implied politeness toward the amateurism of fan films. All bets are off literally on frame one of POWER/RANGERS.
There's still an official Power Rangers feature in development at Lionsgate, scripted by Zack Stentz and Ashley Miller. That has a release date set for July 22, 2016.