Throughout the majority of Power Rangers history, every Super Sentai series was adapted the year after it aired (sometimes while they are airing) and every year there was a guarantee, for better or worse, that the latest Sentai’s suits, mechs, weapons, powers, and enemies would make their way over to Power Rangers. That all changed in February 2014 when it was announced that the 2015 series was to be an adaptation of Zyuden Sentai Kyoryuger, skipping passed fan favorite Tokumei Sentai Go-Busters. Kyoryuger was followed by Ressha Sentai ToQger and then Shuriken Sentai Ninninger, which has been adapted into Power Rangers Ninja Steel. This all stems from Saban Brands attempting to keep up with the Sentai while handling Nickelodeon’s 20 episodes per year deal. As Megaforce proved, it’s better to adapt one series across two years than try and shove fifty episodes of Sentai into twenty episodes of Power Rangers. Go-Busters has some glaringly obvious reasons to be skipped. For Saban, the footage wouldn’t have been easy to film around. For Bandai, five rangers and seven mechs aren’t enough to fill shelves for two years. But why wasn’t ToQger adapted?
KIDS DON’T LIKE TRAINS
Intel gathered at PMC3 has made Saban and Bandai’s initial hesitance towards the colorful imagination themed Sentai: trains are not major part of kids lives in USA like Japan. Trains also are not major public transport in the US. To me this doesn’t really make sense. I’ve ridden a train to work pretty much every day for like four years and I always see kids on them. In contrast, I have never seen a dinosaur or a ninja. If anything tell us that trains are too real and boring, not that kids are unfamiliar with them. Everyone throws Thomas the Tank Engine around as proof that kids like trains. I went to our local science museum last year and the busiest room (like it was PACKED) was a room with a model train in it. Also it is worthy to note that a year or so after “Kids Don’t Like Trains” a set of MMPR Thomas the Tank Engine toys were announced. So what’s up with that?
THE PRODUCTION DESIGN
Let’s look at ToQger’s surface, the stuff that actually matters to Saban and Bandai. It doesn’t matter that the cast is really kids in adult bodies or that the Orange Ranger is a rain demon or that they’re all powered by imagination. The things that actually matter with an adaptation is what footage you can work with and what can be turned into toys. Saban believed the suits to be “pre-schoolish” and that the zords were too stiff. I could see what they mean about the zords. We’ve seen train mechs before but never have they just smooshed next to each other like ToQ-Oh did. The Zords we saw in Lightspeed Rescue and Mystic Force did a much better job of turning trains into giant robots. Other than that, the weapons are pretty classic and the villains can be kept as demons or made into aliens or whatever. The last factor to consider is the Rangers’ abilities in battle. Instead of having superpowers they have… well…
THE COLOR CHANGING
ToQger is the only sentai that I have seen every single episode of. In that year I found the color changing gimmick to be A. pointless B. stupid and C. a whole lot of fun that always put a smile on my face and made up for the lame plot. A lot of people think this was the big reason we didn’t get an adaptation. Some say that it was too goofy (as if Power Rangers wasn’t already) or unnecessary (military scientists have agreed that giant robots would never be effective in combat) or that Saban would never put a guy in pink spandex because they used to recast Yellow males as female (which was more to create a more diverse cast). I really don’t think any of this stuff mattered to Saban or Bandai. In fact, I don’t think ToQger had anything to do with the decision to not adapted it. I think something else just came along. Something better.
NINJAS > TRAINS
Saban and Bandai were more cautious of ToQger than dismissive. They voiced their concerns about the train motif and sat back and waited to see what came next, a tactical luxury of the two year deal. If the 2015 Sentai was about pastry chefs or circus clowns, you bet we’d be watching Peter Sudarso in Power Rangers Engine Express right now. While we can argue all day about how well trains would’ve done, we must also accept the fact that ninjas would do better. There is a reason ninjas come up a lot in Eastern and Western pop culture. Ninjas are cool. LEGO Ninjago is really popular with the Power Rangers demographic.
I don’t think ToQger would’ve been a massive failure. It would’ve done pretty great. But Ninja Still will be greater.