Netflix's Power Rangers Movie Retcons 30 Years Of Franchise History

Netflix’s brief partnership with Hasbro never quite delivered the franchise reboot or definitive streaming home that many Power Rangers fans had imagined. It did, however, lead to a reunion of one of the most beloved Ranger teams in Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: Once & Always. Released in 2023 to mark the franchise’s thirtieth anniversary, the Netflix Power Rangers special reunites MMPR Rangers Zack (Walter Emanuel Jones), Billy (David Yost), Rocky (Steve Cardenas), and Kat (Catherine Sutherland) to fight a robotic reincarnation of Rita Repulsa.

For anyone who last tuned into Power Rangers in the early 1990s, the Power Rangers: Once and Always offered an almost irresistible nostalgia-dripping celebration. The suits, monsters, and martial arts that made the franchise a pop-culture classic returned them to a familiar world from their childhood. As a viewing experience, Once and Always felt like it spiritually picked up exactly where the final episodes of MMPR ended back in 1996. However, dedicated franchise fans who had followed Power Rangers through its dozens of iterations felt that far too much had been ignored to make the reunion happen.

Power Rangers: Once & Always celebrates Mighty Morphin Power Rangers first and foremost. It clearly places nostalgia first and foremost, but reuniting the original Rangers ended up creating awkward timeline inconsistencies that contradict their post-MMPR adventures. Characters acquired different powers, left the team, and built lives beyond Angel Grove. Bringing Zordon’s original Rangers back to their roots after 30 years was special, but the narrative shortcuts taken to make it happen made everything that came after Mighty Morphin feel disposable.

Once And Always Ignored Decades Of Power Rangers Lore

The sidelining of the rest of Power Rangers to create a plausible Mighty Morphin reunion in Once & Always is baked into the very core of the Netflix special, since it treats the original lineup as a coherent fighting force that’s lasted thirty years. The reality is that the returning heroes in Once & Always had long since moved beyond their original Mighty Morphin roles. What’s more, the assembled MMPR heroes that take on Robo Rita weren’t actually members of the same team thanks to shake-ups in the roster during Mighty Morphin‘s three seasons.

Once & Always presents its returning Mighty Morphin Rangers as though they’re a single classic lineup. However, its four returning Rangers didn’t all overlap in the original run of the show. Zack left alongside Trini and Jason when Rocky, Aisha, and Adam arrived in season 2, while Kat joined even later when she replaced Kimberly during season 3. These heroes share a legacy, but they never served together as a Mighty Morphin team. The reunion blurs several distinct MMPR lineups, making several generations of Rangers feel like one group simply picking up where it left off.

Then there’s the status quo during the opening sequence of Once and Always, which basically ignores the journeys of the original MMPR Rangers. Zack, Tommy, Jason, Trini, and Kimberly all return when Billy suits up and summons their aide when first fighting Robo Rita. At no point does Once and Always explains how the original Mighty Morphin lineup reunited after they canonically parted ways during the show (it doesn’t even explain why Tommy is back in his Green Ranger form and not the White Ranger).

All of them had significant journeys after MMPR, especially Tommy and Jason, who both went on to appear in subsequent Ranger teams after the Mighty Morphin era. While it’s understandably cool to see them back together, the Netflix special needed to explain how this came to pass. It didn’t. The original powers and aesthetic of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers are back and as awesome as ever, but the nuance of who was part of what lineup and when, and what happens to its characters after MMPR finished, is ignored.

Mighty Morphin Isn’t The Only Power Rangers Series Worth Celebrating

The selective approach to the history of the individual Mighty Morphin Power Rangers team members in Once and Always does more than simply ignore continuity. It’s actively disrespectful to the legacy of the franchise beyond MMPR. Power Rangers survived for decades because it kept changing, and the journeys of characters across multiple iterations were key to that regular reinvention working. A thirtieth anniversary special was the perfect opportunity to celebrate the adaptability of Power Rangers and how it grew from the foundation Mighty Morphin laid.

To its credit, Power Rangers: Once & Always does include references to the wider franchise. The Bandora Protocol activated by Alpha 9 contacts multiple different teams of Rangers, for example. However, the presence of Easter Eggs like a list of home base locations of other Power Rangers teams isn’t a meaningful connection to different eras. It’s especially hard to appreciate these nods when members of teams like Zeo and Turbo appeared among the Rangers that Robo Rita captured. Multiple MMPR members featured in Once and Always later went on to be part of both squads, so this raises big questions about who fought alongside the heroes imprisoned by Robo Rita.

Keeping Rangers from the MMPR cast central was understandable, since Once and Always was explicitly a Mighty Morphin reunion. Overcrowding it with dozens of Rangers from later eras would have weakened its emotional focus. However, this didn’t mean the Netflix show had to ignore the fact that later Ranger teams included MMPR members in their rosters. The fact that characters like Kat and Rocky knew how to wield multiple Morphin Grid powersets could have been incorporated to demonstrate how far the legacy of the original team reached without requiring guest stars from later Power Rangers shows.

Instead, Power Rangers: Once and Always makes its character’s MMPR-era mantles feel like the only ones that count. For fans who are just as invested in later Power Rangers seasons as they are its first, this is jarring to say the least. The show had already established what happened after Mighty Morphin for the team’s members. An anniversary celebrating 30 years of the franchise should have built on their post-MMPR history to convincingly bring back a reunited Mighty Morphin lineup, not ignored it.

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: Once & Always