"It's Morphin' Time!"

Let's be honest, you know the names of each of those characters and what animal they turned into.

Sometimes in looking back we notice our mistakes. This was possibly one of them, but I’m not alone.

Dear 7-year-old me, I’m sorry we had to watch Power Rangers.

As a 7 year old in 1993, I, like many of my friends, was glued to the TV watching a show about a group of stock teenagers who wore spandex and fought bad guys made out of clay when not hanging out at a rip-off of the soda shop from Saved By the Bell/local YMCA. It was a true mess of a television program but I didn’t care then -- they were fighting kung-fu one minute and turned into a giant transformer the next. Awesome.

Like so many things in my childhood, Power Rangers was not kept to the TV. As kids, we would play Power Rangers on the playground, discuss the episodes at length (“How cool is it that there is a green dragon truck that becomes its own transformers robot. Radical.”), and many times would create our own Power Ranges on sheets on construction paper in our free time (mine was orange).

I also remember my birthday party in 2nd grade having a Power Rangers theme. It was at a bowling alley and the cake had little characters from the show on it, which was pretty cool. I can’t say I remember much from that party except for those two instances. (I may have received a blue Power Ranger toy that year. He was my favorite because he wore glasses.) But in addition to that, the birthday party was a sign of how quickly tastes can change for youth, and shortly after my love of the Power Rangers ceased.

One of the positives I can say about the Rangers is that they opened up one of those growing moments for me. As a kid at the time, I strongly recall vowing off the series and realizing that I tended to follow trends rather quickly and easily. As such, I made a conscious decision that from that point on that no matter what I was into on a given week, I would always have a back up in comic books that I continued to follow. Again, this is a sign that I was a weird kid, but it also was one of those early instances of me taking control.

Today I’m embarrassed and a little more ashamed to have taken part in this series. I only stuck around for the “Mighty Morphin” series (I think it was two seasons) and by that point had completely lost interest. That’s not to say I haven’t seen other episodes. As time went on, the choices for Saturday morning TV became more and more slim, and at the point where cartoons were dropped to only a few hours in the very morning, I would catch an episode of the Rangers only to kill time. And luckily these instances were few and far between.

Like changing my name or some of my other life choices, I feel like this was a positive in my journey of leaving 7-year-old me behind. It’s not to say that I don’t agree with him (obviously I worship him or this blog wouldn’t exist), but Power Rangers represents in some way the point where he was A) too willing to try things and B) easily manipulated by the people around him. Then again, perhaps I’m over analyzing this and forgetting about the earlier comments of kung-fu superheroes and transformer machines. Neat-o.

And with all of that, here is where I stand. Dear 7-year-old me, I'm sorry we had to watch Power Rangers. I know you enjoyed it and had no reason not to, but in the back of my mind, it is not one of your finest choices.