I'm Sorry, Power Rangers, I Failed You 

I don't want kids, but if I'm ever unfortunate enough to have one, I'm gonna name them White Power Ranger. I know there's an inherent risk that people will call them White Power for short, but the sins of the father are to be laid upon his children.

My childhood wasn't perfect, but it was pretty sweet. And more than a loving family, or the lack of diseases, it was because of the hit 1995 film, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.

I know around 70% of the lines, Spanish dubbed, of course. Sometimes I still say them with no context, to people who don't understand. Patada ninjetti de tornillo is, in my mind, the best line of dialogue and the best kick ever put to film, as well as the perfect thing to yell during sex. This film is such a big part of how my brain is wired that I wish I could watch it along with my therapist and save ourselves at least 10 sessions.

Most of my memories from the 90s are about learning to control my sphincter and figuring out object permanence. Meaning, I didn't have much in terms of taste in movies or coherent thoughts in general. That already put me in the right frame of mind to eventually become a fan of this film. The fact that my parents didn't want to deal with me and they sat me in front of the TV watching, rewinding and rewatching this VHS tape all day was also a contributing factor. Make no mistake about it, our parents knew Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie was brainrot. The Rangers, the kids, and our parents were all part of a system created to alienate children and give parents some free time.

In its own way, the film explores these themes of brainrot and alienation, but with a positive twist. The film comes to the conclusion that kids could stop brainrot if they organize and put their hearts into it. Sadly, the movie commits the cardinal sin of being way too hopeful. As this article will prove, we never had a chance and the Power Rangers overestimated us.

The B plot focuses on a kid named Fred, he's not a Ranger or likeable; in fact, he barely even shares the screen with the Rangers. Still, his story is way more relevant to our current world than the Power Rangers getting some new Zords, if you can believe it.

The bad guy, Ivan Ooze, is some kind of space wizard looking to get revenge on Zordon, the mentor of the Power Rangers. At one point, he comes up with an ooze, a purple sludge that he gives to kids. This evil Nickelodeon slime has a lot of metaphorical properties that will aid me in this article, but it also looks tasty as fuck. This explains why when Fred's dad gets home, he sees the sludge and immediately smells and licks it. Why would you do that, Fred's dad? Now he's possessed by Ivan Ooze and is practically a zombie. The father walks out and we see that the same thing has happened to every responsible adult in the city of Angel Grove. Ivan Ooze's plan is to use them as free labour to dig up some buried giant robots. When he's done with them, he orders the parents to literally walk off a cliff.

This is a nail-biting scene, as Fred and a bunch of kids try stop their parents from slowly walking to their deaths. Quite scary! I was obsessed with this scene growing up; the idea that adults would put themselves in that kind of danger, that they'd blindly follow orders even if it meant death. They're the ones supposed to make you feel safe, aren't they? My first little taste of existential dread.

I won't spoil this 30-year-old movie, but let's say Angel Grove's orphanage is going to run out of rooms in the morning.

Through most of the story, adults don't actually help in any way at all. In fact, the only thing they actually do in the plot is get brainwashed by an extremely charismatic villain. Then, they help him bring about the end of the world. Finally, they all walk together to their doom, singing Leap to our doom! Leap to our doom! all the way to the cliff. As always, the Spanish version is better, more poetic. ¡Viva nuestra perdición! ¡Viva nuestra perdición!

So the weight of it all, of saving the city, defeating the evil wizard, saving the parents, falls on the children and teenagers. They're the responsible citizens of the film and the only way they can win is by either kicking ass (but only if they're Power Rangers), or by rescuing their parents from media manipulation. The film was telling us we too could fix our community, not with ninjetti kicks, but with our brains. Too bad we fucked that up.

And it all comes back to the ooze. Ooze as manipulation. Ooze as sludge, as slop. It's sticky, makes a mess, gets everywhere, but it's fun to play with. If you squint, there's half a metaphor there about adults who lose their agency to the goop and walk together towards death. They're pathetic, is what I'm saying. The movie was telling us, "Look at the fuckwad adults literally walking to their deaths because they got played by some charismatic dude and his fancy gadgets!" And then, 30 years later, we are the fuckwads, the kids who grew up to be adults and got duped by even more idiotic forms of manipulation.

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie didn't predict a world where adults are besieged by charismatic charlatans manipulating them through AI slop, the media, the algorithm and many other forms we don't even know about yet. Of course the movie didn't know this, it's just a serviceable 90s kids movie. But by some serendipitous miracle, it contained all the necessary elements for me to take a look at it and ask, "Is this shit prescient?"

That's a cool little twist. This film presents a world where children have to protect their parents' minds from harmful propaganda and misinformation. Can you even imagine? We think we are like them, invulnerable to manipulation. Here we are in the present, making fun of our parents for not understanding something is clearly fake, getting frustrated at them. If we'd been as noble, brave and smart as Fred, we could have stopped our parents from falling victims to AI slop/misinformation. But we didn't.

For all that it got right, the film couldn't have imagined our current situation. It dreamed of an evil morphological being called Ivan Ooze controlling our minds with magic slime, but it never dared imagine we would willingly do that shit to ourselves. The film had high hopes for us. We didn't deliver. We failed the Power Rangers.

Looking around, I found some comments from parents back then and how they worried about this garbage show ruining their kids' brains. Now it's shifted; now we all collectively worry about adults with barely functioning gray matter who spend way too much time sucking off the algorithm.

Turns out, all that brainrot we got as kids didn't really help, it just made us cynical. And if the iPad babies are getting even more brainrot, I don't think they'll be able to break free of this chokehold. There's no getting off this ride now. We're in it until our brains are mush. That's why I'm not having children, I could never do that to little White Power.