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This Friday marks the premiere of a new Power Rangers movie. The upcoming blockbuster represents the first attempt by franchise creator Haim Saban cash in on the new superhero craze, which was pretty much inevitable. See, Saban is an incredibly successful business mogul, and part of that success has sprung from finding profit in the cheapest corners and most exploitable markets. After all, the Power Rangers’ creation myth has long been that Saban was on a business trip to Japan in the late ‘80s and just happened to see an episode Super Sentai, a kid’s action show, and got the idea to buy up extra footage from that to splice together into an America equivalent.
That thriftiness and willingness to exploit fertile markets has been a hallmark of Saban’s media corporation since its inception and dominated much of their output during the ‘90s. However, while there were plenty of Saban produced Power Rangers knock-offs, he also got into another lucrative side of Japanese entertainment imports that led to one of the strangest artifacts of this era- Samurai Pizza Cats.
