Generation Y is beginning to graduate from College and head out into the big scary adult world, which in the marketing biz means it's time to start re-selling them comforting reminders of their suddenly-evaporating youth.I was (or, rather, considered myself to be) just a bit too old when the "Power Rangers" first happened to get big into it - though, obviously, the "tokusatsu" series that the franchise grew out of have been and remain a pretty big influence on me - in fact I remember being a perhaps-too-vocal "hater" of it when I was in Junior High and my then-kid sister was a MASSIVE never-miss-an-episode fan of it. I will say, however, that thanks to Linkara's hugely-watchable efforts I'm more or less becoming sort of a "retroactive fan."
Here's the score: The DVDs are coming out in Season/Volume sets (it started out as a daily series, so "Season One" is incredibly long as kid-shows go) with multi-month release gaps because... hey, they've gotta make money and cheaper piecemeal dole-outs let you make it big time off of impulse buys in the "OMIGOD GOTTA HAVE IT NOW!!!" mold, the "Hey, so-and-so loved this as a kid - let's get it for `em!" mold and especially the younger fans of the current (yet incredibly STILL in some kind of continuity!*) incarnations hungry for more material (seriously, TEN HOURS of episodes for under 20 bucks is a hell of a deal as digital-babysitting goes.)
...BUT! In a welcome acknowledgement that a big part of the consumer base for this will be now-adult collectors with the ability and inclination to buy it in a bigger but more efficient way, they are also set to make a huge box set encompassing every single episode of the first Seven Seasons (for fans: that means the entirety of the "Zordon Era" and the semi-connected seventh "Lost Galaxy" season) available right off the bat through Time Life - similar to the way the "Real Ghostbusters" DVDs initially came out (no price has been set yet.)
THIS, nostalgia-propert license-holders, is how you handle this stuff.
I'm sincerely curious to see how "90s Nostalgia" plays out as a market force. My own biases are obvious in this case; ("...don't you mean EVERY case, Bob derp de-derp derp derp!?") but I maintain that one of the reason that "kitsch nostalgia" of the 80s (and the 50s before it) "works" so well as a re-saleable commodity is the unironic earnestness of the era(s). Yeah, there was calculating cynicism behind all that earnestness - what better way to get kids to dump their parents money into the battle between Autobot and Decepticon than to get them sincerely emotionally invested? - but it was there, and I think it's part of why the stuff endures.
The 90s... had a different "vibe" happening - not necessarily better or worse, but different. The 90s - snuggled too-securely between the end of Cold War fears and the beginning of Terror War fears - was all about affecting a too-cool-for-school "end of history" jadedness, the "whatever" era. Pop-culture of the time reflected that, to a large degree, with lots of cartoons, comics, TV etc. making self-awareness of their own disposability part of their "act;" and I wonder if that's had an effect on how well it's managed to lodge in onetime fans' psyches?
Just for one immediate example: "Power Rangers" itself probably has the most potent "nostalgia cache" of 90s-spawned kiddie properties... and if you go back and watch stuff from the first wave of it what sticks out is that it's an incredibly "retro"-feeling show even excluding the recycled Japanese FX footage. The upbeat gee-whiz teenage superhero formula it cribs from plays out in precisely the manner of an early-60s Disney show or DC comic, and it's wide-eyed earnest almost to the point of self-parody. Correlation? You tell me...
*Incidentally, has anyone made the argument yet that "Power Rangers" is on it's way to being America's equivalent to "Doctor Who;" i.e. a low-budget kids show that goes on forever as a generational, continuing "thing?" I mean, let's be realistic - at some point someone is going to float "do a version in prime-time aimed at older fans" to Saban, and if they pull the trigger it's almost-certainly a moneymaker...
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