Lionsgate is hard at work making a big screen adaptation of “Power Rangers,” but producer Adi Shankar and director Joseph Kahn have already finished a new vision of the popular children’s TV show that launched in the 1990s.
“Power/Rangers,” Shankar’s fourth “Bootleg Universe” project, stars James Van Der Beek (“Dawson’s Creek”) and Katee Sackhoff (“Battlestar Galactica”) as former rangers at odds in a bleak future controlled by the machines.
“This is not a pitch,” Shankar said of the project that follows previous online shorts following popular comic book characters The Punisher, Venom and Judge Dredd.
Instead, it’s a very bloody interpretation of what happens to color-coded rangers Tommy, Jason, Kimberly, Billy, Zack and Trini after being “child soldiers” in an intergalactic war Shankar believes “they really had nothing to do with.”
“How’s that not like child soldiers?” Shankar says in a video introducing the short. “They’re going to have PTSD.”
Watch the 14-minute version of “Power Rangers” you probably never expected to see, and then watch Shankar drop more than a few expletives while explaining the passion project: