Power Rangers Could Have Been Made By Stan Lee...?
I tell you no lie here today, this Ninja is honest. Stan Lee was the original guy to come up with adapting Super Sentai for American audience BACK IN THE 1980S!
Self proclaimed Fox Kids historian Red Ranger4 has posted this excerpt from the interview that he conducted with Margaret Loesch( (President of Fox Kids from 1990-1997) on Rangerboard that reveals some crazy cool history about our beloved Rangers, and Stan The Man
Interestingly enough, I know that this is about Marvel and the X-Men cartoon, but I had a similar experience with Power Rangers. Stan and I had the rights to Power Rangers to try and sell it. I’ve told this many times, but it never gets picked up. Back in the mid to late 1980’s, Stan came to my office one day at Marvel with a ¾ ‘’ video cassette and he told me I had to take a look at this since he thought I’d like it. So he left me with this cassette and I put it on and watched it. Afterwards, I walked down to his office and said: “Stan, what’s up with this? It’s all in Japanese!” He told me: “Yeah I know, but what do you think?” And I told him that I thought it was fantastic. What had happened was that because the live-action Spider-Man that had been made years before became a big hit in Japan, Stan had become a big celebrity. This was not just because of the comics, but also because the show had worked so well in Japan. So Stan became friends with a Mr. Wantanabe at the studio where other live action shows were being done. He had the rights to the Japanese version of Power Rangers, which had been on the air for many years, and he told Stan to take a look at it. If he liked it, he could have a free ride by taking it and trying to sell it. So that’s when Stan came to me and I got very excited. Then Stan and I put together $25,000 and put together a little pilot by plugging in American voices and cutting together really funny, action takes. But when I went around pitching it to all the networks, none of them would buy it. I was literally thrown out of the room at NBC since we had gotten kudos from doing things like Muppet Babies and now they saw this and thought it was horrible. So we pitched it to all of the networks and nobody would buy it. Then we went back to Mr. Watanabe, told him we tried to sell it but couldn’t, and relinquished the rights to the show.
Years later in about 1992, I was meeting with Haim Saban and he was pitching me a bunch of cartoons from Europe. He had about 12 cartoons lined up in a stack of cassettes for me to look at. I got about ¾ of the way through and he came into the conference room to see how I was doing. I said: “Haim, these are all fine, but I’m looking for something really offbeat, zany, fun and exciting…I want a counter program for my morning lineup Monday through Friday. I don’t want to do light, fluffy stuff…I want to come in with something different.” And he says: “Hold it right there!” And he left the room and came back literally running down the hall with this cassette. He told me not to get mad at him and I asked him why I’d get mad at him. His response was: “Oh, a lot of people hate this. Let me show you this, take a look, and let me know what you think.” He put the cassette on and it was the same show, the same videotape that Stan and I had that had been shown to us by Mr. Watanabe years before. I watched two minutes of it and I went next door to Haim’s office and said: “I love it…this is it. There’s changes that I want to make, there’s development I want to do, but this is the show…I’ll buy it and I’ll commit to it today.” And that’s the story, but it all started with Stan.
