TOEI Filming Power Rangers Legend War! BIG Size Images & Info
About a month ago, the February Hyper Hobby issue had an interview with Takeyuki Suzuki, a Toei Executive. In this interview, the upcoming 20th anniversary of Power Rangers was discussed. It took a while, but thanks to nerefir of Henshin Justice Unlimited (@purplevalkyrie on Twitter), we now have a translation of the Power Rangers portion of the interview. It confirms our suspicions from a month ago that Toei is indeed working on a Power Rangers Legend War, featuring “Zyu-On” only suits. Keeping in mind that it’s PR only, I’m sure Toei is aware to remove the five Dairangers! Now this doesn’t automatically mean that we’re getting Gokaiger instead of Goseiger, but it certainly supports the current theory that we are. Stay tuned as more information develops. Be sure to check out the full interview below, again courtesy of purplevalkyrie.
HH: 2012 is also the 20th anniversary of Power Rangers, isn’t it.
Suzuki: At first we got an offer from America to do something like “199 Heroes,” but of course Power Rangers started with Zyuranger, so the characters before that don’t exist. “So just get rid of those parts.” (laughs) We can’t do that either, so the discussion became “Let’s just film new footage with the 20 years’ worth that we do need.”
HH: Power Rangers has already been reimported and dubbed with the voices of the actors that played in the Japanese original. That’s very interesting.
Suzuki: Yes, once you get used to it, it’s very interesting. But there’s a cost to getting the actors to dub, so we can’t really do it much.
HH: Lately they have events even in Taiwan. In Asia, it’s not really “Power Rangers,” is it?
Suzuki: I suppose. Originally they would just broadcast the Japanese version in east Asia. They’ve been doing that in Taiwan for 7 years now. It’s not really profitable, but they wanted to try it out, so they did it. It’s gotten an unusually good reaction.
HH: So then, what are the prospects for sentai, including Power Rangers, in 2012?
Suzuki: In America it will be the 20th anniversary of Power Rangers, so they have to put forth a lot of work. In preparation for that, they asked us to “film the parts with the sentai (from Zyuranger on) in Japan.” We’re currently setting up for that.
Info: Thanks to RRR Otoku