5 Hilarious Power Rangers Knockoffs

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers launched a trend of kid-themed action shows featuring teams of brightly colored teen heroes. While there were plenty of variations between the shows, most of them featured giant monsters, powerful weapons, and overly wordy show titles. To celebrate the release of this weekend’s Power Rangers movie, let’s take a look back at some of the most egregious knockoffs and their bizarre premises:

Big Bad Beetleborgs

Looking to capitalize on the success of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, Saban Entertainment quickly rolled out several more TV series about teenagers that could transform into armored superheroes. Big Bad Beetleborgs was one of the first and arguably most successful of Saban’s knockoff shows, running for two seasons from 1996-1998. 

Using footage from the Japanese shows Juukou B-Fighter, the show featured three kids who asked a ghost that strongly resembled Jay Leno to transform them into their favorite superheroes: the aforementioned Beetleborgs. The ghost granted their wish, but also brought the Beetleborgs’ supervillains to life as well. Each Beetleborg had their own superpower, ranging from telekinesis to superstrength as well as giant assault vehicles.

Big Bad Beetleborgs lasted a whopping two seasons, which actually makes it one of the longer running Power Rangers knockoffs. Saban only cancelled the show because it ran out of Japanese footage to adapt.

Mystic Knights of Tir Na Nog

After Saban had to cancel Big Bad Beetleborgs and several other shows when they ran out of Japanese footage to adapt into fight scenes, they decided to make a series using its own special effects instead of footage from another show. The result was Mystic Knights of Tir Na Nog – a series loosely based on Irish mythology. The Mystic Knights fought ogres, giants and other creatures led by the evil Queen Maeve using mystic weapons and armor that controlled one of the four elements.

Notably, the series featured plenty of characters from the Ulster Cycle, a famous set of Irish myths, albeit in radically different roles. For example, Diedre was a Mystic Knight and daughter of Conchobar in the show, but in the myths she was Conchobar’s wife who committed suicide after he passed her off to someone she hated even more than him. Guess that version doesn’t make for a good kid’s show, though. 

Superhuman Samurai Syber-Squad

When the Power Rangers became a toy producing juggernaut overnight, other toy companies quickly tried to jump on the bandwagon. Playmates, the makers of the popular Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles toys from the 1990s, quickly financed a rival show to Power Rangers called Superhuman Samurai Syber-Squad. The show was a blend of terrible 90s tropes: the lead character (Boy Meets World‘s Matthew Lawrence) was a guitarist in a cool teen band that could travel into the “digital world” to fight evil computer viruses. When he needed help, he could summon his friends into various weapons that he could use to kill the viruses. 

Probably the best part of the show was that Tim Curry (yes, THAT Tim Curry) voiced the show’s main villain. Curry played a sentient military artificial intelligence program that went rogue and tried to take over the “real world” via malicious computer viruses. Sadly, the world never got to experience the Curry-lution thanks to a bunch of Samurai that couldn’t even spell “cyber” correctly.

Tattooed Teenage Alien Fighters From Beverly Hills

Perhaps the weirdest named knockoff, Tattooed Teenage Alien Fighters from Beverly Hills was a USA Network series about a group of tattooed teenagers from Beverly Hills that fought aliens. Each teen could summon the power of a different constellation thanks to a tattoo forcibly given to them by a blob. The suits the characters wore were definitely the weirdest part of the show. Each of the “Galactic Sentinels” looked like a mix of a luchador and a bad Doctor Who villain thanks to a strange metal mouthpiece. 

Although Tattooed Teenage Alien Fighters from Beverly Hills had a terrible name, at least the show’s writers tried to mix things up a bit. None of the characters particularly liked each other, and episodes often poked fun at many of the genre’s common tropes. 

Van-Pires

When four teenagers accidentally get exposed to a meteor, they gain the power to transform into nocturnal robots called Motor-Vaters that vaguely resemble Transformers. Thus began Van-Pires, a 1997 TV series that was among the first children’s shows to use CGI animation. The Motor-Vators (which almost exclusively spoke in car puns) fought the Van-Pires, car/robot hybrids that all resembled classic movie monsters. Van-Pires was a terrible show for a lot of reasons, not least because the heroes were just a bit offensive.  The “obese” Motor-Vater had the ability to weaponize its flatulence, while the black Motor-Vater spoke exclusively in garbled slang.

Oddly enough, Van-Pires had a surprising amount of star power behind the show. The series’ soundtrack was written by the Who’s bass guitarist John Entwistle, while Gary Oldman (yes, THE Gary Oldman) played a hippie mentor to the Motor-Vaters. Oldman’s character Van He’ll Sing weirdly enough was also the love interest for the show’s sole female character…which isn’t creepy at all.