Remember when the Power Rangers Lightning Collection was announced and fans collectively lost their minds — in a good way? Yeah, those were simpler times. Times when you could walk into a GameStop, Target, or Walgreens, drop twenty bucks, and walk out with a surprisingly detailed, well-articulated figure of your favorite color-coded, spandex-clad Ranger. Sure, they weren’t exactly S.H. Figuarts-level masterpieces, but they also didn’t cost as much as a week’s groceries. And for a while, Hasbro had us thinking they might actually complete a full lineup of every Power Ranger team.
Spoiler alert: They did not.
Instead, in a move that feels like watching your favorite childhood show get rebooted as a gritty drama starring Jared Leto, Hasbro handed over Power Rangers toy rights to Playmates, the same company behind everybody’s favorite Spy Ninjas and Miraculous Ladybug action figures, as well as some pretty questionable Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles toys over the years.
And look, we’re not saying every Playmates toy is bad (many are)… we’re just saying these ones especially are. Back in February, the Toy Fair kicked off and Playmates unveiled their new “kid-targeted” Power Rangers ‘Re-Ignition‘ line. Take a look:
The figures, as shown above, consist of the core six and their Zords as part of Playmates’ initiative to deliver their “first POWER RANGERS collection with a kid targeted Mighty Morphin Power Ranger toy line in 2025.” You see the problem here? Yes, these toys look like they are indeed for young kids. But the age they are shooting for? They didn’t grow up with the Mighty Morphin era. It would have made more sense to start with something generationally recent, like Cosmic Fury.
Clearly, the target demographic would have made more sense to focus on millennials in their 30s who watched the show every day after grade school. But instead, Playmates opted to make toys for you kids without an eye for detail. Come on. These look worse than the bootlegs you can find in the parking lot of a liquor store in Ensenada. “Super Mighty Power Team! Collect Them All!”
To put it bluntly: it looks like they found the worst parts of five different action figures at a garage sale and used them to Frankenstein together what might be a Red Ranger if you squint and lower your standards. The paint jobs? Atrocious. The proportions? Bizarre. The energy? An amateur Power Rangers XXX parody, maybe? Or perhaps that one second cousin who lives out on a farm in Alabama and talks to the sheep.
Now, to be fair, Hasbro’s Lightning Collection wasn’t perfect either. Quality control was a thing — paint errors, loose joints, backwards limbs — there were definitely days where it felt like someone blindfolded a toddler and gave them the final inspection duties. It was a roll of the dice, whether the figure you picked up was decent or somehow a reject that made it into the final packaging. And Hasbro knew it, too. That’s why the let Playmates take over and put the Lightning Collection on indefinite hiatus.
But at least the Lightning Collection looked good from a distance. The sculpts were solid, the articulation was pretty good usually, and the character selection (while painfully incomplete) gave fans a reason to hope. We almost got there, folks. We almost had full teams from every generation. And we’ll never forget the ones we lost along the way: the Platinum Ranger, the Death Ranger, and countless others who never got a shot at six-inch plastic immortality.
Sure, Bandai’s old Legacy Collection had better Morphers made with metal parts and more premium-feeling weapons, but Hasbro gave us figures that were fun to pose and display, with accessories that mostly made sense, and price tags that didn’t make you question your financial decisions.
But now? We’ve gone from “collectible-grade action figures with minor paint issues” to “bargain bin fodder that looks like it escaped a rejected toy Kickstarter from a third world country no one has ever heard of.”
The future of Power Rangers figures has never felt more uncertain, and that sucks. All fans wanted was a complete, quality collection of rangers that didn’t look like melted candles. For now, you can expect these hideous pieces of sh*t to be on sale this summer, as Playmates has their MMPR web store page up teasing June 1st.
Rest in peace, Lightning Collection. You deserved better paint. You deserved better quality control. But mostly, you deserved to finish what you started.
