Power Rangers After September 11th 2001: What Changed?

Pictures come from their reliable sources.

In response to the recent events, (Very tragic and sad.) this has always been an interesting thought in my head for about a few years now. How did September 11th 2001 change the way Power Rangers was presented during the final Saban season (at the time) and the entire Disney era? What was changed? What was kept? And most important...why? Here's a little back story.

Saban Entertainment had completed 30 out of 40 episodes of Power Rangers Time Force, the 9th season of the franchise. The company was also in process of being acquired by Disney for $5.3 billion. After the events of September 11th 2001, Saban had to go back and re-watch all 30 episodes and alter footage, lines and run time. These edits are known as "Post 9/11 edits." These ran for a short time on Fox Kids and aired on ABC Family and Toon Disney. Let's look at what had to be altered and changed.

Footage

Power Rangers since its launch has always had monster attacks which involved them wreaking the city and blowing up buildings. This was changed in Time Force however after 9/11. Since this had to be censored after this event, the original footage of the building blowing up or something similar to that, it was replaced with a car blowing up,a close up of an explosion or an alternate scene/different scene. This also happened sometimes when they had to alter dialogue. This was also done to ABC Family's/Toon Disney's runs of Mighty Morphin-Lightspeed Rescue. However, they would simply cut those scenes out or slow down the footage.

Dialogue

As hard as editing the footage may have been, the dialogue probably was harder. This was a Time Force only thing, so Mighty Morphin-Lightspeed Rescue didn't experience this effect from Disney. Anything referencing attacking and destroying was changed to "under alert" and "spotted". Here are a few examples.

In the episode "Dawn Of Destiny" where Ransik invades Bio-Lab to get more cerium, he comes out and tells the mutant this line: "I got the cerium! Level the place!". This was changed to "I have the cerium! Let's get out of here!" (Along with footage change also)

In "Trust And Triumph", Circuit says "Mutant at the trade center!" which was changed to "Mutant at the industrial center!"

Probably the most popular of them all is in "Ransik Lives". Ransik gives a terrorist like speech on TV and tells them to "Surrender or be destroyed!" and "You have one hour to surrender or I'll level the city!" This episode aired 2 days after the 9/11 incident and quickly, Saban inserted the Time Force instrumental to cover up the speech. Later while on the Disney networks, the speech was altered (with footage) to "Surrender or be defeated!" and "You have one hour to surrender!" 

Other dialogue changes were intact, but there are to much to put on here. A link at the end of this post will take you to them.

Runtime

This is going to be a short one because there's not really much to say about it. Why I have a picture of Katie up here is because the episode that she's pictured in really hit it hard. In "Full Exposure" there is a scene where the mutant shoots down a building.......making it look like a plane crashed into it. (Yes this was BEFORE 9/11 and even FOX questioned if this scene should be intact) People freaked out and stuff was flying everywhere. The scene was trimmed down...A LOT. So much in fact, it reduced the episode's length. This episode actually didn't get aired again after its edited version was shown. It was once seen again in 2005. It was also skipped in the UK. 

So, now that 9/11 is over, will Power Rangers follow the same guidelines as Disney did with this amount of "terror" scenes.....well no. Since Saban bought back the franchise in 2010, exploding buildings and such have been intact in Power Rangers Samurai and a few episodes out of the 9 that have been aired so far (at the time of this post) of Power Rangers MegaForce. However, these are also "technically censored" since they imply that the building is empty and no one is inside. However, due to the recent events, these things may be removed again. I personally don't think so, but we will see. It's up to Saban and Nickelodeon to see if they want to do that. 

To see all of the Time Force comparison videos, RangerWiki has a page for that. (The ones in bold are the ones that were edited)