Emo Rangers 2015 Anniversary Special

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Mighty Moshin' Emo Rangers: The 2015 Anniversary Special is a short film released at the end of October in 2015, as a series finale for the TV series. It was originally to be a feature-length film, but various behind-the-scenes complications resulted in a casting cut and significant loss of budget. The film was released as an indie short to YouTube on Halloween of 2015, with a reduced runtime of just under 12-1/2 minutes.
==Plot==
===Backstory===
A long time ago, Captain Emohead made some significant power upgrades to the Chronic Stoner morpher to not only enhance its power, but also to ensure it could not be copied by villains a second time. He had it hid inside a school locker in Boise, Idaho. The school was called Happy Valley High. Nobody ever used that locker, and a small child in the area was entrusted with the key - to remain hidden until the day a new Chronic Stoner Ranger needed to arise. The other Rangers' powers also received some heavy upgrades, and they conquered a multitude of alien threats.
Some time around 2011, the threats got smarter. It got harder for them to trip the Emo Sensors, leading to Captain Emohead going into hibernation shortly after buying back Emo 5 and upgrading him. The other Rangers tucked their morphers away in safe places...and immediately spend the next four years carrying on with their everyday lives as civilians. Only one threat that they are aware of that they forgot about remained, and that threat vanished. However, Happy Valley High suddenly got a new principal.
Turns out, the principal was an evil alien in disguise, wanting to find ways to rule the world by subjugating it with the help of his own version of the Hoodie Patrol. But in order to create the new breed of Hoodies, he needed to hypnotize his students into being obedient mind slaves using chemically-alien-altered prescription medications - that were to be administered to them by the also-secretly-alien school nurse.
The Principal was a bit sloppy. He tried to convince parents that the school was a great place to send children to teach them to be upright citizens, yet his careless propensity to behave as a psychiatrist without proper qualification should have been a clue. Alas, many parents either pulled their kids from school or else failed to catch on. Nearly the entire school wound up on the mind control prescription drugs. The Principal also had a red flag annoying habit of being overly-obsessed with watching his students' every move, with enforcing rules to the extreme, and with his own casual and routine sexual harassment of female students. Parents either dismissed him as a jerk, or thought their kids were making stuff up. Nobody suspected aliens were involved.
===Main film story===
Mary Jane Greenfield has difficulty finding a school where she can truly fit in, anywhere. Her mother fears that Mary Jane will fall in with a bad crowd also. Falling for the aliens' ruse, the mother has Mary Jane (whose father is never mentioned and may very well be dead) enrolled at Happy Valley High. However, Mary Jane immediately senses something is off when the school attracts storm clouds and lightning. She also notices a distinct lack of students playing anywhere, or appearing to be enjoying themselves, or having any sort of fun at all. Before even being handed a rule book, and before classes have even begun, she is still strictly adhered to the rules by the Principal - who senses that she is suspicious and therefore decides to enforce the rules extra hard on her.
Mary Jane attempts to take a selfie with her phone, and is immediately called into the Principal's office. The more she questions him about his excessive strictness, the angrier he gets - until his desk catches on fire. She is troubled by how little concerned he appears to be with this. He tries to force her to take the prescription drugs so that she'll behave as mindlessly, timidly, and obediently as the other students. However, the drugs don't sit well with her. Tired of being forced to take them, and fearing the evil influence they're having, she considers cheating on her doses.
However, she meets the Mysterious Vagrant - an eccentric teen who speaks in riddles derived from song lyrics. The vagrant turns out to be the boy that Captain Emohead had initially entrusted with the key to the Secret Locker. All this sudden activity finally trips the Emo Sensors, reviving Captain Emohead and Emo 5. The vagrant gives Mary Jane the locker key, and then vanishes without a trace. Mary Jane decides to throw all her prescription pills down the toilet, and then heads to the Secret Locker. 
Furious with everything she has witnessed at the school and fed up with the hopelessness of her situation, she discovers a joint next to the morpher inside the locker and openly rebels by smoking it. She vanishes from school property after smoking it, and transforms herself into a stoner rebel. This infuriates the Principal, who sends his Hoodies after her to murder her for her extreme act of rebellion.
Captain Emohead decides to upgrade Mary Jane's status, making her the Neo-Chronic Stoner Ranger. This immediately enhances her combat abilities, allowing her to easily dispose of the Hoodies. The Principal panics, realizing that all the Hoodies she scattered about will tip off local authorities to what's really going on. He also becomes paranoid that since Mary Jane is now on marijuana, she will become a bad influence that will lead others astray. Mary Jane morphs, and confronts the Principal about his evil plan and about his continued sexual harassment of her. He dismisses her concerns, and tries to win the children of Boise back to his side with an anti-drug PSA. 
However, the PSA proves ineffectual on some in the area. Mary Jane in particular is unimpressed. A band of Ritalin Minions attack, but Mary Jane is easily able to fight them off by entering Super Emo Mode and firing the Emo Cannons. The frustrated Principal retaliates by firing death lasers at Mary Jane, yet her enhanced armor protects her. Mary Jane is told by Captain Emohead that it's 4:20 in the afternoon. She responds by pulling out a Bong Flute, summoning the Neo-Chronic Stoner Emo Fight Bot.
However, Mary Jane doesn't initially comprehend how to operate the new machine. The Principal takes advantage of her inexperience, and lands a lucky shot that takes her some time to recover from. Captain Emohead stalls the battle, much to the Principal's annoyance, and then contacts the other Emo Rangers on MySpace. The Rangers waste no time morphing, and then they teleport to Boise to save Mary Jane. However, their diversion is short-lived. The Principal exhausts the backup reserves of defense energy of his robot to activate a beam that sends the Rangers into a time warp - transferring them from 2015 to 2025 in an unknown location. This exposes a weakness in the bot, and Mary Jane exploits the weakness to destroy the bot and kill the Principal - as a way to avenge the other Rangers.
The Principal's demise quickly leads to other alien threats arising. Realizing it could take time to either find a way to save the other Rangers or else to recruit new ones with new emo-themed powers, Mary Jane drops out of school and becomes a full time Emo Ranger. She tries to write a letter to her mother explaining the situation - but makes herself sound bad in the process.
Later, Captain Emohead confirms that the Rangers are in 2015. Emo 5 rejoices, saying that they'll "just have to wait ten years," and then they can "enjoy endless adventures" with the other Rangers. Captain Emohead shoots this down as a "dickheaded" idea.
==Cast==
===Rangers===
Designations 	Rangers 	Actors
Introspective 	Ross 	Ross Fretten
Chaos Mohawk 	Luke 	Luke Markey
Weeping Tears 	Vicken 	Vicki Godby
StraightxEdge 	John 	John Penn
Bleeding Heart	Stef 	Stef Braithwaite
FashionxCore 	Fai 	Fai Burnett
Chronic Stoner	Mary Jane	Krystal Moore
===Allies===
* Luke Cole as Captain Emohead
* (Uncredited) as the voice of Emo 5
* Kyle Letner as Mysterious Vagrant
===Villains===
* Yurek Hanson as the Evil Principal
* Chase Peel and Kyle Johnson as several Hoodie Patrollers
Actresses Katty Elyassi and Amy Hamilton repeatedly stepped in to either play various uncredited roles, or perform voiceovers for said roles. Whatever they couldn't get quite right, was run through heavy voice distortion algorithms to make them sound like aliens. Vocalist Marc Halls of Fei Comodo also frequently stepped in to play numerous uncredited roles. Other uncredited extras were pulled as needed, whether to portray villains or to portray civilians at risk.
==Crew==
See also: List of crew members
* Chris Phillips (writer, producer, and director)
* Nick Pittom (producer, 3D designer, and animator)
* Kyle Johnson (fight stunt coordinator)
* Zach Mikel (music supervisor)
* Kitty Sherwood (production assistant)
* Chris Becker at SOVRN (logo design and branding)
* Gale Benning (costume designer and stage manager / prop designer)
* Robert Puttock (sound design and mixing)
==Production==
===Initial plans===
First announced on June 20th of 2014, this special was supposed to be released in the summer of 2015. It was going to be sponsored heavily by MTV, and be made as a feature-length film with a budget of $5,00,000 USD. Paul Garson was set to premiere as Paul, the new Orange Rockstar Emo Ranger that would step in upon Fai's untimely death. Paul was to also become the new leader, resulting in Ross accepting a demotion. Paul was to be friends with John, though capable of making John jealous since he also had a crush on Stef. After defeating their enemies, the new team of Rangers would look for a new FashionxCore Ranger to replace Fai before the end credits rolled.
===Derailment===
Real life for the actors got in the way of scheduling. Fai Archer got married, becoming Fai Burnett. Vicki Symes also got married, becoming Vicki Godby - and had a child. Ross Fretten became extremely important both in his real-world job and with college project management classes. This meant that only John Penn, Luke Markey, and Stef Braithwaite really had any time for the project whatsoever.
===Legal concerns===
To make matters worse, right around the time that filming was to begin, Adi Shenkar released a Power Rangers parody dubbed "Power / Rangers" on YouTube. The parody only got to stay up due to some out-of-court settlement agreements between the Bootlegverse producers and Haim Saban - the latter being all too eager to sue the parody makers for depicting a way-too-dark version of the classic Power Rangers that involved drugs, nihilism, cold-blooded murder, and prostitutes.
The lawsuit in early 2015 shut down all but the most determined of fans from making their own videos imagining a reboot of Power Rangers. Lone Wolf Studios published its reboot pilot episode as a short film dubbed "Teenagers With Attitude," moving the setting of Angel Grove from California to Hawaii. That same studio later made its own Zordon-themed prequel: "Zordon of Eltar." Yet, it failed to gather the crowdfunding necessary to release Teenagers With Attitude 2 - which would have shown off reimagined Ranger suits.
Bat in the Sun also made episodes depicting what would happen if Tommy as the Green Ranger fought Ryu, and another in which Tommy as the White Ranger fought Scorpion from Mortal Kombat.
However, the sheer pessimism in 2015 that prevailed over Saban threatening to sue Adi Shenkar led to MTV and others losing faith that a feature-length film of Emo Rangers would be even remotely feasible legally. With real-world British politics like the Londonistan issue, Brexit, and the Manchester attacks being inevitable future events, Britons involved had far bigger things to worry about than whether or not another story would get made with the Emo Rangers in it.
===Leaving MTV===
This forced the creators to leave MTV behind in regards to production, and to retreat back to YouTube and other websites - where the show had its roots. Paul was no longer slated to be the new Ranger, given that the loss of Ross and Fai from the main lineup of regularly-available actors meant that the original film's plot wouldn't make sense anymore - not even by Ranger standards!
===Drug activism===
Chris' friend Krystal Moore agreed to step in for Paul's role instead, and to help make a much-shorter film to commemorate the series having been around for a whole 10 years. Due to the cast and crew's mixed feelings about marijuana legislation both in the UK and the US, and even more mixed feelings about schools that over-prescribe Ritalin, it was decided that the 2015 special would be a strange anti-prescription-drug tract - one that argues that even kids ruining their futures on marijuana voluntarily would be preferable to having them be forced to lose their souls to Ritalin by an uncaring and hypocritical education system - for grades that might not even work at getting them to a better station in life than where they'd be if they squandered their potential on marijuana! 
This was also an acknowledgement of the fact that since they were no longer bound by MTV-US contracts, they no longer had to worry about who got offended if a Ranger were to be powered by drugs. But since it would likely offend viewers to have John abandon his StraightxEdge ways and fall off the wagon, they ruled that a new Chronic Stoner was the way to go.
To further rub this strange moral in viewers' faces, the crew decided that Krystal's character should be named "Mary Jane" - a common term for marijuana. The Rockstar Emo Ranger angle was scrapped in favor of making her the Neo-Chronic Stoner Ranger. 
===Final casting===
thumb|right|Radica's new Emo Rangers theme.
Due to the above-mentioned issues, most of the original Rangers were only able to return for brief-second cameos. Their Ranger scenes - also short - were animated with CGI, with their voices dubbed in. Luke Cole returned to voice Captain Emohead, though with a lot less enthusiasm. The Command Center looked very different, and it's been rumored that this is because the season 2 stock animations got lost.
==Filming locations==
Various locations in the greater area around Boise were utilized for this special, given that Krystal and Yurek were both Boise locals. This intersection had its building facades used to create the backdrops composited together for when the Principal's evil robot begins threatening the town. Parks near where Krystal lived served as potential locations for her battle with the Hoodies. A desert / hill zone resides not far from the state capitol building, doubling as a rock quarry-esque zone where the Neo-Chronic Stoner Fight Bot is implied to be when battling the Principal's Fight Bot.
==Music==
After the band Fei Comodo dissolved, Zack Mikel's act Radica from the Boise area was contacted to come up with a brand new theme. They developed one with Austin Townend - another artist from the Boise area - providing vocals. Much of the reason for this shift in setting was due to Chris taking other jobs that required him to travel, thus leading to him being in the Boise area for a time. With Chris and Nick now venturing outside of Chelmsford, they needed to make due with whatever they could get. They were fortunate enough to find enough talents in the Boise area to get a special made. However, the original cast pitched in where they could.
==Reception==
In just under two years since it was published, the official video has acquired over 10,110 views on YouTube. Positively Dreadful's review praised the dramatic increase in production value, yet expressed understandable frustration with being disappointed by the cliffhanger ending. He was particularly disappointed that the original Emo Rangers were given so little to do, in a feature that was named after them."A Review of Mighty Moshin' Emo Rangers" (video.) Positively Dreadful's channel. November 16th, 2015.
==Sequel==
While the Facebook page has spread rumors about a follow-up special involving another Christmas episode and the Avengers (or knockoffs of them,) said follow-up has yet to materialize. A mock poster was created all the same. It is unknown if this would lead to the Rangers being rescued from 2025 to aid the Avengers somehow, or if the story would be set in 2025. 
In the alt timeline of the fanfic Volkonir Meets the Power Rangers, MODM rescues the 2015 Emo Rangers from 2025 and brings them home to 2015 - to the "safe zone" of the near-multiversal-singularity city of Big Rapids, Michigan. Presumably, they go back to Chelmsford one day later. What becomes of them afterward is never stated, in either canon nor any known fanon. While this does not make a sequel to the 2015 special impossible canonically, it does complicate matters.
One of the single biggest concerns with making any new Emo Rangers media that would be canon is the fact that in real life, Chris moved to the United States some time after season 2 wrapped up. This means he and Nick had to work from scratch to make new animations for the 2015 special, and that he had to converse with Nick from a distance to get animations completed. This also put significant limitations on his ability to remain in regular contact with members of the original cast - most of whom still live in England.
==See also==
* Mighty Moshin' Emo Rangers: The Series
* Mighty Moshin' Emo Rangers (2005 short film)
* Mighty Moshin' Emo Rangers: The Video Game
==References==
==External links==
* 2015 special on YouTube
Category: Movies