[ViRGE]

Backfill of Eddie posts for those of you that can't get on Rangercast:

Originally Posted by EddieGuzelian99

Hello, everyone. Thank you so much for your warm welcome and for your interest in the new season of Power Rangers and my involvement in the show.

I will go through and begin answering questions now, in no particular order, to the best of my ability. I'm in the middle of doing some work so I will be jumping on and off for the next couple of hours.

My real goal is to get more questions than Dan Ewing does in his Q&A thread because I know that will just piss him off. I can picture him at his computer--"What the hell's wrong with these people? Didn't they see how cool I looked in that leaked youtube promo? WTF?"

Kidding, of course. Dan really is something special. And once RPM airs, people will be stampeding over me to get to him.

Originally Posted by EddieGuzelian99

If you've been reading the online accounts of my tenure as Executive Producer of the show, you should have a pretty decent idea of how I would have approached the finale.

The plan was for me to personally spend New Zealand's entire gross national product so that we could shoot the entire thing on the surface of the moon. I realize that this approach probably would have plunged our international banking system into a state of collapse and chaos, but dammit, I had a vision.

I also intended to do this with out Disney's knowledge or approval and distribute the scripts for the finale three weeks after shooting had begun. I know that may sound strange, but what can I say? I'm a crazy maverick animation guy. That's just how I roll. By the time filming started, the plan was also for me to have laid off the entire cast and crew of the production and to do the entire finale as a one-man-show piece of performance art.

Seriously, though, it's a hard question to answer with out giving away some story elements and twists that will appear in the first half of the season. I am extremely disappointed that I was not given the opportunity to finish the season and even more disappointed that Disney never bothered to ask me how the story arcs were supposed to end. Even if they planned to abandon them and go in a different direction, it could have only helped the transition to a new producer to know what had been planned.

Originally Posted by EddieGuzelian99

Hello. Thank you so much for your interest and enthusiasm.

Your question is a very good one. When I first came aboard to do the show, the executives at Disney made it very clear to me that they wanted to see some drastically different in the next season of PR. They felt that the show's sensibilities had been gradually skewing younger and younger and wanted me to make something that would appeal to an older audience with out turning off the pre-school crowd.

The idea of setting the show in a domed city in a post-apocalyptic future came after I went back and watched dozens and dozens of episodes from the past ten years or so of the show.

All of them, of course, featured footage of some creature attacking a city and I noticed that it often took up large chunks of the episode to justify and explain why these attacks were taking place. You needed to have fairly long dialogue scenes with the villain outlining the plan, setting up what the monster is specifically after, why it is attacking now as opposed to later, etc., etc. The scenes explaining the attacks were often very expositional and not a lot of fun.

It seemed like something might be gained by setting up a situation where the villains entire goal is to conquer this one, last remaining city on earth. That way, you could have these attacks take place at any time with out having to explain them too much since the whole premise of the show would be built around the idea that the villain would be constantly trying to attack and conquer this last remaining human city.

I also liked the domed city setting because it immediately built a sense of urgency into the show that I thought would help make it more exciting and also appeal to a slightly older audience. The stakes are very high and very clear. The city is the last human settlement on earth, the only part of the world that has not been conquered by a renegade computer virus. If the Rangers fail to defend it, it will be the end of mankind. I was hoping that would immediately just ratchet everything up a notch or two.

Even though the premise sounds quite dark, it was never my intention to create a show that was dismal and dreary. I actually wanted it to be a lot of fun and to capture the spirit of a lot of the great sci-fi movies I grew up loving in the 1980s. I think people might be surprised (and possibly disappointed) to discover that the show is really not all that horrific and dark.

I intentionally wanted to capture and use (or maybe rip off is more honest) iconic imagery, story lines, character traits, etc. from those classic 80s sci-fi movies and weave them into the show. Even from the trailer, the influences of movies like 'Mad Max,' 'The Road Warrior,' and 'The Terminator' are obvious and the show is filled with direct and intentional reference to these movies.

In addition to just loving those movies and wanting to pay tribute to all of them, I also believed that they would resonate with the audience, including the younger members who may never have seen the original films. Even if you have never seen 'The Road Warrior,' the image of a mysterious badass dude in all black roaming through a vast wasteland alone is going to have some kind of strong impact because it is an iconic universal image--"the man with no name"--that speaks to us all on some base elemental level.

And if you've seen those movies or grew up watching them like me, it would hopefully be fun to spot all these moments and connect them to the fond memories you may have had of them.

Thanks for the question--sorry this is so long--got carried away.

Originally Posted by EddieGuzelian99

Hello. The very first meeting I ever had with Disney on the show, they told me flat out that Jungle Fury was supposed to have been the final season of Power Rangers. I don't remember the circumstances exactly, but something involving foreign financing or issues with the toy company had already begun moving forward and put them in a position of being obligated to to go ahead with the RPM season. I guess people familiar with following the show have become used to hearing this every year, but I took it to be true.

Because it was the final season of the show, the executives at Disney pushed me to shoot for something that was ambitious. They told me to "swing for the fences" and often reminded me that, because the show was essentially already cancelled, I had "nothing to lose."

The accounts that paint me as some kind of renegade producer who went rogue and ran off to produce some overly ambitious personal vision against Disney's wishes are all completely untrue and absurd. Disney approved a verbal pitch for what I wanted to do with the season before I was even hired. They approved a written bible that pretty much outlined exactly what the show became. They approved every script and saw rushes from shooting every day. And not only did they approve this take of the series, they demanded it and pushed me on a daily basis to pursue my new vision of the show.

At no time did I ever ask for more money to make the show and at no time did Disney tell me that I could not afford the version of the show that I was trying to make.

Also, the stories circulating that I did not listen to Disney's creative notes or refused to communicate with them are all completely false. I was in constant communication with Disney execs through out the process and cannot honestly think of a single major creative decision that was made with out their knowledge and approval. If anything, I felt like I had a very close and creatively collaborative relationship with the show's execs, which made it even more difficult for me to understand how they ultimately chose to handle my termination.

I have never met Doug but hear great things about him. Bruce had the office next to mine and was very nice and helpful to me when I first arrived, but 'Aaron Stone' was just getting started, so I didn't see him much after that or get the chance to speak to him very much about Power Rangers. He seems like a very nice guy.