Big Bad Beetleborgs

Big Bad Beetleborgs was what Saban Entertainment made once Mighty Morphin Power Rangers had proved the formula: take the fight footage from a Japanese Toei series, here the Metal Hero show Juukou B-Fighter, and shoot new American scenes around it. It premiered on Fox Kids on September 7, 1996, and unlike Power Rangers it leaned on sitcom business rather than a villain of the week. In the fictional town of Charterville, Drew McCormick, his younger sister Jo and their friend Roland Williams enter the haunted Hillhurst Mansion on a dare from two rich bullies, bump into a pipe organ and release Flabber, a phasm who grants them one wish. They wish to become their favorite comic-book heroes, the Big Bad Beetleborgs, and the wish also lets the comic's villains, the Magnavores, out into the real world.

The house was the show. Hillhurst came with its own monsters: Mums, a 5,000-year-old Egyptian mummy; Frankenbeans, a lumbering Frankenstein type everyone called Frankie; Count Fangula, a vampire of questionable ability; and Wolfie, a werewolf the household treated like the family dog. Saban altered the Japanese footage to taste, recoloring the B-Fighters' realistic-looking guns bright red and purple and covering the more violent hits with Batman-style sound effects or comic-panel transitions. Much of the American footage was shot in Santa Paula, California, and the theme was performed by Jeremy Sweet and Billy Forester, who played Flabber.

The second season became Beetleborgs Metallix, with new footage from B-Fighter Kabuto, a new villain named Nukus and new armor drawn up by the comic's artist, Art Fortunes. Bandai made the action figures, and Acclaim published a 1997 one-shot comic in which the Beetleborgs met the Power Rangers Turbo. The show ended on March 2, 1998, after 88 episodes, for the same reason VR Troopers had: Saban ran out of Japanese footage to adapt. It reran on UPN Kids, sat on Netflix for nearly a decade from 2011, and passed to Hasbro with the Power Rangers brand in 2018.