FIG PHOTO SERIES: My Magnum Opus Is Complete

Over four months.

The first picture in this series was completed on Jan 2, 2023. The last one was completed on April 6, motivated in part by the desire to finish before the Mighty Morphin’ 30th anniversary special dropped.

My nostalgia for Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers is weird, because it’s nostalgia for my 20’s. I’m fucking ancient, so I couldn’t have watched the show as a kid, but I was into it… not ironically, exactly? But with a sense of self-awareness that this thing was bad and also weirdly cool. 

I may have told this story on here before, but this Magnum Opus is ENTIRELY the fault of All Elite Wrestling’s “All Ego” Ethan Page. It was a Lightning Collection Tengu Warrior on his toy hunt vlog that got me into collecting Lightning Collection, to the point that, with one exception (the Gamestop Goldar with wings (trying to get cheap) and weird paint variant Rangers (don’t care), I have every single Lightning Collection figure from the pre-Turbo era.

Ethan Page also introduced me to the idea of toy photography as a hobby. I don’t do it the way he does it. His way requires space, lighting, backdrops, and functioning eyes. My way adapts all those shortcomings into my own… style?

Anyway, four months plus of production. A couple months of planning before that. A plan that initially started as 8-10 pictures and ended up at 33 as ideas popped into my head and transitional pieces made their need known. All depicting a fairly standard Power Rangers episode in thiwh the Rangers fight… Beef Boss and Mancake from Fortnite. Why? Because I thought that would be funny. I have Lighting Collection monsters, but Beef Boss and Mancake also look like MMPR monsters, even if I had to fix the scaling in post.

Many of the group shots you see are not composited. Some are, because of the aforementioned scale issues or difficulty in setting up a group pose. But the majority of fight and group shots were photographed that way, with some elaborate stand engineering (and erasure) helping out.

So here it is, the magnum opus of my toy photography hobby to date. I think, if you know anything about Power Rangers, these are self-explanatory. Here are all the individual pics: