The year was 1998. Power Rangers Turbo has nearly wrecked the entire franchise. In fairness, Power Rangers has always been somewhat of a hostage to the Japanese Sentai footage, and the writers simply weren't prepared for the footage they got from the Japanese-equivalent to Turbo. I mean, really, was there anyway the Rangers could be cooked into a pizza without the show devolving into a farce? Probably not, and Saban knew that farces don't sell merchandise.
Anyway, the executives at Fox, knowing the short shelf-life of children's television, graciously gave Saban one last chance to save the franchise. Saban looked at the new season of Sentai footage, and saw it was space-themed. This, he thought, he could work with. Of course, the problem was that it only looked like it was space-themed, it was really some sort of virtual-reality-themed series, and Saban had already tried that with VR Troopers. For those of you who weren't around during the nineties, Saban had good reason to think that repeating that tragedy would kill the franchise outright.
So Saban and his crew did what they did best, make the Japanese footage fit their plans, continuity and visual glitches be damned! And so Power Rangers in Space was born.
Now, a lot of people will tell you that Power Rangers in Space was the best season of Power Rangers, or at least one of the best because of better writing and more emotionally mature storylines. They might be right, but it's also worth noting that those successes later led to season-after-season of trying to recreate that magic with mixed results at best.
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