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More than 60,000 people tuned in to watch the Green Ranger make his debut on Twitch’s Mighty Morphin Power Rangers marathon, and collectively lost their minds when the stream dropped.
Although it was simply a matter of coincidence, the irony of the Power Rangers’ most notorious villains in the first season besides Rita Repulsa taking down a stream did not go un-noticed by fans. In the first season, the Green Ranger, who is also known as Tommy Oliver, is a new student at Angel Grove High School. He catches the attention of Repulsa after fighting the Red Ranger, Jason Lee Scott, in a martial arts tournament. The five-part episode in which the Green Ranger makes his debut, “Green with Evil” has become one of the most beloved among fans, and people were anxiously waiting for the episode to debut on Twitch.
The stream went down twice during the course of the five-part episodes, leading fans to proclaim that it was the work of the Green Ranger.
GREEN RANGER DESTROYED THE TWITCH STREAM
— Zeo Ranger 5: Devon (@ArashiKaji) March 15, 2017
Looks like the green ranger won. Rip twitch watches power rangers. #BibleThump
— Michael Neumann (@Crunchmaester) March 15, 2017
Green Ranger warped into the Twitch HQ and started pulling plugs.
— Fox (@DatFox89) March 15, 2017
Green Ranger broke twitch. ;_;
— OFViking (@OFViking) March 15, 2017
The Twitch chatroom devolved into similar chaos, shouting phrases like “GG Power Rangers” until the stream reappeared. Despite the obvious amusement behind the irony of the situation, the instability of Twitch’s stream did bother a large portion of the fans who tuned in specifically for the show.
“It's dead again,” one commenter wrote. “They fixed it again, but this is getting annoying.”
It’s unclear why the Twitch stream dropped twice in a short matter of time, but it was during the “Green with Evil” saga that the marathon saw its highest number of concurrent viewers. Polygon has reached out to Twitch about issues with the stream and will update if more information becomes available.
Twitch launched the Power Rangers stream yesterday, and will marathon all 831 episodes from 23 seasons. The end of the marathon will coincide with the release of Power Rangers, the new feature-length movie that explores the Power Rangers’ origin. It will be released on March 24.
Update: The stream went down for two minutes on two separate occasions because of transcoding issues, according to a Twitch representative. It was incorrectly transcoded at 720p instead of 1080p.
