CAPTAIN POWER AND THE SOLDIERS OF THE FUTURE was a half-hour kiddie show primarily funded by a toy company that wanted to use it as a sort of high-excitement infomercial aimed at getting scads of kiddies to buy lots and lots of high-priced plastic mathoms.It was shot in Toronto, far enough away from the corporate offices that they didn't have a clear idea of what was going on with the storylines.... and they hired Joseph Michael Straczynski and Larry DiTillio to do a lot of the writing and story consulting. Result: one of the best-conceived half-hour kiddie shows ever made. They had less than 22 minutes of air time per episode to tell a story in, and often found a way to do a quality script with some reasonably adult conflicts and character development.
Even after the time lost to the obligatory scenes of robot soldiers demanded by the toy company, the shows were usually worth watching.
Main problem was that the scripts and plot developments were toy-sales driven rather than character or technology driven; the quality of much of the FX work had to take second place to getting the right brightness and flicker rate on the targets on the mechanical critters, so that toy-equipped kiddies watching the show could shoot the Bad Machines. The management kept dreaming up things they wanted added to the show, so they could sell more toys, and each one cost more screen time.... and they wanted characters added, for action figures sales, and so on.
Jessica Steen wanted out, so she could go do something else (next thing of hers I remember was an extended arc on WISE GUY;) and Straczynski was real tired of having to rewrite his scripts into toy commercials... and meanwhile, the toy company was getting major blasts of flak from all directions over their relatively unconscionable use of live actors to sell toys. (Apparently this is permissible for *ANIMATED* toy-sales commercials, but not live-action toy-sales commercials....)
....so in the last episode, Pilot [Jennifer Chase/Jessica Steen] is *apparently* killed off (actually digitized for later recovery, but you're not supposed to know that), Power Base is destroyed, and Power and his crew have become disenfranchised fugitives.....
Straczynski and DiTillio had a detailed outline for the second year's shows, and DiTillio reportedly had a number of scripts completed and ready to go.... but when the show went out of production, they walked away happily to go work on something else. (Note that Straczynski did very well for himself over at MURDER, SHE WROTE for several years, and DiTillio also had no trouble earning a living.....)
Tim Dunigan became Davy Crockett and several other things, and so on. No one who was connected with the series ended up hurting, and the core of the production crew ended up on BABYLON 5 where they're showing what they COULD have done, given half a chance.
I've been told that the folks who make the Japanese series we call MMPR here in the U.S.... conciously copied the switch-able uniforms and Mentor prior to tossing in the obligatory Japanese monsters; I noticed a small kidlet watching a C.P. tape commenting Just like Mighty Morph urng (the urng denotes kid being throttled....)
If you find copies of the C.P. tapes, dupe yourself a set while you have a chance; they're the first decent use of CGI in a major TV show, and C.P. was the TV show that proved it *could* be done at all, and more cheaply than model-based FX work.