UNSOED Conferences, International Conference on Language, Linguistics, and Literature (COLALITE) 2020

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“THE REPRESENTATION OF AMERICA AS MULTI RACIAL SOCIETY IN POWER RANGERS SERIALS MOVIES AND REBOOT MOVIE”
Muhammad Fithratullah Fithratullah

Last modified: 2020-07-02

Abstract


American popular culture has bigger fans than any other popular culture; movie is among the most popular forms and most successful global industries in the world. It becomes the forefront to see a glimpse of America, as a multi yet diverse society. Popular movies like superhero attract a lot of attention from various ages. Children and adults are competing to watch their favorite superhero. Through decades American movies are dominated by the ‘white American’ actors and actresses. By the time American movie industries begin to embrace another race. It represents race through many movies, and superhero movie is one of them. A power ranger is a global phenomenon ever since its serials published in 1993 up to this day; it’s an American adaptation of Japanese’s ‘Super Sentai’. Through power rangers’ movies and serials the industry exposes American as a multi-racial society in combat with evil all together. Several races expose though the serials and the movies; Asian, Hispanic or Latin American, African American, Hawaiian and Jewish all represented in Power Ranger movies. This research uses representation theories and semiotics from Stuart Hall and Christian Metz used to help to figure out connotation and denotation to expose hidden meaning or messages. The semiotic focuses upon some aspects in the movie related to the idea of multi-racial society by highlighting the characters in representing certain connotation of multi-racial society and it is helpful in seeing how the movie constructs some messages behind the symbols and signs.


Keywords


Keywords: power rangers, superhero, multiracial, semiotic, Christian Metz