More importantly: who’s taller, Optimus Prime or the Pink Power Ranger? I’d like to take just a few minutes here to answer this simple little question.
The two clearly have very different images. One is the fearless leader of a race of transforming robots from another galaxy. The other is the high-kicking female member of a superhero team who in her spare time is a good friend of Felicity.
Taking a quick look across the internet I find a good bit of information on the Power Rangers. We will of course be using the original Pink Ranger in this article, the lovely Amy Jo Johnson. According to Celebrity Wonder’s little page about Amy, the Cape Cod-born actress stands a towering 5’2”.
Figuring out Prime’s height was a little harder for me. For one, I don’t own Optimus Prime’s toy. I do have him at my parent’s house, but it seems that at age five I managed to break him and lose all but his torso, so that isn’t much help. I do have, however, the recent Toys ‘R’ Us re-issue of Rodimus Major, a.k.a. Hot Rod. (Hasbro managed to lose the copyright to “Hot Rod” at some point between 1986 and 2002.) Doing some quick measurements, I’ve found Hot Rod to be 5 inches long in vehicle mode and 6 inches tall in robot mode. This will be useful, because now I just have to find out how long he would be in real life, perform some simple division, and I’ll have an answer for us.
Looking at Hot Rod’s vehicle mode, I’ve decided that he’s probably about the length of a Lamborghini Countach. In fact, many Transformers had that exact car as their vehicle modes (like Sideswipe and Red Alert), so I think I’m pretty justified in thinking that Hot Rod is just a futuristic version of that sort of low-to-the-ground really big sports car. A quick trip to everyone’s favorite terrible search engine, Ask Jeeves, with the question “How long is a Lamborghini Countach?” provides the answer: 165 inches, or 13 feet, 9 inches. Now, since his robot mode is 6 inches tall, we can do some math to figure out the right scale.
A few minutes more of searching tells me that Optimus Prime’s toy (the 1984 version) is 6.3 inches tall in robot mode. Now some quick math will give us an answer:
5/165 = 6.3/x 5 * x = 165 * 6.3 5 * x = 1039.5 x = 1039.5 / 5 x = 207.9 Assuming that Hod Rod’s toy is in scale with Optimus Prime’s, this would give us a Prime who’s 207.9 inches tall, or 17 feet, 4 inches. This makes Prime over three times the height of the Pink Power Ranger.
So there you have it folks! Now onto the matter of deciding who has hotter boots, Amy Jo Johnson or Princess Allura.