If you're still poking around for scarce Mighty Morphin Power Rangers items and you own a computer with a CD-ROM drive, you might want to consider the "Mighty Morphin Power Rangers" disk.
Then again, PC Data, a research organization in Virginia, ranks the title as the best-selling children's entertainment CD-ROM of the year, so you might find some stores out of this item, too.
The disk, which is for Macintosh, Power PC and Windows, is distributed by Paramount Home Video. About 15 percent of its sales have been in video stores, relatively few of which carry CD-ROMs, but in some ways the Power Rangers CD-ROM has ties to the videocassette.
Not a game but a storyteller, the disk presents five episodes of the Fox-TV show about teen-agers who morph into superheroes to fight evil. Players may rearrange story elements or dig into background information about characters and other subjects or do various tasks like print out and save on the disk.
"Part of the novelty is horsing around with the Power Rangers on Dad's PC," said Peter Black, the president of Xiphias, the Los Angeles software publisher that developed the title.
With 113,000 Power Rangers CD-ROMs in distribution, Xiphias is looking for other properties that might lend themselves to companion disks. Mr. Black said hit TV shows were ideal because they were in front of viewers continually.
A hit movie like "Forrest Gump," the Paramount film to be released on videotape April 28, would also serve nicely, he said, provided the CD-ROM was ready to go on the same date as the tape.
Xiphias, he added, might include games on future disks but would again favor the storytelling approach used on the Power Rangers disk, with supplementary material accompanying pieces of the show or movie.
Other activities might include exploring sets. As an example, he cited a current CD-ROM, "Star Trek: the Next Generation, Interactive Technical Manual, USS Enterprise NCC-1701-D," which allows the user to tour the starship.
Furthering these possibilities, he said, will be a new generation of CD that can store an entire film on one disk and still has room for other features. For instance, "Lawrence of Arabia" might include a history of the Middle East. "Top Gun" might come with a flight simulator.
Distributors say that kind of disk might have more appeal to video dealers than do present CD-ROMs. Mr. Black and other software makers say acceptance depends on the number of CD-ROM drives in homes, which by some estimates could reach 20 million by 1996.