POWER RANGERS Writer Reflects on Casting Controversy: “It Was Such a Mistake”
Decades after Mighty Morphin Power Rangers first hit the airwaves in 1993, one of the key creatives behind the show is addressing a casting choice that’s long been the subject of fan conversation and critique.
In the new Hollywood Demons docuseries from Investigation Discovery, original Power Rangers head writer Tony Oliver opens up about what he now sees as a clear misstep: casting a Black actor as the Black Ranger and an Asian actor as the Yellow Ranger. At the time, Oliver says, the implications simply weren’t on their radar.
“None of us [were] thinking stereotypes,” Oliver admits in the documentary, referencing the early casting process. “The Black character [was] the Black Ranger and the Asian character the Yellow Ranger.”
It was only after “my assistant pointed it out in a meeting one day” that the issue truly hit him. “It was such a mistake,” he says.
The show premiered in August 1993 on Fox Kids, with Walter Emanuel Jones as Zack Taylor (the original Black Ranger) and Thuy Trang as Trini Kwan (the original Yellow Ranger). Oliver says the roles were filled based on the actors’ personalities.
Jones “seemed to have the swagger of the group” while the Yellow Ranger was intended to be “the peaceful one, who tends to be the conscience of the group.”
It’s worth noting, Oliver adds, that Trang wasn’t originally cast as Trini. That role first went to Audri Dubois, who left the production after a pay dispute. “Thuy was not our original Yellow Ranger,” he says, explaining that Trang was edited into scenes that had already been shot.
Behind the scenes camcorder footage included in the doc shows the cast themselves acknowledging the optics at the time. “My name’s Walter Jones, I play Zack. I’m Black, and I play the Black Ranger, go figure,” Jones says on camera, clearly aware of the coincidence.
Co-creator Shuki Levy, in an earlier interview with Complex, also said that the casting wasn’t malicious or calculated, it just came from a different cultural lens.
“It wasn’t intentional at all,” he said. “At that time, Haim [Saban] and I were new to this country. We didn’t grow up in the same environment that exists in America with regard to skin color. We grew up in Israel, where being a Black person is like being any kind of color. It’s not something we talked about all the time. It wasn’t a big issue.”
My brothers and I had a blast Power Rangers when we were growing up, but this is something that never registered in my brain when I was a kid. I just thought the show, the action, and all of the characters wre freakin’ cool!
Via: Entertainment Weekly