Entertainment
Power Rangers Writer Reflects on Controversial Casting of Black and Yellow Rangers
Years after casting choices for the “Mighty Morphin Power Rangers” ignited fury, head writer Tony Oliver has regrets. The series, which debuted in 1993 and cultivated a pop culture phenomenon, cast a Black actor as the black Power Ranger and an Asian actor as the Yellow Ranger. The choice was generally seen as tactless and, in an updated documentary, Oliver deems it a “mistake.”
“No one of us is thinking stereotypes,” he said in an interview for “Dark Side of the Power Rangers,” the most recent episode of the Investigation Discovery documentary “Hollywood Demons.” In truth, he said, it wasn’t until one of his aides brought up the stereotype during a meeting that he realized the optics.
Although the series subsequently developed a trend of recasting actors season to season for each color Ranger, the impact of the initial casting was irreparable. Walter Emanuel Jones, the original Black Ranger, even made light of the decision in behind-the-scenes material from the series.
“My name’s Walter Jones, I play Zack. I’m Black, and I play the black Ranger — go figure,” he says in a clip from the “Dark Side of the Power Rangers.” The original Yellow Ranger was Thuy Trang.
“It was such a mistake,” Oliver said in the documentary, covering his face slightly and shaking his head.
“But Thuy was not our first Yellow Ranger,” he disclosed. “It was really Audri DuBois. She did the pilot episode. Don’t know why she quit. You’ll have to ask her.”
DuBois, interviewed for the show, said producers she left on a dispute over pay when the studio would not offer her sufficient funds per episode to live and pay to relocate to Arizona.
“I try to be tough about it,” she cried. “It is what it is, you know.”
During an interview with Complex in 2013, the director and writer of the show Shukli Levy explained that the racial casting decision was not a deliberate one.
“At that point, (show creator Haim Saban) and I were new to the country. We didn’t have the same background that there is in America with skin color,” he explained to the publication. “We were raised in Israel, where being Black is like being any color. It’s not something we discussed constantly. It wasn’t an issue. And that’s also what I felt in Paris, where we lived for seven years before we came here.”
Barbara Goodson, the actress who portrayed Rita Repulsa on the series, justified the move to Complex at the time, describing it as a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” type of scenario.
“If they didn’t do it, folks would say, ‘Well, why didn’t they make the Black Ranger a Black Ranger?’ You could get flamed either way,” she said. “The girl who took over the Yellow Ranger after Thuy wasn’t Asian, she was Black. You could find something to scoff at everywhere.”
