It’s a bit of early 1990s casting so “wait, they did that?” that it would never happen today, but if you watch vintage episodes of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, which ran for three seasons across 1993-1995 on Fox, you can’t help but notice. The Black Ranger is played by Black actor Walter Emanuel Jones, and the Yellow Ranger is played by Asian actor Thuy Trang. It’s a groan-worthy stereotype that somehow slipped past the writers at the time, as one of the show’s creative mind now admits.
This tidbit comes from “Dark Side of the Power Rangers,” a new episode in Investigation Discovery’s Hollywood Demons series (reported on by Entertainment Weekly). As you can tell by the title, it’s a behind-the-scenes look at the more troubling aspects of the series, including that casting. Former Power Rangers writer Tony Oliver appears on the episode and admits, “None of us [were] thinking stereotypes” at the time. He also points out that the Yellow Ranger was re-cast after the show’s pilot episode, with Trang stepping in for the non-Asian actor that was originally hired.
Oliver says he didn’t notice the problematic situation surrounding those particular Teenagers With Attitude until his assistant “pointed it out in a meeting one day,” and he now thinks “it was such a mistake.” EW surfaced a 2013 quote from Shuki Levi, who co-created the show with Haim Saban, who said the stereotyped casting “wasn’t intentional at all.”
The unfortunate situation didn’t last long in terms of the show’s ongoing legacy; after the show’s second season, both Jones and Trang departed the show, and the Black Ranger was thereafter played by Johnny Yong Bosch (who is Asian) and the Yellow Ranger was Karan Ashley (who is Black).
But fans remember, and the casting has taken its share of knocks over the years: Jordan Peele and Keegan Michael-Key’s Comedy Central sketch show Key & Peele once ran a sketch mocking the “Power Falcons,” in which every member of a superhero team refers to the Green Falcon as “Black Falcon” because he’s Black (he’s portrayed by Peele).
In the scheme of things, always casting a woman as the Pink Ranger feels like a much smaller complaint… but it feels worth pointing out as long as we’re talking about stereotypes. You can stream the Hollywood Demons series on Max.
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