It’s time for the truth to power up.
“Mighty Morphin Power Rangers” head writer Tony Oliver admitted it was a mistake to cast a Black actor in the role of the Black Power Ranger and an Asian actor as the Yellow Power Ranger.
“None of us [were] thinking stereotypes,” Oliver shared in the new Investigation Discovery series “Hollywood Demons.”
Walter Emanuel Jones, a black man, portrayed “Zack Taylor” as the Black Ranger and Thuy Trang, an Asian woman, as the Yellow Ranger “Trini Kwan” in the Emmy-nominated series that ran for two seasons in the 90s.
Oliver claimed he never connected the dots about the stereotypes until his assistant “pointed it out in a meeting one day.”
“It was such a mistake,” Oliver said.
Jones openly joked on-set about the casting decision.
“My name’s Walter Jones. I play Zack. I’m Black, and I play the Black Ranger — go figure,” Jones said in an old camcorder video from the set that was featured on Investigation Discovery.
On Wednesday, Jones opposed Oliver’s admission, calling the role “a milestone” and “an honor.”
“I understand the impulse to address what might be seen as cultural insensitivity, but calling it a ‘mistake’ would dismiss the impact it had on countless people around the world who found inspiration and representation in TV’s first Black superhero — morphin’ into none other than the Black Power Ranger,” Jones said.
“It wasn’t a mistake; it was a milestone. It was an honor.”
Jones said he was “never bothered” being the Black Ranger during his time on the show.
“I was happy about it when I first saw the suit,” Jones said on the Toon’d In with Jim Cummings podcast, released last month.
“I might look cool in red. I know I don’t look cool in blue because I’ve seen it. The black is what I wanted to wear. When I saw it, I said ‘I want this one’ and they said ‘That’s yours.’”
Trang initially wasn’t the first choice for Yellow Ranger.
Audri Dubois, a 5th-degree black belt with a diverse ethnic background that included Hispanic and Asian roots, was cast in the pilot episode, but could not join the show due to a pay dispute.
According to the Investigation Discovery episode, the original show had a non-union cast with actors like Austin St. John, David Yost, and Dubois, who were relatively inexperienced for television.
The producers reportedly paid the actors around $750 per half-hour episode even though leads on other union shows on television were making tens of thousands of dollars each episode.
Dubois tried negotiating for more money for each episode “so that I could make a living” in Los Angeles, but those efforts failed and she was not able to continue.
This opened the door for Trang to join the series and be edited into scenes from the pilot, initially played by Dubios.
Jones and Trang left the series in the mid-second season due to contractual and pay disputes.
