Power Rangers writer says casting Black and Asian actors as Black and Yellow Rangers was ‘mistake’

Writer Tony Oliver said: ‘None of us are thinking stereotypes’

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers writer Tony Oliver has said it was “such a mistake” to cast a Black actor to play the Black Ranger and an Asian actor to play the Yellow Ranger on the first two seasons of the 1990s superhero show.

The series, which debuted in 1993, starred Walter Emanuel Jones as Zack Taylor/Black Ranger and Thuy Trang as Trini Kwan/Yellow Ranger.

Speaking on Investigation Discovery's new docuseries, Hollywood Demons, Oliver said the casting choices, widely seen as racially insensitive, were an oversight, adding: “None of us are thinking stereotypes.”

He continued: "It was my assistant who pointed it out in a meeting one day, that we had made the Black character the Black Ranger and the Asian character the Yellow Ranger. It was such a mistake.”

Oliver went on to point out that “Thuy was not our original Yellow Ranger.”

In the original pilot for the series, the Yellow Ranger was played by Audri Dubois, who quit the show following a pay dispute. Trang was added to the cast and edited into the pilot before it aired.

The Power Rangers strike a pose in the 1990s superhero show ‘Mighty Morphin Power Rangers’ (Saban Entertainment)

Behind-the-scenes footage included in “Dark Side of the Power Rangers” shows that the cast, if not the writers, were aware of the stereotypes at play. In one scene, Jones says to the camera: “My name’s Walter Jones, I play Zack. I’m Black, and I play the Black Ranger. Go figure.”

When the series was rebooted as a movie in 2017, the characters were recast. A Black actor, RJ Cyler, played the Blue Ranger while an Asian actor, Ludi Lin, played the Black Ranger. Latin pop star Becky G played the Yellow Ranger.

However, the film attracted a different kind of controversy after it failed to deliver on a claim of LGBTQ+ representation.

Writing for The Independent at the time, Kaan K said: “As a queer person who grew up in a ‘straight’ culture, you can imagine my excitement when I read online that the newest Yellow Power Ranger was going to be gay...

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“I went to the cinema with high hopes – the director called the Yellow Ranger’s ‘coming-out’ scene ‘pivotal’, after all. Finally there would be a cute girl who the Yellow Ranger falls for, I thought, just like there have been so many heterosexual romances in Power Rangers in the past.

“So you can imagine my disappointment when her ‘queerness’ was left so ambiguous that you could have easily left the cinema thinking she was straight.”