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

https://ew.com/power-rangers-writer-calls-black-and-yellow-ranger-casting-a-mistake-11710918

42 comments

  2. They transcended the stereo types/type cast/ rascism if you asked me.

  5. Wasn’t the Yellow Ranger in the original footage actually a dude?

  6. Yep. That’s the reason the Pink ranger has a skirt on her suit but Yellow doesn’t!

  7. Asking my Asian partner her opinion on this, she just said: “the real question is why were two ice age mammals part of the Dinozord?”

  10. *Black Falcon*, homie, nobody is trying to get in your grill, so why don’t you stop being so *Black Falcon* about it?

  11. Red Ranger wasn’t an Indian. Clearly there were no ulterior motives.

  12. Nah, it wasn’t. I loved that the black ranger was a black guy. It’s probably the reason I still wear black a lot.

  15. I guess in today’s waters this was bad, but honestly I see no problem with this at all. Like someone else said red ranger should have been mega Indian lol, or some insane 90s American buff actor example Rambo xD

  18. Why though? Because people associate colors with people? No issue with the pink ranger having a skirt and being a girly girl though? It was a product of its time and the target demographic (children) didn’t see it as wrong unless their bigot parents chimed in and made it a joke.

  19. And the girl was pink. Felt all pretty obviously coded…

  20. I’m surprised the blue one wasnt a rainbow colored ranger.

  21. As a kid who loved the original I never put any correlation of race with their suit colors.

  22. they come off hella aloof in this article to the point where it reads as disingenuous. you’re telling me nobody clocked or pushed to reconsider the optics of it all until months or years later? my suspension of disbelief only goes so far. it’s not like these are new stereotypes or concepts being dealt with here.

  24. Walter Emanuel Jones literally just did Jim Cummings podcast and explained that he basically told them he wanted to be the black ranger before it was really established he had to be the black ranger. 

    He basically said he hated the blue suit and the way it looked, and the blue ranger was  already slated to be the nerd who couldn’t really fight, so that had to be Billy.

    Then he said since the red ranger was the leader there was no way he was going to be cast in that role at that time. But since in the original footage the red ranger was always backed by the black it fit his character to be the strong second. 

    The yellow ranger was already cast with a female. And the pink ranger obviously had to be a female. 

    Then the yellow ranger demanded more money and got replaced by Thuy.

  25. I really don’t care Yellow Ranger was Asian. It would be far worse to take a show based on a Japanese franchise (Super Sentai), which is superior in many ways, and not cast an Asian actor.

    Also for fans of the first season of Power Rangers, I really recommend at least familiarising yourself with the original Super Sentai series it was based on (Zyuranger and Dairanger) and the premise that the rangers change every year.

    It explains why Green Ranger shows up and disappears (his story in the original is so much better) and also explains why the show got so awkward with White Ranger (it tries to combine the sixth ranger from Dairanger and the mecha from Dairanger with the original five from Zyuranger).

  26. I say it is the same thing with pink ranger being always a woman.

    That’s the type of stereotype we have difficulty in erasing, but I don’t know how truly negatively impactful it is. Perhaps not that much.

  27. As a kid I recognized the pattern but I never attributed it with any racial stereotypes or anything negative

  28. I have a feeling the outrage is mostly just from white folks lol.

  29. I’m embarrassed that i never picked up on this until now

  30. Believe it or not, the casting for the black ranger came from a progressive place (for the 90s) initially. In the japanese version the red and black rangers are best friends and they wanted a black character and a white character to be best friends. Ended up with an unfortunate casting decision however.

  31. The mighty Morphin power Rangers were smart and swapped those colors. I watched the movie drunk recently and I was like wow that could have been bad

  34. https://youtu.be/CpSinxdbxY0?si=XjgRjpJKAsMPSMNb

    Here’s a video from only a few weeks ago of Walter Jones talking about this very thing. He calls it “powerful”. He goes into the BTS minutiae of who got what suit, saying he wanted to be the Black Ranger, that he was never going to be the leader or the nerd who wasn’t good at fighting, which the Zyuranger footage of the Red and Blue rangers portrayed, so Black was the only one for him.

    He does say that when Thuy Trang came on as Yellow then it was kind of odd, but it wasn’t anything nefarious or things that kids would care about.

    It’s funny when you realize that once Walter and Thuy were fired, they solved that problem right away by casting an asian man and a black woman as Black and Yellow.

  35. Flip side, it was the only way to get tv execs in the 90s to allow a black/asian character on tv

  36. Why did green falcon leave falcon formation, black falcon check in on that and report back

  37. We kinda joke but I really don’t think anything was meant by it. 
    It’s the 90s kid equivalent of the old Star Trek joke: The Hillbilly as a doctor, the Asian guy driving, the Alien as the scientist, the Black girl in charge of communications, and the Russian in charge of the secrets yuk yuk right?

    But you know….nobody cared about that. These were characters we believed in. And I don’t recall anyone seeing race. 

    Sometimes a tree is a tree. 

  38. One of my fav sketches.

    So we are gonna have to black rangers and two white rangers? No, he’s the white ranger because he’s the leader. You’re the pink ranger because you’re a girl.

    A gay Jew? Oh my god, I’m guessing you’re out and so is the other black guy. *teleport him to Africa* I’m from Connecticut!

    Now we’re not enough! No you’re not, Jorge, power sombrero!

  40. As I kid I never took it as anything more then a coincidence

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