‘Power Rangers’ Writer Says Racially-Coded Casting Was A ‘Mistake’

One “Mighty Morphin Power Rangers” creative insists no one was “thinking stereotypes” when the show made two questionable casting choices back in the ’90s.

Decades after the beloved kids’ superhero series debuted in 1993, former head writer Tony Oliver said it was a bad decision for the show to cast a Black actor as the Black Ranger and an Asian actor as the Yellow Ranger.

“It was such a mistake,” he said in the “Dark Side of the Power Rangers” episode of Investigation Discovery’s “Hollywood Demons” series, as recapped by Entertainment Weekly.

Oliver said he didn’t clock the racially loaded optics until his assistant “pointed it out in a meeting one day.”

It wasn’t immediately clear who was responsible for casting Walter Emanuel Jones as the Black Ranger and Thuy Trang as the Yellow Ranger, but Oliver said “none of us [were] thinking stereotypes” during the making of the show.

Jones’ character, Zack Taylor, “seemed to have the swagger of the group,” while Trang’s Trini Kwan was “the peaceful one, who tends to be the conscience of the group,” Oliver added.

He also noted, “Thuy was not our original Yellow Ranger,” pointing out the character was first played by multiracial actor Audri Dubois, who left over a pay dispute after the pilot.

While Oliver characterized the color choices as purely coincidental, Jones seemed to recognize the awkward connotation at the time. Per EW, the docuseries includes behind-the-scenes footage showing the actor saying, “My name’s Walter Jones, I play Zack. I’m Black, and I play the Black Ranger… go figure.”

However, Jones has also said he didn’t even notice the awkward casting until others pointed it out.

“Nobody really talked about me playing the Black Ranger at first,” he said in a 2014 interview. “But after Trang was hired everyone was like ‘Wait a minute! The Yellow Ranger is Asian and you’re the black ranger and you’re a black guy.’ They were going to replace Audri Dubois with another girl either way, but she just happened to be Asian.”

Later recasts of the Black and Yellow Rangers helped blur the controversy as the show went on.