Yeah. I can believe that Trini was an accident. They wanted two girl rangers. Blue, Red, and Black are “boy colors” whereas Yellow is neutral.
And Zack’s character was pretty normal for the era (black guy who incorporates “hip hop” into everything he does) but there is zero chance it was not intentional to cast the Black guy as Zack the Black ranger.
And yeah. Even as kids on the playground we all knew that was racist as shit. I’ll always remember my homeroom teacher trying not to laugh her ass off while she was telling us we can’t talk about how they should have cast a Native American as the Red Ranger.
What’s funny is right before they changed costumes with ZEO, they gave Tommy a Native American ancestor and then he became the red ZEO ranger.
The real question is what they should have done with the blue ranger. All I can think of is David Carradine.
I found Rich Evans’ Lemmy account
Let’s be honest here: if the Carradines knew power rangers was a thing they would have insisted on putting on some yellow face and taking Thuy’s job.
Pink ranger must have been an accident, too.
No? Pink is a “girl” color. And even in the original sentai source material, Pink was a girl (hence the skirt). Yellow was a dude which is why you can really tell what scenes were filmed with the US stunt team/actors and what were from the original (hint: Is the bulge in the crotch or the chest?).
the optics might not have been the best but walter and thuy were amazing as power rangers
Should have cast a russian as the red ranger. I mean if you’re ALREADY being racist…
You could cast a person with depression as the blue ranger. Oh…I see you have that covered. And a female sex symbol as the pink ranger. Oh, thats covered too.
If you’re going to go full racist, red wouldn’t be Russian. They’d be native American.
It could be either. I was thinking red scare communists, since the show was just after the fall of the soviet union.
But your way works too.
Huh? How is being a communist, racist?
There’s no way they’d let a Russian play as the team leader.
Hmm…
tldr Saban didnt want unionized actors and went out of their way to cast functionally nobodies for the lowest price. Its why after this dispute, it was much less common for cast members to be retained for the next season. Outside of Jason David Frank and Johnny Yong Bosch, it was much more rare for any ex cast member to return in a series several series later.
“asshole move made with full awareness” is probably a better term than “mistake”
I have a vague memory that the original show from Japan had a man in the yellow costume and when it was adapted for American audiences they wanted yellow to be a woman. This lead to a effectively trans character because of an occasionally noticeable bulge.
I’m just goin to leave this here.
Related key & peele skit https://youtu.be/mOyE_l80D4Y
Still one of my wifes favorite sketches of theirs.
The pink for girl and blue for boy was there too.
Is red the odd one out?
/s
