Former Power Rangers writer says the way they cast Black and Yellow Rangers was a "mistake"
Entertainment Weekly (via the Daily Wire) says some former staffers on the live action children's series Might Morphin Power Rangers (which was adapted to comics, if memory serves), including mogul Haim Saban's contributors, think the way they cast the Black and Yellow Rangers with Black and Asian performers was a "mistake":
All that aside, Power Rangers isn't something I've ever cared for, and it's worth noting that a number of years ago, all for the sake of woke brownie points, a recent 2017 movie changed the Trini character to a lesbian, as if it were literally impossible to market the film without such a retcon (it was a box office failure, as the list on the bottom of this page notes). And wasn't some of the series' material borrowed from Japanese super-sentai programs? In that case, it's not an entirely original stateside production.
One of the key creative minds behind Mighty Morphin Power Rangers is owning up to a pair of casting choices widely decried as racially insensitive.As insufferable as I've found Saban's left-wing politics, it's regrettable that skin color has to be an issue at all, and if it's not an issue in Israel, why must it be so in the USA? Yet if they're leftist, then it's just like Saban - and Levi - to follow along with the leftist playbook, and say that to have the Black and Asian performers wear the black and yellow uniforms was nothing more than insulting and stereotypical. If Saban's going to be such a left-wing loyalist, then the PC answers provided either/both by him and his staffers is hardly surprising. It's vital to consider that when Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created Black Panther in 1966, they gave T'Challa a black costume, and that wasn't an issue in their time, so why did the Power Rangers staff suddenly have a problem with what they turned out? Answer: just so they can appease the modern PC crowd.
While crafting the first season of the children's superhero crime-fighting series, "None of us are thinking stereotypes," said former Power Rangers head writer Tony Oliver, speaking on "Dark Side of the Power Rangers," the latest episode of Investigation Discovery's new docuseries, Hollywood Demons.
That's why he says that the series was able to get all the way to air — and run for two seasons — with "the Black character the Black Ranger and the Asian character the Yellow Ranger." Oliver says it took "my assistant who pointed it out in a meeting one day" to realize the glaring, stereotype-driven casting at the heart of the show. "It was such a mistake," he reflected. [...]
In a 2013 oral history of the series, Saban's co-creator Shuki Levi claimed that Jones and Trang's controversial casting "wasn't intentional at all. At that time, Haim and I were new to this country. We didn't grow up in the same environment that exists in America with regard to skin color. We grew up in Israel, where being a Black person is like being any kind of color. It's not something we talked about all the time. It wasn't a big issue."
All that aside, Power Rangers isn't something I've ever cared for, and it's worth noting that a number of years ago, all for the sake of woke brownie points, a recent 2017 movie changed the Trini character to a lesbian, as if it were literally impossible to market the film without such a retcon (it was a box office failure, as the list on the bottom of this page notes). And wasn't some of the series' material borrowed from Japanese super-sentai programs? In that case, it's not an entirely original stateside production.
Labels: Black Panther, Europe and Asia, history, marvel comics, misogyny and racism, msm propaganda, politics
