A decades-old casting controversy around Mighty Morphin Power Rangers is back in the spotlight after former head writer Tony Oliver said he now views one early decision as “such a mistake”: casting Walter Emanuel Jones, a Black actor, as the Black Ranger, and Thuy Trang, a Vietnamese American actress, as the Yellow Ranger. Oliver revisited the issue in the Investigation Discovery docuseries Hollywood Demons, saying the team didn’t clock the racial optics at the time and that it took an assistant pointing it out for them to realize how it could read on-screen.
The comments reignited a long-running critique of the show’s original lineup, where the color-coding of suits uncomfortably aligned with the ethnicity of two of its stars. Oliver has framed it as unintentional rather than malicious, but still an avoidable oversight that looks worse in hindsight precisely because Power Rangers was aimed at kids and became a global phenomenon.
There’s also a specific behind-the-scenes wrinkle to how it happened: Trang wasn’t the Yellow Ranger in the pilot. Reports note that actress Audri Dubois originally played the Yellow Ranger but left after a pay dispute, and Trang replaced her for the series.
Jones responded publicly after Oliver’s remarks made headlines, pushing back on the idea that his casting was simply an embarrassment. He said it “wasn’t a mistake; it was a milestone,” emphasizing the pride he felt in being a Black superhero on TV and the impact the character had on viewers.
The broader conversation in Hollywood Demons also touches on the reality that, despite the show’s success, early cast members dealt with low pay and difficult working conditions—issues that reportedly contributed to multiple departures after Season 2. Later seasons also reshuffled the “color/ethnicity” optics when new Rangers joined, including Karan Ashley (a Black actress) as the Yellow Ranger and Johnny Yong Bosch (a Korean American actor) as the Black Ranger.
What’s worth being precise about, though: calling Trang “Asian” is technically true, but vague—she was Vietnamese American, and the discourse is really about how easily TV shorthand can slip into stereotypes when nobody in the room slows down and asks, “How is this going to land?” That’s the part Oliver says the production missed, while Jones argues the cultural impact of representation still mattered and still does.
