Victoria Justice breaks silence on ‘Quiet On Set’ and Dan Schneider
Victoria Justice broke her silence on ‘Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV’, saying that former producer Dan Schneider owes her an apology.
unbranded – Entertainment
Decades after casting decisions for the “Mighty Morphin Power Rangers” sparked outrage, head writer Tony Oliver has some regrets.
The show, which premiered in 1993 and spawned a pop culture phenomenon, cast a Black actor in the role of the black Power Ranger and an Asian actor as the Yellow Ranger. The decision was widely viewed as insensitive and, in a new documentary, Oliver calls it a “mistake.”
“None of us are thinking stereotypes,” he said in an interview for “Dark Side of the Power Rangers,” the latest episode of the Investigation Discovery documentary “Hollywood Demons.” In fact, he revealed, it took one of his assistants pointing out the stereotype in a meeting for him to realize the optics of it.
While the show later established a pattern of swapping out actors for each color Ranger season to season, the mark made by the original casting was indelible. Walter Emanuel Jones, who played the original Black Ranger, even joked about the choice in behind-the-scenes footage from the show.
“My name’s Walter Jones, I play Zack. I’m Black, and I play the black Ranger — go figure,” he says in a clip from the “Dark Side of the Power Rangers.” The original Yellow Ranger was played by Thuy Trang.
“It was such a mistake,” Oliver said in the documentary, covering his face slightly and shaking his head.
“But Thuy was not our original Yellow Ranger,” he revealed. “It was actually Audri DuBois. She was the one who did the pilot episode. Don’t know why she left. You’ll have to ask her.”
DuBois, who was interviewed for the episode, told producers she exited over a pay dispute when the studio refused to give her enough money per episode to make a living and finance her move from Arizona.
“I try to be tough about it,” she said through tears. “It is what it is, you know.”
In an interview with Complex in 2013, the show’s writer and director Shukli Levy said the racial casting choice was not intentional.
“At that time, (show creator Haim Saban) and I were new to this country. We didn’t grow up in the same environment that exists in America with regards to skin color,” he told the outlet. “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. And that’s also how I felt in Paris, where we lived for seven years before coming here.”
Barbara Goodson, who played Rita Repulsa on the show, defended the decision to Complex at the time, characterizing it as a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” kind of situation.
“If they didn’t do it, people would say, ‘Well, why didn’t they make the Black Ranger a Black Ranger?’ You could get criticized either way,” she said. “The girl who played the Yellow Ranger after Thuy wasn’t Asian, she was Black. You could find something to scoff at everywhere.”
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