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It’s long been known that, despite its overnight success, Power Rangers‘ behind-the-scenes drama saw its cast and crew earn very little of the blockbuster cash the series brought in as it exploded in the early ’90s. But in a new video together, two of the original members of the Mighty Morphin’ team opened up about just how sketchily they were treated, both before and after Saban realized the phenomenon it had got its spandex-clad hands on.
Speaking in a recent video for Fanward (via Popverse), Austin St. John and Walter Emanuel Jones–the original Red and Black rangers, Jason and Zack–discuss what it was like being young actors signing onto a show that became an overnight sensation. The answer? Sketchy contracts, non-union rates, and threats of immediate replacement–something that actually happened to one of their original co-stars, Audri DuBois, who played the Yellow Ranger in Power Rangers‘ pilot.
“After the pilot got picked up, she knew then that we were going to get screwed,” St. John recalled. “[DuBois] went to Haim Saban and was like ‘Hey, this is jack, You need to pay us more.’ And he fired her–he liked her. They got along.”
“The TV show itself was non-union… originally, we got a contract, and the contract was not that great,” Jones prefaced. “We were told, ‘Hey, you could take this contract and show it to your lawyers or to your agent, but first person that comes back and wants to change anything, we’re going to fire you.’”
Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers was an immediate success upon its debut in 1993, but that didn’t change future contracts the cast signed–nor did it change the rates the crew behind the cameras received either, even in the face of the show’s gruelling filming schedules. “I could remember a lot of the crew coming to me off camera being like, ‘Man, you guys should go union. Look at what they’re doing. You guys are getting screwed,’” St. John added. “Because the crew, they were getting paid even crappier than we were.”
St. John, Jones, and Thuy Trang, who replaced DuBois after the pilot as Trini the Yellow Ranger, all departed Power Rangers after the conclusion of season 2, and made more money making appearances for fans at external events than they did for actually filming. It would take decades–until Hasbro’s ownership of the Power Rangers brand and the production of the 2019 series, Beast Morphers, for the series to become a unionized production. And although the franchise faces an uncertain future again after Hasbro initiated a controversial fire sale of its costuming history (and perpetual rumors of new reboot shows and movies seem to flicker in and out of the morphing grid), one thing’s for sure: St. John and Jones made sure they were paid better when they returned to the franchise in the years since their exit.
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