It was the late 1990s, and I was standing in front of the bathroom mirror of our childhood home, holding my dad’s solid-metal belt buckle up with a pseudo-serious expression on my baby face. Fortunately, I wasn’t doing a YouTuber-style makeup review, but was in fact mirroring the transformation sequence of my favorite TV idols, the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.
Power Rangers are known in Vietnamese as “Siêu nhân,” and Mighty Morphin Power Rangers (5 Anh Em Siêu Nhân) was the first-ever English-language iteration of the long-enduring franchise that spawned numerous sequels from east to west. It was also my first and only brush with Siêu nhân, as Pokémon and Disney would arrive soon after, taking over my entire childhood and leaving little time for intergalactic crime fighting.
Created by a pair of Israeli entertainment producers after they came across its Japanese predecessor, Mighty Morphin premiered in 1993 with a cast of relatively unknown newcomers and a lot of doubts that America would take well to the violent nature of spacefaring fights. According to the plot, five high schoolers in California were given the ability to transform into Power Rangers, a team of superhuman soldiers tasked with protecting Earth against alien villains. Apart from a few racially insensitive casting decisions — Thuy Trang, of Asian descent, was given the role of the Yellow Ranger, while Walter Emanuel Jones, who is African American, plays the Black Ranger — the series was an instant hit across North America and even internationally.
The opening sequence of the first season of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, released in 1993.
Thuy Trang was born in 1973 in Saigon, but migrated to the US with her mother when she was five or six on a cargo ship via Hong Kong. It’s also important to note that Trang was her surname and Thuy (diacritic unknown) was her first name. The family eventually reunited with her father and resettled in California in 1980. After graduating from high school, she got a scholarship to study civil engineering in college, but was spotted by a talent scout while hanging out with friends and switched her focus to acting, at least for a while.
Thuy Trang as Trini Kwan, the Yellow Ranger. Photo via BuzzFeed.
Thuy was officially cast as Trini Kwan, the Yellow Ranger in Mighty Morphin in 1993, from a pool of 500 other actresses. The casting process wasn’t race-specific, as Thuy recalled seeing hopeful Trinis from all ethnicities in the room, but little did the production or Thuy Trang know at that point that her role as Trini would turn out to be a groundbreaking role model for millennial Asian Americans during their formative years. The reception of Thuy’s portrayal of Trini was very positive, as she learnt over the course of her tenure at Mighty Morphin that an Asian superhero was an unprecedented point of pride.
“Asians are not portrayed in the media very well, and there are not many roles for Asian people except for the stereotypes — gangsters, hookers, things like that,” Thuy Trang shared in an interview in 1993. “A lot of older Asian people come up to me and say that I'm doing a service to the Asian community.”
Admittedly, primary school me didn’t even realize that she was Vietnamese, or Asian for that matter. The real name of the actress appeared for all of three seconds in the opening sequence, and, as an ethnic Vietnamese born in Vietnam, it wasn’t extraordinary to see an Asian person on screen, because, well, everybody else is Vietnamese on local TV. This undoubtedly wasn’t the case for millennials of Asian, and especially Vietnamese, descent in the US, as they could instantly connect with Thuy Trang’s Yellow Ranger and even her own personal background as a refugee in the US.
A fan art of Trini Kwan by Chris Jones. Image via Reddit/Instagram user @theoriginalmistajonz.
One of them is Chi-Hung Ta, who founded the Thuy Trang Tribute website in 1997. The site, still operational 28 years later, remains the most comprehensive multimedia resource on her to date, even though new materials are understandably scant, considering Thuy Trang had passed away for over 20 years now. “When Mighty Morphin Power Rangers debuted in 1993, I was slightly older than the target audience. But, I watched because of Thuy Trang's portrayal of Trini Kwan, the Yellow Ranger. I recognized Thuy as being Vietnamese, whose immigrant story matched my own,” Chi-Hung writes in the site’s About Us section.
Thuy Trang took over the role from actress Audri Dubois, who played the Yellow Ranger in the pilot, but over the course of 80 episodes of Mighty Morphin across two seasons, she made the role of Trini Kwan her own. Thuy Trang was also an avid athlete and martial artist, having taken up Shaolin Kung Fu since she arrived in the US, and even got a black belt. She was also a forthright young woman who wasn’t afraid to speak out against injustice, and perhaps, it was this bluntness that didn’t sit well with the network executives behind Mighty Morphin.
The original cast in a Japanese promo poster. From top to bottom, clockwise: Jason David Frank (green), David Yost (blue), Austin St. John (red), Amy Jo Johnson (pink), Thuy Trang (yellow), and Walter Emanuel Jones (black). Photo via Henshin Grid.
In 1995, in the middle of the second season of Mighty Morphin, it was announced that Thuy Trang was leaving the show, alongside Austin St. John and Walter Emanuel Jones, who played the Red and Black Rangers, respectively. The reasons given were contract disputes, though we have recently learnt that there were more behind the scenes, thanks to an episode of the docuseries Hollywood Demons, which delved into the seedy underbellying of the film industry.
According to the episode, titled “Dark Side of the Power Rangers,” merely a year after its premiere, Mighty Morphin was already shaping up to be a lucrative cash cow, earning its creators over a billion dollars in just toy sales. The actors, who were relative unknowns at the time of its launch, didn’t see a dime of the merchandise money. The jobs were non-union, and they were reportedly making just US$60,000 per year each, so when their first contract was up mid-season, the three joined forces to negotiate for better pay, a percentage of the toy earnings, and union recognition. “We were broke,” St. John said, detailing the financial pressures of having to take a second job on top of being on a demanding TV production, which was raking in big bucks for the execs.
The transformation sequence of Mighty Morphin.
The disputes reached the climax at a major presentation of FOX, with many of the network’s stakeholders present. Thuy Trang took the stage to deliver a blistering speech, chastising the show owners for failing to fairly compensate the actors while they were the ones anchoring the ratings. The network response was swift and straightforward: all three were fired from the show and instantly replaced. In the Mighty Morphin world, the reason given for the characters’ exit was that the three teens were chosen as representatives in an international “Peace Conference” in Switzerland, and their powers and colored uniforms were passed on to new faces.
One can’t help but wonder if things would have turned out differently had all the actors banded together to foot the demands, something Amy Jo Johnson, who played the Pink Ranger, also regretted not doing. The cast of Friends, another smash hit to have come out of the early 1990s, successfully negotiated increased and equal pay for the six friends, once the show became a household name.
Following Thuy Trang's departure from Mighty Morphin, she only appeared in two other film projects in 1996, and expressed struggles finding roles as an Asian American actress. Those wishful Hollywood aspirations would be shelved forever just a few years later. In 2001, she was in a car with actress Angela Rockwood and another friend, Steffiana de la Cruz, driving between San Jose and Los Angeles. The two girls were to be bridesmaids for Rockwood’s upcoming wedding with Dustin Nguyen. Cruz, the driver, struck some loose gravel and lost control of the car. The accident injured Cruz and rendered Rockwood paraplegic, while Thuy Trang succumbed to fatal injuries on the way to the hospital. She was 28 years old.
Power Rangers have continued to put out successful iterations and introduced new batches of rangers since then, to the point where you can probably guess a new friend’s age by the generation of Power Rangers that they were obsessed with as a child. This ever-churning cycle might be what Thuy Trang and her colleagues didn’t realize at the time when they naively, but rightfully, stuck their neck out to ask for fair pay back then: Power Rangers are replaceable and kids abandon old toys for shiny new ones faster than you can shout “Saber-tooth Tiger! Transform!”
On Thuy Trang’s part, Hollywood might have been quick to replace her for fighting for her deserved compensation, but Vietnamese never forget. She was the first, and for 30 years, only Vietnamese Power Ranger — that is a pretty badass legacy to leave behind. Spoiler alert: the 2023 Netflix special Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: Once & Always revealed that Trini had a daughter, Minh Kwan, who took over the family business by becoming the Yellow Ranger.
Still, I wish Thuy Trang could be around now to see the 2020s, when the political and social climate, at least in Hollywood, has improved to the point when Asian-led rom-coms and all-Asian ensembles are much more prevalent. Perhaps she could have been the steely mother in Crazy Rich Asians instead of Michelle Yeoh, or the lovestruck sport writer in Set It Up in place of Lucy Liu? Wake me up before I subsume into the reverie of a Thuy Trang renaissance à la Ke Huy Quan's. Thuy Trang was an icon, and may she rest in peace.
