It's Morphin' Time

It all started in a hotel room. Music producer Haim Saban, now 74, was watching TV while visiting Tokyo in 1984 when he came across the popular Super Sentai franchise.

HAIM SABAN I was lying in bed, flipping through the three channels that were basically showing Japanese game shows. And then this show came on where I saw five kids in spandex battling monsters, and—I might come across as a bit of a child here—I fell in love. I thought it’d be a great opportunity [to create an American version of Super Sentai]. I’d never seen anything like it on TV in Europe or Israel or America. Action scenes are the most expensive to shoot, but you didn’t see their faces in the battle scenes, so I thought, “You can use the [Super Sentai] footage from Japan.” But it took eight years of trying to convince different people. People would tell me that I should focus on my music because TV’s not my business, that [the pilot] was embarrassing, so bad. But I didn’t give up. Finally, Margaret Loesch at Fox Kids said she’d give it a try.

Thus began a casting search for “teenagers with attitude”—and martial-arts skills. Soon Saban had his team of superheroes who would play the Rangers when out of their helmets and voice them when the Japanese battle scenes were used: Red Ranger, Jason (AUSTIN ST. JOHN, now 44); Pink Ranger, Kimberly (AMY JO JOHNSON, 48); Black Ranger, Zack (WALTER EMANUEL JONES, 48); Blue Ranger, Billy (DAVID YOST, 49); Green Ranger, Tommy (JASON DAVID FRANK, 45); and Yellow Ranger, Trini (THUY TRANG, who passed away at 27 in 2001 [see sidebar]).