Parents Beware: Gay 'Power Rangers' Star Brags About LGBT Content
If you turn on the reunion special “Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers: Once & Always” on Netflix, you might be expecting reasonably unobjectionable stuff. But, welcome to 2023, where “representation” and “trailblazing” are two words that need to be attached to anything intended for your kids to come out of a major studio.
Thus, as the openly gay actor who plays the Blue Ranger, David Yost, told Entertainment Weekly, he’s happy to see a scene featuring a gay couple in the new special, included for no other reason than … it features a gay couple.
“I think it’s great that we add an element like that obviously into where we are, because it’s so important that people do see representation,” Yost said in an interview with EW published Wednesday, the same day the “Power Rangers” special became available for viewing on Netflix.
“It’s taken a long time to get there. So to have it in this special I think is great, and to just have it be like it’s just an everyday thing, I think is awesome.”
In the original version of the show, which debuted in 1993 according to the Internet Movie Database, Yost played Billy Cranston, who was given the ability to turn into the Blue Ranger by an extra-terrestrial named Zordon. Zordon came from the home planet of sorceress Rita Repulsa, who has arrived on Earth and has set her sights on conquering it — except all of her plots seemed to revolve around conquering the fictional town of Angel Grove, California, where all the Power Rangers conveniently attended high school.
Any more explanation of the plot and I’ll hurt your head or mine. What really happened was that action footage from a low-budget Japanese rubber-monster series called Kyōryū Sentai Zyuranger was mixed with equally low-budget footage shot in Southern California to create a show that became a surprise cultural phenomenon. It has undergone numerous other iterations (“Mighty Morphin’ Alien Rangers”, “Power Rangers Zeo”, “Power Rangers in Space”) since the original ended in 1996.
Entertainment producer Haim Saban talked in a 2018 interview with EW about how the idea for the original show came about while he was on a visit to Tokyo in 1984: “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.”
So, he fought for the rights to get the footage, eventually obtained it, and the rest is history. Except, of course, Yost didn’t have a particularly good experience, something he claims was because of his sexual orientation. As EW noted in its Wednesday article, the actor “has been open about how the homophobia he faced while working on ‘Mighty Morphin Power Rangers’ led him to walk away from the hit series in the 1990s.”
“The reason that I walked off is that I was called ‘f**’ one too many times,” Yost said in 2010. “I had just heard that several times while working on the show from creators, producers, writers, directors … Basically I just felt like i was continually being told I was not worthy of being where I am because I’m a gay person. And I’m not supposed to be an actor. And I’m not a superhero.”
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But now we have inclusivity — which, in the case of “Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers: Once & Always,” we have, according to EW, a “scene in which Yellow Ranger Trini’s daughter Minh (Charlie Kersh) helps a man and his boyfriend fend off some of Rita Repulsa’s Putty Patrollers.”
If you’re an adult and you can read that sentence with a straight face, you’re way more of a geek than I will ever be, and keep in mind you’re dealing with someone who falls asleep with episodes of “Mystery Science Theater 3000” playing as background noise. However, the point is that 1) the scene was wholly superfluous except to broadcast the show’s wokeness, and 2) as the actor noted in the interview, this isn’t the first time the “Power Rangers” franchise has gone woke in regards to LGBT content.
“Yost now says he was glad to see Power Rangers’ first moment of LGBTQ representation in a 2021 episode of ‘Power Rangers Dino Fury,’ which found Green Ranger Izzy (Tessa Rao) holding hands with Fern (Jacqueline Joe),” EW noted.
Now, in a way, it’s worth pointing out that it’s difficult to tell whether the reunion special is really for actual kids or for kids at heart who may be in their 30s or 40s. As the gaming and entertainment website Polygon notes, the show actually opens with something you’d never see on an episode of “Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers” back in the 1990s, which is one of the Rangers dying; the actress who played the original Yellow Ranger, Thuy Trang, died in a 2001 auto accident.
While some of the original Power Rangers chose not to return, the plot chose to deal with that by Rita Repulsa capturing and shrinking the other Power Rangers from the various Power Rangers series — well, really, explaining this for any longer makes it sound more complex than the plot to a Christopher Nolan movie. The point is that this might just be engineered so that über-geeks who still long to see some of the original members of the “Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers” as Power Rangers can do so.
That being said, I don’t think that “Power Rangers Dino Fury” is being aimed at that same crowd and it’s still stuffing LGBT wokeness in there — the same way that the special is. Furthermore, if you want your kids to be entertained for an hour or so on Netflix and you see there’s a Power Rangers reunion that was just released, that’s going to be one of your default go-tos, right?
Furthermore, just a reminder that this is endemic throughout the industry. Remember these undercover videos from the fine people at Disney talking about how they were hard at work indoctrinating your kids?
SCOOP: I’ve obtained video from inside Disney’s all-hands meeting about the Florida parental rights bill, in which executive producer Latoya Raveneau says her team has implemented a “not-at-all-secret gay agenda” and is regularly “adding queerness” to children’s programming. pic.twitter.com/eJnZMpKIXT
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) March 29, 2022
SCOOP: Disney corporate president Karey Burke says, “as the mother [of] one transgender child and one pansexual child,” she supports having “many, many, many LGBTQIA characters in our stories” and wants a minimum of 50 percent of characters to be LGBTQIA and racial minorities. pic.twitter.com/oFRUiuu9JG
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) March 29, 2022
David Yost is an adult and I don’t particularly have an opinion one way or the other regarding his romantic life. He’s not a member of my church. I don’t even know his opinions on faith nor would I be particularly inclined to listen to them even if they were in a thoroughly accessible place. If he suffered from homophobic abuse during his time on the original “Power Rangers” show, I feel genuinely sorry for the man; nothing excuses the behavior he describes, if it happened as described.
The way to rectify this, however, isn’t to shove LGBT content into kids’ entertainment wherever possible on the assumption that issues regarding whether or not same-sex relationships and transgender ideology are sinful have been settled in the cultural left’s favor — and everyone who doesn’t believe that is a bigot and needs the establihsment media to re-educate their children.
This is hardly the worst offender, mind you, but parents should be aware that this isn’t the “Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers” they grew up with — and, as Yost noted in the EW interview, it hasn’t been that way for a while, either.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
