The Power Rangers' Oddest Details That Change The Way You Remember The Show

In the ninth episode of the show's first season, there's a shot of a Megazord with a random, unmentioned and unexplained Japanese kid just kinda standing there next to him. In subsequent shots, he's gone. Was this some kid who randomly wandered onto the set and into a shot? Did we hallucinate that?

Turns out -- as several of our Power Rangers-savvy Facebook fans pointed out -- the kid was actually part of the plot in the Japanese show Kyōryū Sentai Zyuranger, which Power Rangers re-used some of the Megazord battle footage from. So in this particular shot, the recycled footage happened to include this kid but the U.S. show never explained it, then just moved on.

The first few seasons of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers were an absolute mess behind the scenes. Mighty Morphin Power Rangers was a non-union show, which means that the cast wasn't represent by the Screen Actors Guild, so the producers didn't have to give the actors any of the protections or fair pay that is part of a standard union contract. As a result, the actors were paid a pittance.  

"I mean, we were a non-union show. Literally, we were being paid, I think, tops $600 a week. No residuals; absolutely not one residual," Amy Jo Johnson, the original Pink Ranger, said during an interview on the "No Pink Spandex" podcast. Austin St. John, the original Red Ranger, told The Huffington Post:

"We weren’t paid a lot, at all. I could have worked the window at McDonalds and probably made the same money the first season. It was disappointing, it was frustrating, it made a lot of us angry. [Executive producer Haim Saban] just had absolutely zero conscience about making billions using our faces because it was his idea and he owned it. He felt like, screw us. I don’t want to put works [sic] in his mouth but he could not have cared less about making all this money, because he had this ownership."

Midway through Season 2, St. John left the show, along with Thuy Trang and Walter Emanuel Jones (the Yellow Ranger and Black Ranger, respectively). Johnson doesn't mince words about why they left:

"Austin and Walter and Thuy had left because they wanted [the show] to go Union...[the producers] said, “Really? You want to become Union. Okay, I’m just going to replace you guys.” So it became the Power Rangers thing. I always say it’s kind of like Menudo. Right? Because the members in the band always changed, so we became completely replaceable, right?"

That's right, the first Yellow Ranger was actually played by a Latina actress, Audri Dubois, and she starred on the first episode. After filming the pilot, she asked for more money and was given the boot according to a TMZ interview with Walter Jones. Then we got Trini, who will always and forever be the only Yellow Ranger, ever.

Years before he starred in one of the most beloved shows of all time, Breaking Bad actor Bryan Cranston did voice acting for Might Morphin’ Power Rangers. There were two separate occasions – once to play a villain named Snizzard, the other to play another villain, named Twin Man. Bonus fact: some say that the Blue Ranger, Billy Cranston, is named after Bryan.