Ludi Lin joins the upcoming Power Rangers movie as the new Black Ranger. A relative newcomer, Lin's resume includes short subjects and TV movies, with a notable, Chinese animated film known as Monster Hunt. Lin voiced the “Wind Magician” in the film released in July.
The casting has lead to some confusion amongst fans due to one aspect: Ethnicity. The original Black Ranger, Zack Taylor (played by Walter Jones) was African-American. There are a few reasons this could have been changed.
Many have called the original Power Rangers “racist” for casting an African-American as the Black Ranger and an Asian (the late Thuy Trang) as the Yellow Ranger. Although the role of the Yellow Ranger was originally given to Audri Dubois, a Hispanic-American.
Jones claims that the Ranger color assignments were coincidental:
“Nobody really talked about me playing the Black Ranger at first, but after Trang was hired everyone was like ‘Wait a minute! The Yellow Ranger is Asian and you’re the Black Ranger and you’re a Black guy.’ They were going to replace Audri Dubois with another girl either way, but she just happened to be Asian.”
However, the world has become more sensitive to these things since the early 1990s and recasting Zack as a different ethnicity might be Lionsgate and Saban's way of combating that. Or it's something else entirely...
Rumor has it that the movie could tie into the latest series, Power Rangers: Dino Charge. I don't put a lot of stock into that rumor, but this casting makes me wonder--We know which Rangers that Naomi Scott, Darce Montgomery and Ludi Lin will be playing, but the character names have not been released. Why is that? Is it possible they're not playing new versions of Kimberly, Jason and Zack, respectively? Could this be a new Ranger team? Will it still be based on Mighty Morphin'?
Time will tell, as they say. Saban and Lionsgate seem to be making more frequent casting announcements, so hopefully we'll know more details sooner than later.
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