On this day, 28 February 1947, the 228 incident took place in Taiwan, when an anti-government uprising was violently suppressed by the nationalist Kuomintang government, killing thousands and beginning a white terror which would kill thousands more. Economic mismanagement and corruption had worsened living standards of the poor, and the price of rice had increased over 400-fold in just 16 months of nationalist rule. Then on 27 February a government tobacco agent killed a widow selling cigarettes. The following day protests began. Security forces cracked down violently, killing several, sparking an uprising across the island. Civilians took over large parts of the country, and formed committees to keep order and make demands of the administration, with some groups seizing weapons. On 8 March, Chinese troops from the mainland began trying to take back control, killing, mutilating and looting indiscriminately, and jailing and executing organisers. At least 5000 were killed, including many communists, against whom a “white terror” would then begin, and last until 1987, in which tens of thousands more people were imprisoned, executed or “disappeared”.
Pictured: A crowd in front of the Tobacco Monopoly Bureau, February 28, 1947.
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They worked 12-15 hour days six days a week for a show that made billions of dollars and barely made any money. Austin St. John was living in his jeep after leaving the show. Austin St. John said in a 2014 interview:
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. [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 in his mouth but he could not have cared less about making all this money, because he had this ownership. The hell with everybody else who was helping him make that money. That’s the way it’s always been.
The show was also really bad with safety regulations. Amy Jo Johnson almost died multiple times:
Yost, and Amy Jo Johnson, who played Kimberly, the Pink Ranger, were almost set on fire during the making of Power Rangers: The Movie in 1995, after a pyrotechnics stunt went wrong on the low-budget set.
“It was this machine and all of a sudden it started smoking”, Johnson explained last year.
“I could see smoke out of the corner of my eyes, I was like ‘What is happening?’, and then we realised that the machine was on fire.
“Just silly things like that, that on a union set would never happen.”
Johnson left the Power Rangers that same year, but returned for the 1997 movie.
In keeping with this disregard for on-set safety, Johnston was electrocuted on set during the filming of this, narrowly avoiding death.
They all made it work and made the best of it, but it definitely does not sound like the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers set was the best set to be on.
I remember hearing about situations like this from various Power Rangers actors at conventions. Since Power Rangers was a non-unionized show, they only made money off the hours they worked. They did not get any royalties from the merchandise. They worked 18 hours a day and only got Sundays and Christmas off.
Johnny Young Bosch himself said that after Power Rangers, he was couch surfing and basically homeless. During this time, he created his band, Eyeshine.
Austin St. John had to drop out of high school to play Jason and was the youngest of the original MMPR group. He would later join the military since he jumped from part-time job to part-time job after Power Rangers and would have to quit his job because people would recognize him and it would cause chaos at his places of work with people flooding in and trying to get an autograph or talk with him.
Walter Jones has a collection of Power Rangers merchandise, but 90% of it is what fans of the show have donated to him. He was not making enough money to be able to afford an action figure of himself and had to cut back on a lot of his usual creature comforts, like his comic book pull box, to essentially “ration his money” as he has put it. He nearly cried when he found out that his variant cover for Justice League vs Power Rangers featured him with his favorite hero The Flash.
David Yost was offered to come in as a guest cameo for giant battle in
Power Rangers Super Megaforce
but declined because he has not forgiven the company for how they treated him.
To this day there are MANY people who worked on Power Rangers who don’t like to acknowledge it because of how they were treated while on set or by the company. It wasn’t isolated to just Mighty Morphin. I can’t say for later series but it went on a lot during the early days of the franchise.
