In the 1990s, no TV show defined my childhood better than Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. I would have given anything to be one of the teens selected by Zordon to defend the Earth from evil… but those feelings have changed since I watched a recent documentary available with a Max subscription.
The third episode of Hollywood Demons, “Dark Side of the Power Rangers,” reveals some heartbreaking facts about the stars of the long-running franchise that I had never heard before, such as details regarding the death of Tommy Oliver actor, Jason David Frank, or that original Red Ranger actor Austin St. John was arrested for fraud. However, there was one upsetting behind-the-scenes story that I was aware of and was shocked to find it was not even briefly mentioned in the doc. Allow me to shed some light on the topic.
The Original Blue Ranger Actor Was Bullied For His Sexuality
The original iteration of the Power Rangers, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers (which was actually the American update of Japan’s Super Sentai Zyuranger), cast David Yost as the Blue Ranger, Billy Cranston. In a 2010 interview with No Pink Spandex, the actor first publicly acknowledged that he was gay, and also revealed that his sexuality affected his time on the show. He was called an offensive slur on set enough times that he feared it would lead him to take his own life.
After Power Rangers Zeo premiered, Yost walked away from the show in 1996, and spent the next two years trying to “pray the gay away.” This eventually caused him to have a nervous breakdown, for which he was hospitalized for five weeks. Afterward, he decided to move to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, for a year, where he was able to learn to accept his true self.
David Yost Would Reprise Billy Years Later
Despite his traumatic reasoning for initially leaving the Power Rangers franchise, Yost did not completely put his “morphin time” behind him. In more recent years, the actor has actively attended conventions where he is celebrated for his time playing Billy. In fact, his exit from Power Rangers Zeo would not be the last we saw of him in the blue suit.
In 2023, Yost starred in a Netflix-exclusive, 30-year anniversary special called Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: Once & Always, which also reunited him with Walter Emanuel Jones as Zack Taylor, Karan Ashley as Aisha Campbell, and more from the original series. That same year, he reprised the role once more for an episode of the 30th iteration of the franchise, Power Rangers: Cosmic Fury.
The topic of David Yost’s struggles was actually in the news as recently as 2016, when Bryan Cranston (who played Zordon in the 2017 reboot) apologized for making an offensive joke about Yost’s sexuality during a 2009 interview with IGN, which makes his exclusion from “Dark Side of the Power Rangers” all the more surprising to me. However, he luckily did manage to endure his trauma and come out on top, which, as the doc reveals, quite a few of the franchise’s stars cannot say. I suppose the producers of Hollywood Demons were more concerned with the more tragic stories, but I still feel Yost deserved a few minutes to tell his.
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