Ron Banks
It was the kind of crowd you only saw for rock stars or royalty. On February 21, 1994, Universal Studios Hollywood buckled under the weight of the number one children’s TV show in America. By sunrise, 35,000 fans had flooded the park to see six brightly colored heroes take the stage—the Power Rangers.
News helicopters circled overhead. Traffic stretched for miles. Merchandise vanished within minutes.
When six heroes finally stepped onto the stage—Jason, Kimberly, Billy, Zack, Tommy, and Trini—the crowd erupted. It was the first and only time the original team would ever appear together publicly.
Except it wasn’t the original team.
Months earlier, another actress had worn the yellow suit, filmed the unaired pilot and helped shape what Mighty Morphin Power Rangers would become. Her name was Audri Dubois.
Becoming Trini
Hollywood is full of stories about people who helped shape something iconic, only to be replaced once success seemed within reach. One of the most famous examples came in 1984, when Eric Stoltz was removed from Back to the Future (1985) after weeks of filming, his performance later reduced to trivia—and even a meta-joke in Deadpool 2 (2018).
Dubois’s story followed a different path. She didn’t lose the role—she walked away from it.
When I spoke with Dubois, she described a life built around discipline and purpose long before Power Rangers. Growing up in Arizona, she earned her black belt before she could drive. By her early 20s, she was teaching classes and competing on the tournament circuit. She trained within the same karate lineage as Jason David Frank, arguably the most legendary Ranger in the franchise. And when she wasn’t in the dojo, she was behind a camera or writing for Red Dragon Illustrator magazine.
Her spark began years earlier at Mann’s Chinese Theatre, where an eight-year-old Audri watched Bruce Lee move like no one she’d ever seen. “He wasn’t large in stature,” she recalled, “yet his movements were effortless, fast, and powerful.” She left the theater convinced she could inspire people the same way.
When she decided to give acting a serious try, she signed with a small agency and immediately landed an audition for a meek character named Trini in something called Dino Rangers—a strange, low-budget pilot that no one explained was martial-arts-based. When the producers asked whether she really held a third-degree black belt, she bowed politely, then exploded into a flurry of precise strikes, stopping a kick inches from a producer’s face. The room went silent. She booked the part on the spot.
In the days that followed, she learned her interpretation reshaped the character. Trini was no longer timid but grounded and disciplined. A martial artist who valued control over aggression. “The smart, tough conscience of the group,” Audri explained, “the first to walk away from a fight, but also the first to step in to protect someone else.”
Cracks in the Command Center
Once on set, filming moved quickly. When I asked Dubois what she remembered most about filming, it wasn’t the action scenes, but the camaraderie: David Yost’s composure as Billy, Amy Jo Johnson’s quirkiness as Kimberly, Walter Jones’s constant jokes as Zack, and Austin St. John’s natural leadership as Jason. Between takes, they once slipped off set together, leaving producers frantically radioing, “The Power Rangers are missing!” When executive producer Winston Richard eventually found them, they expected trouble—instead, he joined in, hiding out and joking with them.
But the jokes didn’t last.
During a scene in the Command Center, Romy J. Sharf—the actress inside the Alpha 5 costume—could barely see through her headpiece and had to move quickly across an elevated stage. “We all held our breath, hoping she wouldn’t fall,” Audri recalled. She didn’t, but moments like that showed how fragile the production was.
It became impossible to ignore the things that made her feel uneasy. From the start, she sensed the show’s depiction of martial arts didn’t match the discipline she’d trained her whole life to protect. “Martial arts teach restraint, not aggression,” she said. “But our first fight scene was in a bowling alley, and it felt unnecessarily violent for a children’s show.”
As Dubois remembered it, the red flags multiplied when contracts arrived: five-year, non-union deals with no royalties, no residuals, no safety guarantees, and clauses that tied management directly to production. “After deductions, we would have made just a few dollars an hour.”
Her breaking point came on a scorching afternoon when extras in thick rubber Putty suits began collapsing from heat exhaustion while the show’s creator Haim Saban sat nearby in an air-conditioned limo. When one performer had to be hospitalized, Dubois refused to continue filming until she knew the performer was receiving care. “That’s when I realized this wasn’t the environment I wanted to be part of.” She walked away and later found out the others had been told she was fired.
When auditions reopened for the Yellow Ranger role, the show found its new face in the late Thuy Trang. For millions of kids who rarely saw themselves represented on screen, her Trini became a symbol of courage and compassion—and with her, the new lineup launched a phenomenon.
A Billion-Dollar Phenomenon
After premiering on August 28, 1993, a scrappy, low-budget mix of American footage and Japanese action sequences suddenly became the biggest children’s show on television—and one of the most profitable. That success created an overnight demand for merchandise.
Before Power Rangers, Bandai America’s biggest product was a line of sidewalk chalk. Within a year of the show’s debut, the company was generating nearly a billion dollars in retail sales. Toy shelves were wiped clean. Parents jammed phone lines demanding restocks, and by 1994, Bandai had opened nearly a dozen new factories just to keep up—a surge later documented in The Toys That Made Us.
The scale of it all hit Audri. “I’ll never forget seeing the news footage of Power Rangers arriving in Texas—thousands of fans screaming at the airport,” she said. “I felt happy for them, proud of my friends. For a moment, I wondered what it might’ve been like to experience that level of excitement.”
Only later did she learn the truth. “Austin told me that the people getting off that plane weren’t even the actual Rangers—they were doubles used for publicity because the main cast was stuck on set.”
The frenzy she saw on TV was an image, multiplied, marketed and sold. “That revelation helped me let go of any lingering regret,” she admitted.
The Price of Power
Behind the skyrocketing profits, the people who made the show a sensation were treated like background extras. As the franchise barreled toward its first feature film, actors Austin St. John and Walter Emanuel Jones have said they, along with Thuy Trang, walked away amid contract disputes. They were earning about $600 a week for 12-hour days, with no union protection or residuals—confirmed by Amy Jo Johnson and Walter Jones in later interviews.
The Screen Actors Guild later criticized Saban Entertainment over pay and labor practices, eventually barring its members from working on Saban-owned productions.
By the time Power Rangers: The Movie hit theaters in 1995, several original cast members were gone, and none of them saw the profits their work built.
In hindsight, Audri’s departure looked less like a missed opportunity and more like an act of foresight.
The Ranger Legacy
Over the decades, the Yellow Ranger mantle has passed through countless hands. In the 2017 Power Rangers reboot, Becky G reimagined Trini for a new generation—a more conflicted teenager wrestling with identity in ways that reflected the era. In 2023, Netflix’s Power Rangers: Once & Always honored the franchise’s roots, revealing Trini’s daughter taking up her mother’s mantle alongside returning Rangers Walter Emanuel Jones and David Yost. Around the same time, BOOM! Studios announced Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Return, co-written by Amy Jo Johnson—a continuation of the original team’s story. Even after countless reboots, the original team remains the heartbeat of the franchise.
Today, Dubois lives in California, working both in front of and behind the camera, running a small production company focused on independent projects. Her current slate includes Jenny Jupiter, a two-volume comic series; Atom, a children’s book; and two feature films in development.
She trains regularly, lives clean, and stays deeply connected to the martial arts community—including her close relationship with Jason David Frank’s son, Jacob, and his boys. “They’re like family to me,” she said. “Staying connected with them reminds me that martial arts is as much about family as discipline.”
She also stays in touch with fans and former collaborators who remind her how much Power Rangers still means to people—and that what began as a short-lived role became a lifelong conversation about courage, self-worth, and integrity, the very things she stood for when she walked away.
When I asked what advice she’d give performers or martial artists entering Hollywood, she didn’t hesitate:
“Always hire an entertainment lawyer before signing any contract. Protect yourself. Be clear about your priorities—do you want fame, or do you want a sustainable career? Those aren’t always the same thing.
If I could go back, I might have stayed for one season just to experience it fully. But it was never about the money—it was about principle. Every step of the journey, including leaving the show, brought me to where I’m meant to be. You are always right where you need to be, at the time you are there.”
At Universal Studios, the crowd gathered for heroes. But one of the franchise’s most important acts happened long before anyone was watching.
