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.
Not to mention how they were all told they would be replaced every time they spoke out. Or the homophobia David Yost experienced! What a nightmare.
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.
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