Still, I would've been happier if the Red Ranger(s) in Power Rangers Samurai had been cast as Japanese, instead of as very, very blond. Having the other Rangers be multiethnic, and implicitly descended from those Western (honorary?) samurai, would've been okay given what I know now, but the Shibas, the elite and senior samurai on the team, should've logically been from an older and therefore native samurai lineage. Plus we've never had an East Asian Red Ranger, and this would've been the perfect season for one.
Although I have to say, the ethnic diversity of Red Rangers has improved since production moved to New Zealand. Before then, we had one African-American RR and a couple of Latinos (if you count Rocky, who wore red but was never the team leader) out of a total of nine regular Red Rangers. So 2/3 of the regular US Red Rangers were non-Hispanic whites (although Tommy was alleged to have Native American ancestry, though I don't know if Jason Frank does). But since then, of the eight regular Red Rangers in the NZ era, two have been black, one Samoan, and one Arab, so fully half have been nonwhite.
