Troubled Production/Real Life/Live-Action TV

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Examples of Troubled Productions in Real Life Live-Action TV include:

• Power Rangers: Particularly in the movies.
  • Mighty Morphin Power Rangers (as Linkara summedup nicely): season one hit its troubles when it turned out the series was popular, forcing Saban to rewrite the original finale, "Doomsday", to keep going and had them approach Toei to make new Ranger-centric scenes. When season two came along, Saban opted to use mecha footage from Gosei Sentai Dairanger and had to mix it in with footage from the so-called "Zyu2" footage. When the Zyu2 footage ran out, they also retired the Green Ranger character and ended up changing him into the White Ranger. By this time, Austin St. John, Walter Jones, and Thuy Trang (Jason, Zack, and Trini) were let go because of contract disputes and were replaced midway. When the Dairanger footage ran out, they replaced that footage with mecha footage from Ninja Sentai Kakuranger. It would be by that point that Saban threw their hands in the air and opted to change everyone to match the seasons.
  • Power Rangers Turbo nearly ended the franchise due to a number of problems, including:
    • When Steve Cardenas was injured during filming of Power Rangers Zeo, he was let go and replaced with Blake Foster in an attempt to garner new viewers. Didn't work.
    • Jason David Frank and Catherine Sutherland asked to leave the series for other pursuits. They were given a shortened contract, giving them enough time to find replacements. Instead, it was decided to jettison everyone connected to the original group, including Zordon and Alpha 5, replacing them with cryptic mentor Dimitria and jive-talking Alpha 6. As well, all four pre-Turbo Rangers were replaced with new characters(Johnny Yong Bosch said in one interview that they didn't know this was happening until they saw an ad for auditions for their jobs in the paper.)
    • Arguments between the writing team members as they weren't sure what to do with Gekisou Sentai Carranger's slapstick comedy moments and if they should embrace it or continue with their apocalyptic storyline.
  • Power Rangers Lost Galaxy: Creators were dismayed when they found out all the mecha scenes from Seijuu Sentai Gingaman all took place in cities, scuttling plans for otherworldly battles. As well, when the actress playing Pink Ranger Kendrix was stricken with leukemia, she was planned to have been replaced by Cassie, the Pink Ranger of Power Rangers in Space (even a plot hook where her morpher was damaged was filmed), but was scuttled due to contract problems and she was replaced by Karone, the former Astronema. And it was good.
    • Additionally, scripts were constantly being rewritten, and at times, the producers weren't sure what exactly they wanted to do with the season. This is particularly evident when the Lost Galaxy, the season title, was reduced to an eight-episode mini-arc near the end of the season.
  • Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue: While the show overall didn't seem to suffer massive issues, the team-up with the previous season... On top of drawing heavily on Sentai footage from the counterpart team-up special, which is rarely done for any team-up, given the diverging plots between Power Rangers and Super Sentai, it was originally released as a video tie-in for McDonald's, explaining why the episode focused more on a child actor than, say, the two teams teaming up. Amy Miller, the actress who portrayed the villain Trakeena, left the set shortly after filming began when she learned that the Lost Galaxy characters were essentially cameos in their own team-up and was replaced by another actress. While he remained for filming, Danny Slavin, who played the Red Lost Galaxy Ranger, is audibly redubbed with the voice of another actor at points.
  • Power Rangers Wild Force: The anniversary episode Forever Red was rife with problems. Originally conceived as a cult attempting to revive Dark Specter, the need to use abandoned Big Bad Beetleborgs costumes and the want of a super weapon lead to the usage of the Machine Empire and Serpentera. Scenes were filmed and cut out (including a bigger role for the Wild Force team outside of their brief cameo) and a major battle between classic Megazords and Serpentera were scuttled when Bandai insisted that Cole use a vehicle he gained just an episode earlier, leading to a Curb Stomp Battle.
    • Another example was with the series itself. Judd Lynn quit the series partway through because he was tired of Jonothan Tzachor's scene-by-scene recreation of Hyakujuu Sentai Gaoranger (which he would pull off again in Power Rangers Samurai). As well, the series was being made during the time Disney bought the franchise and wasn't sure what to do with it.
    • Also on "Forever Red," Leo's actor had been dissatisfied with his show's treatment in their crossover on Lightspeed Rescue, and only agreed to do it after most of the episode had already been shot. Hence his very late arrival, and the awkward bit where he demorphs just so the big morphing sequence can include all ten Rangers.
  • Power Rangers Dino Thunder: Not as bad as most, but Jason David Frank wanting to spend some time back with his family in the United States forced them to create a scenario where Tommy is trapped in his morphed state, then invisible. Like the Karone incident, it did lead to an Awesome Moment.
  • Power Rangers SPD: Executive Meddling lead to a good chunk of the series' budget being placed onto the series finale, which had a major CGI battle between the SWAT Megazord and the Bigger Bad. However, this lead to them being unable to do a number of things, including hiring an actor for Sixth Ranger Sam, the Omega Ranger. As well, many episodes were taken wholesale from its Super Sentai counterpart Tokusou Sentai Dekaranger. When Canada accidentally aired the second installment between SPD and Power Rangers Dino Thunder, ABC held back that part for a good length of time before finally letting it air.
  • Power Rangers RPM: Started off pretty well, even though it was at the tail end of Disney's apathy toward the series. Things took a downturn about halfway through, when Guzelian was fired over "creative differences" with Disney and Rangers veteran Judd Lynn was brought in. This created some animosity among the cast, who were hired by Eddie and didn't like the way things went down. They took particular offense that the Disney Executives involved in firing Eddie lied and blamed the show's budget and scheduling issues on him, even going so far as to use their contacts in the fandom to spread these rumors online in an attempt to badmouth and smear the new producer before RPM premiered. Though the rumors of Eddie mismanaging the show continue to be pedaled on message boards, not a single person involved in the production has ever come forward to substantiate them (Eddie himself said in one interview that scripts would occasionally come in over-time or over-budget, but that isn't exactly rare for any production.) In fact, anyone who was actually there has gone on record to say that the rumors aren't true. Dan Ewing, the star of the show, even called the rumors being spread about Eddie (and this is a direct quote from an interview) "complete bullshit." Not as bad as some other seasons, but it definitely had its rough patches.
  • As a whole, the Disney-era Rangers series suffered from Troubled Production. It was bought up when Disney attempted to get the Fox Family Channel and Saban's collection of series (specifically Digimon) and the series as a whole clashed with Disney's family-friendly attitude. While they did show some care during the early years, their apathy started to show. They attempted to shut down the series at least three times, start up an animated version of the series and even attempted to gain control of Toei's Super Sentai franchise to make it less violent!
• Several game shows have had production troubles that led to the contestants, and sometimes the host, never being paid. These include Pitfall (1981; host Alex Trebek — yes, that one — framed the check he got from the company after it bounced), the original 1987 version of Lingo (1987), a game show adaptation of Yahtzee (1988) and The Reel to Reel Picture Show (1997). Interestingly, Lingo and Yahtzee shared an executive producer, and both the latter and Reel to Reel were hosted by Peter Marshall of The Hollywood Squares fame.
• Once he became executive producer of The Price Is Right in the 1980s, Bob Barker was often at odds with the models, having fired six of them for various reasons. All six of them sued him for sexual harrassment. He also barred longtime announcer Rod Roddy from appearing on-camera in the early 2000s due to a salary dispute, which led to Fremantle Media covering up by saying that they'd enacted a policy to keep announcers from appearing on camera.
• Family Feud also had its share of backstage troubles from original host Richard Dawson, particularly in the later years. Namely, he was a prima donna who was often at odds with the producer, even barring him from the set and debating with him on answers. Mark Goodson once remarked that Dawson gave him "tsoris" (Yiddish for "trouble").
• The shooting of the pilot episode of Lost was interrupted by constant rain, resulting in their set getting flooded and some of the equipment washed away and/or waterlogged. They had to drive to the nearest town, which was something like half an hour away IIRC, to buy hairdryers to dry off the cameras. In addition, natural rain doesn't show up properly on camera, meaning they had to fake rain all over their poor actors at the same time as trying to keep equipment from getting washed away. Then there was the other problem they had just before shooting; Evangeline Lily, who is Canadian, had some problems with getting her work visa, causing them to delay her scenes and almost have to recast the female lead in the middle of shooting.
• The first shoot of the 2005 revival series of Doctor Who was a very troubled affair. The full details have never been made public, but by all accounts the director set about making himself unpopular, and after the first week of shooting they managed to be three weeks behind schedule.
• Star Trek: The Original Series was rife with problems. The root cause for much of it was the network wanting an action-oriented Space Western and the production team wanting to do serious science fiction. Low budgets were also a big problem, something you'd probably figure out from watching almost any episode. Things got especially bad in the infamous third season. The show was renewed thanks to a fan letter-writing campaign, but with budgets slashed further and a move to the Friday Night Death Slot. This led to Gene Roddenberry quitting his job as Show Runner. As a result of all this, the third season had a marked decline in quality with an accompanied increase in campiness. Leonard Nimoy found himself frequently clashing with writers and directors who wanted Spock to do Out of Character things like use violence or hit on the Girl of the Week. By the end of that season, the show had predictably crashed and burned itself into Cancellation.
  • If there's any single episode of TOS that suffered from this trope, it was "The Alternative Factor" during the first season. John Barrymore, Drew's father, had been cast as Lazarus, the main guest role ... and then didn't show up on the first day of filming. His agent and lawyer couldn't find him, so they cast someone else in a big hurry (Barrymore's absence led to him getting suspended by SAG for six months after Desilu filed a grievance). The beard for the replacement was improvised from what had been designed for Barrymore, and it shows. The script has howler lines like "Starfleet has been getting reports from all over the galaxy and far beyond ..." It also had a subplot in which Lazarus became romantically involved with a black member of the crew. That was filmed ... and hastily edited out when NBC got paranoid about how the Southern affiliates would react, resulting in the finished episode's choppy feel.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation had a similarly rough ride for its first couple of seasons, mostly due to Gene Roddenberry's declining health and the ridiculously high turnover rate in the writing staff for the first two seasons. Roddenberry's lawyer took control of the writing staff for most of the first season, leading to the departure of TOS mainstays David Gerrold and D.C. Fontana, and near the end of the season cast member Denise Crosby, who got pissed off at being a glorified extra. Things got a bit better for the second season where Maurice Hurley took over the writing staff, but since a lot of TV writers chose to sit out the whole 1988-89 season after the 1988 WGA strike it left no more than about four or five writers (two of whom worked as a team) working on the show at any one point. It didn't help that, according to Tracy Torme at least, Hurley didn't get along with anybody and only differed from Roddenberry's lawyer in that he actually had writing experience. There were also rumors that Hurley had a big crush on Gates McFadden and had her written out of the second season (replacing her with Dr. Pulaski) when she brushed him off. It wasn't until the third season when Roddenberry health didn't allow him to work, which allowed Rick Berman and Michael Piller to take control of the production and the show start to balance out.
  • Even by the standards of the first two seasons, the infamous episode "Code of Honor" stands out. One of the two original writers took his name off it after it was heavily rewritten, and that was before the director they hired chose to populate the aliens of the week entirely with African-American guest actors, whom he proceeded to treat like garbage (though apparently he didn't treat the main cast a whole lot better). Eventually Roddenberry decided enough was enough and canned the director, leaving the first assistant director to pick up the pieces for the remainder of the shoot... which just happened to include the episode's big action sequence. Most of the main cast members (Jonathan Frakes, Brent Spiner and Wil Wheaton especially) have had some rather choice words about the episode in recent years.
    • Not to mention that many of the writers felt Roddenberry's rewrite put it beyond any chance of salvation. He had supposedly told one of the two original writers, on another episode, that the Enterprise doesn't fire warning shots ... only to add a scene in this episode where it did exactly that.
• Mystery Science Theater 3000 isn't perfect, what being a series that bring big laughs with a small budget, but they do have some very interesting incidents.
  • Way back in Season One, there was the episode The Sidehackers. Prior to this episode, Best Brains would choose a movie, someone would watch over part of it and if was worthy to riff, they'd go through it. When Frank Conniff (before he took up the role of TV's Frank), found it, he thought it was good enough to riff and bought the rights. Imagine their shock and horror when, partway through, there was a rape and murder scene. Unable to pull back, Best Brains ended up lopping out the entire scene and Trace, as Crow, added in a throwaway line mentioning what happened to the girl who suffered that fate.
  • The blooper reel Poopie! does show a number of incidents that has the Crow, Tom and Gypsy puppets malfunction in some way, mostly by Tom losing his dome or Crow's headnet falling off. One incident from the movie Danger!! Death Ray had a scene where Tom shoots Crow with a ray gun and Crow's seen lit up. As the scene comes to an end, Crow bursts into flames! The scene was actually kept in!
  • Another Poopie! blooper showed that Frank couldn't say "I don't think that, soul brother." with a straight face at all! It was so bad, they just grabbed the best take and edited out the part where they burst out laughing.

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