Judd Lynn

Judd Lynn is a writer, producer, and eventual showrunner whose work on Power Rangers spans close to two decades, starting well before he ever wrote a script. He and Jonathan Tzachor had worked together on low-budget films when a mutual contact offered them the pilot for what was then called Dino Rangers, Tzachor as line producer, Lynn as Unit Production Manager. The production ran on almost no budget with a non-union crew, and staff did whatever the job required, including driving trucks or standing in as extras. Lynn characterized the earliest seasons’ episodic structure as a product of production logistics rather than story ambition: writers built episodes around what could be filmed on budget and schedule, treating the imported Japanese Sentai footage as a constraint rather than a creative resource.

Lynn moved into writing once a pitch to Tzachor was approved, and traced his effectiveness back to his UPM training: internalizing hard deadlines became his biggest asset, since a script that hits deadline and still works dramatically is what makes a writer indispensable on a show built around that pace. He described the show as a double-edged experience, steady work and lasting friendships against a typecasting problem that, after years on the franchise, left him wondering whether outsiders believed he was capable of anything else. He eventually left, citing burnout and creative friction with Tzachor, though he called their disagreements mutual and respectful.

Lynn returned to the franchise later at Disney’s invitation, stepping into the showrunner role under conditions he described as genuinely difficult: story editor Jackie Marchand had just parted ways with the studio, and when writer Eddie Guzelian was let go, most of the writing staff left with him, taking friendships they’d built with cast along, leaving some cast wary of Lynn as a replacement. Actor Dan Ewing, who played Dillon on Power Rangers RPM, was reportedly open about disliking the transition; Lynn suspected he’d gotten bad information from people close to Guzelian, and said the two worked out a real rapport by season’s end regardless. He credited Disney with being more supportive through the transition than its reputation suggested, and praised the New Zealand crew for keeping the show on schedule despite the disruption.

Asked his biggest creative regret, Lynn pointed to weak characterization across Rangers, villains, and one-off characters, attributing it to inexperience and time pressure on the American writing side against what he considered stronger Japanese source material. His proudest achievement, by his own account, wasn’t any single story so much as sustaining the workload and quality bar over years of writing, producing, and directing at once; pressed for a favorite anyway, he named the multi-episode Ninja Turtles arc, calling it one of the rare times an episode “just flows.” On the fan question of the Phantom Ranger’s identity, Lynn said the writers’ room never settled a backstory before time ran out, though he floated his own idea years later: Billy, stranded on Aquitar, could have created the Phantom Ranger powers as a first, non-Zordon-based experiment gone wrong, revealed once the Rangers were captured and the villains demanded the Phantom’s power for their freedom. He was firm this was speculation, not canon, and dismissed the Phantom Ranger being the Blue Ranger’s father as “far too obvious.”

His advice to aspiring writers and directors was practical: read and watch widely, find peers to build with instead of waiting on film school, take unpaid or minimum-wage production work seriously, and, the lesson he learned too late in his own career, build relationships with the people who actually buy scripts rather than assume good work sells itself.

He returned a second time in 2014 as executive producer and showrunner of Power Rangers: Dino Charge, after Saban asked him to pitch a new season while attached to a separate, delayed project; his pitch became the basis for putting him in charge. Weighing Kyoryuger, the season’s Japanese source footage, against Go-Busters, the season Saban Brands passed over, Lynn said he knew Go-Busters well and thought it was fantastic, but Kyoryuger’s dinosaur theme gave it an edge since the franchise hadn’t done one in some time; he wasn’t sure whether Saban would revisit Go-Busters later. Among Kyoryuger’s elements he singled out the Plesio Zord, a purple dinosaur-based Zord parked in an undersea hangar that can also fly into space, for how eclectic its design is. He described an overarching “Power” connecting every Ranger across every season even as each stays self-contained, leaving room for cross-season Zord connections to surface later without having been planned from the start.

Building a season starts, Lynn said, with the theme, the cast, the time period, the Zords, and whatever runs through the villains; ideas get tested against whether they have enough “legs” for a season-long arc rather than a single episode, and a story is never finished, only abandoned in favor of moving forward. Villains and quirky characters are the easiest and most enjoyable to write, he said, while “vanilla” characters are the hardest, since audiences need an emotional stake in someone before they care what happens next. Asked what he hoped to bring back this time, Lynn said his opinions had often competed with other voices at Saban, the network, and the production company; with his voice given more weight and oversight extended to casting, costumes, and set design, he expected fewer compromises than his earlier run had.