Ron Wasserman

Ronald Aaron Wasserman (born September 2, 1961), also known as Aaron Waters and The Mighty Raw, is an American musician who composed the original theme songs for Mighty Morphin Power Rangers and X-Men: The Animated Series.

He was also a member of the band Fisher.

Wasserman has been fascinated with music since he was three years old, when he started playing the piano.

Bands that influenced him as a teenager include Black Sabbath, Genesis and Pink Floyd.

Wasserman said, "my musical taste my entire life was so diverse, so I'd be listening to 'Rhapsody in Blue' by George Gershwin one day and learning to play it on the piano, and then I'd switch over to 'War Pigs' from Black Sabbath."

His early music bands include Hollywood Headliners Betty Boop & the Beat, formed by SAG actress Lucrecia Sarita Russo.

In the mid-1980s, Ron started a rock band with present-day actress, E.G. Daily.

In 1983 (with Wasserman on keyboards), the group opened for Felony/Scotti Brothers records at the Florentine Gardens.

Felony was fronted by Lucrecia's then-husband, Jeff Spry, who was receiving chart action with the KROQ-FM hit single "The Fanatic".

In 1989, shortly after the band disbanded, he started working for Saban Entertainment.

Wasserman filled in at Saban Entertainment one afternoon and eventually stayed there for six and a half years.

Wasserman and Ron Kenan, once V.P. of Saban Entertainment/Music Production, met in the early 80's and played together in the popular new wave pop band, Betty Boop & the Beat.

During his early days at Saban, Wasserman worked as a music engineer, sometimes contributing background music and co-writing themes for several of their smaller series.

Shows Wasserman worked on during this period include King Arthur and the Knights of Justice (which he composed the theme for), Little Shop, Saban's Around the World in Eighty Dreams, Saban's Gulliver's Travels and Video Power.

Early on, he received creative notes from Saban that his music was too fast and heavy for children, and they would sometimes not accept the music he submitted because of this.

Wasserman said, "you could hear probably throughout the whole office building when I drove in, blasting Black Sabbath, or Nirvana or some death metal out of my car. I had that energy and that angst back then. I got it out in my music."

His compositions for the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers series and various other Saban productions were credited to Shuki Levy and Kussa Mahchi (an alias Haim Saban started using during the 1990s), with Wasserman only ever being listed in TV credits as a music producer or music engineer.

This was allegedly so the pair could collect music royalties for Wasserman's work.

According to Wasserman, he very rarely composed alongside Shuki Levy or Haim Saban on any Saban Entertainment shows.

In the late 1990s, ten of these composers launched an unsuccessful multi-million dollar lawsuit against Haim Saban.

Wasserman was not among the ten composers.

Another reason Saban did not credit musicians was so that they would be hidden enough as to not get offers to work for higher paying companies.

In 1991, he had previously composed an instrumental heavy metal theme song for a similar Saban project called Metalman.

The project never got off the ground, and Wasserman decided to give Mighty Morphin Power Rangers a rock/metal sound since it reminded him of Metalman.

In 1992, Wasserman wrote the theme song for the animated X-Men series and co-composed background music for it, with this being the first hit show he worked on.

Wasserman did not know anything about X-Men when he was asked to compose the theme.

In a retrospective 2022 article, Wasserman remembered, "it was two weeks of hell putting that song together", adding that "I kept getting notes [saying] they wanted more baseline, then more high-hats. It was a real pain in the ass to do all that back then too. It came out really great though, the theme was really catchy and interesting and it was especially interesting when they animated to it."

For the early episodes, the show's closing credits featured an instrumental heavy rock song, but for later episodes it was replaced by a shortened version of Wasserman's opening theme.

The following year, he composed some of his most recognizable work, which was for the show Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.

One day, he was presented with the first footage of the show, was told to use the word "Go", and to have it finished by the next day.

The people from Saban Entertainment wanted him to use the word "Go" since Haim Saban had success using that lyric in the Inspector Gadget theme song, which was the first hit theme he and writing partner Shuki Levy were credited with.

After two and a half hours, the song that resulted was the show's theme song, "Go Go Power Rangers".

In addition to composing the theme song, Wasserman also handled the background music, and in 1994 several of his most popular songs and scores from the series were eventually released on a successful concept album entitled Mighty Morphin Power Rangers the Album: A Rock Adventure.

Wasserman was originally going to do the music for the 1995 Power Rangers film, but Saban scrapped this plan at the last minute since it was a union film co-produced by 20th Century Fox, which would mean that Wasserman would have to be listed as the composer, and thus would be more well-known in the industry.

Saban's practice of not crediting musicians in order to gain royalties was revealed in a 1998 article by The Hollywood Reporter.

Several past and present composers from Saban were interviewed, although Wasserman was the only one that was willing to be identified by name.

Wasserman told The Hollywood Reporter, "they put their names on my work, and most of the time they had absolutely nothing to do with it, as far as creating the work was concerned. Most of the time, I would deliver the score, it would go to mix and air without the (credited) 'writers' seeing it or hearing it. That's how it works. It's really that simple."

Regarding Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, Wasserman said, "for that, I got producer and/or engineer credit. No music by credit. No cue-sheet credit. The credit went to Haim Saban and Shuki Levy [founders of the production company]. I worked on the theme alone; they contributed nothing. On the background music, they acted as producers and guided me extensively on the direction."

In this article, a representative from Saban still maintained that the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers theme had been co-composed by Haim Saban, and that Wasserman was incorrect in saying that he was the sole composer.

Wasserman and all other composers at Saban signed a contract agreeing to give up the rights to their compositions prior to joining the company.