Featured Testimonial About Creighton University
I tried to keep it quiet. But people at Creighton found out that I was a Power Ranger anyway.
By Micah Mertes
Dan Slavin, JD’05, has had an unlikely career trajectory — from model to actor to Power Ranger to Creighton law student to commercial litigation attorney in Phoenix. In a way, he owes it all to the kid who beat him up in grade school.
The kid was a year older than Dan and had a black belt in karate. Their hallway standoff — which ensued because the karate kid mistakenly thought Dan was interested in his girlfriend — was over as soon as it started, with Dan flat on his back after his opponent surprised him with a leg sweep.
“I went home to my dad that day and said I never want to be in that position again,” Dan said. His father’s law partner knew how to fight, and he recommended that Dan start taking lessons in the Korean martial art of Kuk Sool Won. He learned all manner of offensive and defensive combat techniques he hoped would come in handy when the next guy challenged him to a fight.
Dan never got a rematch with the kid who leg-swept him. (In fact, the two later became friends.) But his extensive training did lead to at least one nice outcome — landing him the role of the Red Power Ranger.
Dan Slavin is, to the best of our knowledge, the only Creighton alum to have their own action figure.
* * *
In the mid-’90s, Dan was a business undergraduate at the University of San Diego. He was walking along the beach one day when he saw a TV production underway. On a whim, he walked up to a woman wearing a headset and asked: “Hey, how do you get on this show?”
She took a Polaroid of him and wrote down his info. A week later, Dan was shooting a scene on the crime drama series Silk Stalkings. It was a small role with only a few lines, but it earned him a Screen Actors Guild card and the chance to keep acting.
After graduation, Dan landed a job at a real estate company in Phoenix (his hometown). The job paid well, and he liked the people he worked with, but a different path beckoned. He’d gotten a small taste of showbiz, and he wanted to see how far he could take it.
Dan started with a modeling agency, eventually moving to New York to work as a booking agent with Ford Models. But he was more interested in acting. He soon moved to Los Angeles, where he started auditioning for roles. One of the first he landed was a one-episode appearance on Saved by the Bell: The New Class. He was also close to getting a role in the soap opera General Hospital.
His time in Hollywood, he said, was marked mostly by near misses — casting calls, auditions and unfulfilled promises of “We’ll call you.” With one exception.
The day he got the call (or, more accurately, the page) to audition for the Power Rangers TV show, Dan was kickboxing at the gym.
He raced to the casting call and ended up having to audition in his karate clothes. His attire — along with his ability to kick, punch, flip and jump in a credible way — gave him an edge. Dan scored a role in the new series Power Rangers: Lost Galaxy, the seventh season in the Power Rangers saga that started with Mighty Morphin Power Rangers in 1993.
Dan played the Red Galaxy Ranger (a.k.a. Leo Corbett) in 45 episodes of Power Rangers: Lost Galaxy, which aired in 1999 on the Fox Kids network. Though each actor had their own stunt double, Dan snuck as many of his own moves into the show as he could, including a few roundhouse kicks. All the actors went through a training camp. (This is how Dan learned to do a standing backflip.)
For safety reasons, the stunt team performed the most dangerous feats themselves. The way it almost always worked on Power Rangers was, if the helmet was off, it was the actor; if the helmet was on, it was the stunt double.
Dan loved his stunt double, though he did have one critique.
“I don’t know if it was a choice he made or just the way he naturally moved,” Dan said. “But the fact is, my stunt double ran like a duck. Which made it look like I ran that way.”
Let it be known, on this 25th anniversary of the Creighton law alum’s brief tenure as a Power Ranger, that Dan Slavin does not run like a duck.
* * *
After his first and only season with the show, Dan felt that this wasn’t going to be a good way to support a stable future. He didn’t want to spend his career chasing new parts to play. He decided to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a lawyer.
Dan was seeking recommendation letters for law school applications, which led him to a family friend, Jim Silhasek, BA’69, JD’72, a longtime supporter of Creighton.
A Jesuit, Catholic college in Nebraska wasn’t remotely on Dan’s radar. But Jim made a strong pitch. He pulled out a brochure for Creighton’s School of Law and told Dan that this was where he was meant to be.
Dan applied and was accepted. After a year of fighting aliens and saving the universe, he moved to Omaha to study law at Ahmanson Hall. Being a Creighton law student was much more difficult than being a Power Ranger.
“We had a tremendous workload in law school,” Dan said. “I remember we had a 50-page reading assignment on day one. Creighton’s law program is vigorous. They’re not messing around. They’re truly preparing you to do great work in your career.”
In addition to the hard work, Dan recalls plenty of great memories:
“Sitting in the law library while it was snowing outside. Holding up at a cubicle against the window studying. Walking out of the library and grabbing a coffee. It’s a beautiful campus, and it was this picturesque thing for me. I loved it.”
(He loved it so much that his sister, Jacquelyn Slavin, BSN’04, later followed him to Creighton.)
Dan’s law professors also made a big impression on him, in particular Lawrence Raful, JD, who had returned to full-time teaching after 11 years as the School of Law’s dean. Dan took Raful’s course on legal ethics, and what he learned continues to resonate today.
“I still really identify with this part of the law, and I think a large part of that has to do with Raful’s class and Creighton in general,” Dan said.
At Creighton, Dan didn’t advertise his past life as a Power Ranger. In fact, he kind of tried to keep it a secret.
Before law school, Dan had always gone by Danny Slavin. It was Danny Slavin who played the Red Power Ranger. When he came to Creighton, he started going by Dan Slavin. Partly because he wanted a fresh start, partly because the name change would make his Power Ranger past less likely to pop up in a Google search.
“People figured it out anyway,” Dan said. “I had to tell the admissions committee what I’d been up to the past few years, and I think it leaked out that way.”
In any case, students and professors were always nice about it. Just curious and occasionally baffled that someone could go from one thing to another so quickly. But, hey, when it’s morphin time, “it’s morphin time.”
Dan’s favorite part of law school was meeting fellow law student and future wife, Amber Slavin. They met in a class on the federal income tax. Amber was with someone else at the time, but she and Dan kept in touch over the years and eventually became more than friends.
Dan and Amber’s relationship has been marked by a few odd Power Rangers-related coincidences. For one, Amber’s maiden name is “Allred.”
Another is their sons’ names. Dan and Amber have two children, Connor and Wesley. Wesley and his twin, Cole, were born prematurely. Cole didn’t survive, and Wesley spent four months in the NICU. (At one point, Wesley’s parents dressed him in a Red Power Ranger outfit.)
Dan and Amber chose the names Connor, Cole and Wesley simply because they liked the names. It wasn’t until later that they realized all three were the character names of Red Power Rangers in different seasons.
Dan: “How weird is that?”
* * *
Though he sometimes attends Comic Cons or gets recognized by the occasional die-hard fan, Dan’s Power Ranging days are behind him. Today, he works as a commercial litigation attorney at Francis J. Slavin, P.C. in Phoenix.
“We get to take on a lot of interesting work,” Dan said. “It’s challenging but fun. I mainly work on litigation-related issues.”
I asked Dan a dumb question I hoped would result in an insightful answer:
How does playing a Power Ranger prepare you to become a litigation attorney? Are both, to some extent, a kind of performance?
Dan: “Well … it definitely helped me in terms of speaking well in front of others. But litigation isn’t acting. The court appreciates it when you can make your case as succinctly and effectively as possible. Less is more. You want to come across as honest and truthful in a trial, not showy. Which is not exactly what we were going for on Power Rangers (laughs).”
Dan could draw a more direct line between the legal profession and martial arts.
Both, he said, are about being so well prepared for the fight that you never actually have to fight. If you receive the proper training — in the law or in Korean martial arts — what you’re really gaining is the confidence that you don’t have to prove yourself, that you don’t need to raise your voice or your fists. The skills themselves speak loud and clear.
Thus far, Dan’s legal career hasn’t required him to block a leg sweep or do a backflip in the courtroom. But on the off chance the need ever arises, he’ll be ready to go (go).
