I really don’t know what to say other than to just show you the report…
…am I the only one here who feels that groups of all kinds, have it be race related groups, religious groups, animal rights groups, and everything else should just lighten up? Ugh, this doesn’t sit well with me at all.
Will a mod please edit this if you can, I forgot that you can’t post exact articles here. Or just delete it and I’ll change it around, thanks, and please accept my apology.
I’ve seen many of the Charlie Chan series, and I suspect the activists haven’t. The Chan films don’t involve any Asian stereotypes, and except for Warner Oland, the films employed many Asian actors in a time when respectable roles for Asians were few.
Now if the activists wanted to ban Breakfast at Tiffany’s because of Mickey Rooney’s performance. . .
I wonder if the International Society For Siamese Twins will prevent the film Stuck On You from being released.
My issuse is about the censorship of film. The Charlie Chan films, if anything, put the Asian community in a very good light, even if the main actor was not Asian, he still portrayed the race in a heroic sort of light. Of course there were sterotypes, but aren’t there sterotypes in just about every film?
Will all stupid white teenagers start to prevent all films in which actors portray that sort of person from being released?
Will all films which show Italians begin to be refused to be shown?
Will the episode of Get Smart entitled “Hoo Done it” be banned simply because is stars an actor modeled after Charlie Chan?
Where does it end, that is the issue. The Charlie Chan films, like it or not, are a piece of cinema history. They weren’t that great, but they were classic.
There are endless ammounts of films which insult someone, but we can not go refusing them to be shown just because one group of people do not like them.
This is not a censorship issue. No laws have been passed to ban the films, no changes were made to edit or delete their content.
Fox News Channel changed its plans after an ethnic group protested and pointed out the highly infammatory nature of the films to many Chinese-Americans. There are many, many precedents for this kind of decision, ranging from black protests (AMOS N ANDY radio and TV shows) to religious protests (LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST) to the blind (MR. MCGOO).
The Chan films can still be rented and purchased from select video outlets. Collectors can still buy and trade them. You can buy time on public access TV and show the films. But the day of yellow-face, red-face and blackface entertainment broadcast on the airwaves is done.
In and of himself, Charlie Chan is not a racist stereotype. If anything, he was a precursor of Lieutenant Columbo: outwardly a self-effacing, schlemiel, but really a sharp operator who was much smarter than everyone around him.
It’s just a shame that, for many years, he was the ONLY image of Chinese Americans ever seen in movies. If he’d been just one of many images, I doubt whether modern-day Asian-Americans would find him such an embarrassment.
To use a crude analogy… Barry Fitzgerald often made the Irish look like scatterbrained drunks in movies like “The Quiet Man,” but very few Irish-Americans spent much time fuming about that, because there were so many other actors (Spencer Tracy, John Wayne, Bing Crosby, Errol Flynn, et al.) presenting positive portrayals of Irishmen and Irish-Americans.
If Barry Fitzgerald were the ONLY movie Irishman of hi stime, I might be ready to boycott his movies myself.
So no more of Laurence Olivier’s Othello? Too bad, I never did get a chance to see that.
No more Eddie Murphy’s Coming To America? No big loss for me, never much cared for Eddie Murphy.
No more Dustin Hoffman’s Little Big Man? I’ll miss that one.
No more Ona Munsen’s Shanghai Gesture? Over my dead body!
Or wait! Maybe we can look at the totality of the situation instead of knee-jerking a response because white actors portrayed members of another ethnic group in movies 60 years ago which, as near as I can tell from the ones I’ve seen, don’t seem particularly insulting.
And yes, it is about censorship. It’s about self-censorship, which is censorship even if there is no force of law behind it.
I don’t think that counts because he played a white guy living as an adopted native… unless you think they’d object to a cowboy named Jack Crab being played by a jewish guy?
Ironically enough, the Chinese are generally portrayed very favorably in the Charlie Chan films: the people who should be objecting are blacks, about the googly-eyed caricatures played by Stepin Fetchit and Mantan Moreland in many of the films.
I admit that I won’t be shedding any tears over not seeing Charlie Chan on Fox. I don’t think the movies are horribly offensive, but in this day and age, it’s like a sign reading “Colored Drinking Fountain Here” – slightly unnerving.
On the other hand, am I the only one who thinks Charlie Chan would be the perfect target for a modern Hollywood remake, a la Charlie’s Angels or The Brady Bunch? I’m picturing it as an action-adventure/comedy, with Chan and his sons out investigating crime and fighting bad guys as the occassions warrant. No yellowface or goofy accents, but just a fun summer movie that sends up some of the Asian stereotypes we still get in movies today (like, say, one of the Chan sons prefers to use guns because he’s lousy at martial arts). Anyone with me on this?
It’s a shame that Fox & co. went to the trouble (and expense) of overseeing a restoration of the films, only to feel compelled to pull the plug. As a film archivist, I worry that future initiatives to save and restore old movies will be dependent on the most current P.C. perceptions. Studios and institutions won’t (and currently often don’t) go to the trouble of restoring old movies if they see limited commercial possibilities for their efforts.
What’s next: Dragon Seed? That’s playing on Turner Classic Movies at the end of the month (and to these eyes, far more objectionable).
Here’s what Keye Luke had to say about Oland in an excerpt from the book Charlie Chan at the Movies:
While I agree with your overall point, I must take issue with the stereotype claim. Charlie Chan was emblematic of a ethnolinguistic stereotype, i.e. the Chinese man with the thick accent who doesn’t speak English that well. His accent and linguistic malaprops are supposed to be part of the reason we find Charlie Chan entertaining or amusing. Though he didn’t have buck teeth, he still spoke English in a manner that was stereotypically associated with Asian immigrants, and branded them as irredeemably “other”. Since the actor playing Charlie Chan was Caucasian, the accent was a deliberate put-on for effect. And I can certainly see why that would be offensive because there are now and were then numerous Chinese-Americans who speak perfectly fluent, unaccented English.
I have the same problem with Apu from “The Simpsons.” It’s not that there aren’t Indian immigrants who talk like Apu. There unquestionably are. But there are a growing number of Indian immigrants that do not sound like Apu, and the voice is not Hank Azaria’s natural voice. Azaria affects Apu’s accent and manner of speaking in order to entertain us with how “other” Apu is. And Apu is, at the moment, the only identifiably South Asian regular character on US television that I can think of.
While Charlie Chan was certainly better than the stock Asian villains of the time (Fu Manchu, Ming the Merciless), he wasn’t unambiguously positive.
Add to the list Bug from “Crossing Jordan.”
Uh, 'scuse me? Ming the Merciless was from Mongo. In space. Never set foot anywhere in Asia.
Uh, 'scuze me, Otto…? The term “Yellow Peril” ring a bell…?
Another white guy playing an insulting Asian stereotype. When’s the last time “Flash Gordon” was on TV?
Well, yeah, but where do you draw the line? That’s the point of comedy. Things that are quirky, strange, different, whatever…get made fun of. This doesn’t have to be racist, per se. This is a really old joke, but is it racist to point out the differences between whites and blacks in a humorous manner (i.e…white men can’t jump/dance/perform sexually). Some of it is cliched, but why can’t you poke fun at something different? Not in a cruel way, no, but sometimes you have to get over what is “PC” and just laugh at yourself.
As for Apu, we all know that not all Indians speak like him. Well, at least I do. I mean, I’m Asian and I speak in unaccented English, but there are people who do have accents. Why present everyone in a sterile, non-offensive light? It isn’t believable, and it isn’t funny. And Matt Groening obviously didn’t intend for Apu to be an offensive stereotype. “The Simpsons” is a show that sends up stereotypes, as a matter of fact, from the town drunk, to the Dennis the Menace-esque bad boy, to the comic book geek, to the stupid white guy. Pretending that differences don’t exist doesn’t get us anywhere, but acknowleding them in a tasteful, slightly original light, can be funny.
Yeah right, Ming is just a thinly veiled Fu Manchu in space. Notice his name even sounds vaguely Asian. I mean, he’s a space villain and Ming was the best they could come up with?
Yeah right, Ming is just a thinly veiled Fu Manchu in space. Notice his name even sounds vaguely Asian. (Not to mention his home planet of Mongo . . . sounds like Mongolia . . . hmmm.) I mean, he’s a space villain and Ming was the best they could come up with?
Probably that horrid 90’s animated series where they turned Flash into a teenage skateboarder and Ming looked like this
I hope this isn’t too much of a hijack, because we are dealing with Asian stereotypes here, but I notice that not only did they change Ming into a kind of lizard person, that’s largely the route they with when they changed the look of the Mandarin in the 90’s Iron Man series, green skin and claws and the like.
So instead of evil Asians, we’re dealing with evil humanoid Asian reptiles. Riii-iiii-iiight.
I suddenly yearn for the subtle racial nuances of Jar-Jar Binks.
Don’t forget Sidney Toler, but not as good as Oland. Reminds me of Chico & the Man- Mexicans were “upset” that a Hungarican-F.Prinze was playing a Mexican.
Any Italians want to protest Leonard( Chico) Marx playing an Italian? I’m part Irish & went to school in Brooklyn. I want to protest Gleason playing a silly bus driver from Bensonhurst.
I guess FOX wants to stay fair & balanced. Maybe Amos & Andy will fill in.
