Them uppity black women all look alike anyway. Who can tell 'em apart?
“The Little Mermaid” with Halle Lynn Bailey as Ariel. Review bombing in the US and Europe by racist bigots.
psst - those are code words for the GQP “Make 1950s America an Idealized Dream” (MAID) fanatics.
So these people object to the portrayal of a mythical creature such as a mermaid by a non-white actor? Why is that? Is there a master list somewhere of the races of all of the mythical creatures?
The complaint I keep hearing from Twitter chuds is that Hans Christian Andersen was Danish, so the mermaid needs to be a blonde blue-eyed Nordic goddess.
Never mind that Andersen described her as having green skin…
I thought Orion Slave Girls were the green-skinned ones.
It’s very simple for bigots: good mythical creatures are white, bad mythical creatures are not.
Hmmm… y’know, in the last Black Panther Wakanda movie… did anyone significant complain that the SubMariner was cast as Maya? Or was that OK because Namor since at least the 60s has been canonically something of an asshole?
I dunno… I don’t remember many people complaining about how Aquaman was now half-Polynesian, either. I suspect there’s a major sexist element there too.
Allegedly (at least according to a co-worker to objected to the casting), it’s because it interferes with their memory of Ariel as a redhead mermaid. Which is weird-seeing Henry Cavill as Superman didn’t delete my memory of Christopher Reeve in the same role.
Who ?
Who what?
Who? What? When?
So it’s the not uncommon issue with factions of the fandom deciding they and not the rights-holders, “own” the character.
…wonder how they would have felt about a black actress in greenface…
I think it’s more than just interfering with their memories. It’s that the decision to cast a black actress is a sign of “wokeness,” that anything that gives some advantage to minorities is inherently “woke,” and thus inherently suspect.
This may be accompanied by speculation about a hypothetical biopic of Martin Luther King, Jr. starring a white actor (I bet the woke crowd wouldn’t like that, ha-ha!), and assurances that any news stories about the new Little Mermaid movie being successful or popular are lies told the the “mainstream media” to further their “woke narrative.”
“Othello was played by a white guy one time!”
I heard about a production with Patrick Stewart as Othello. The whole thing was race-reversed, with all the traditionally white roles played by black actors.
According to Wikipedia, it was Stewart’s idea, and was rather controversial at the time.
I’d love to see a race-reversed production of Gone With The Wind.
Laurence Olivier and Orson Welles both also played Othello in films. Olivier wore ridiculously over-the-top blackface. Welles’s makeup was more subtle, but still troubling today.
It’s a Conservative paper, but their MOTY award IS tongue in cheek - previously they’ve given it to Hunter Biden, or RBG’s personal trainer (for keeping her alive through the Obama years), etc. Did a little digging at @gnarator’s link.
I do think that the joke is probably closer to “don’t bikers suck” rather than “aren’t people who vehemently hate bikers ridiculous”; but it’s hard to tell.
Olivier played Othello in blackface. My wife and I went to see this, and the afternoon showing was flooded by the contents of a Catholic girl’s school which spent their time catcalling (heh) and shrieking “eeew” loudly enough to drown out the dialog. When we had had enough my wife and I left, and on the way out I paused to ask the back row of nuns WTF (not really; I was a nicer guy in that long-ago, but that was the gist). The nuns sank down into their seats and shrugged, “nothing we can do”.
When we got home I called the school and ratted to the Mother Superior. When I repeated the “nothing we can do” part, she said “Oh, yes, there is”.
Years later I was speaking to a couple of young women who mentioned their school, and I told this story.
“You got the rest of the field trips cancelled that year!”
See, the system DOES work.
Dan