Atamasama, tell me, knowing a man’s last name is “Speigel” , how likely is he to be Japanese?
If you can’t even spell the name, do you have a leg to stand on to comment?
And Spiegel can be a perfectly fine non-Jewish German surname.
You know absolutely fuck-all about the Romani, don’t you?
Well let me check the census results from Mars and I’ll get back to you. 
You know German people and Japanese people can fuck, right? Like, with each other? And produce children?
Also - and you might have missed this, because it’s kind of subtle - but Cowboy Bebop takes place in the future, after the entire solar system was colonized. Spike Spiegel isn’t German or Japanese. He’s Martian.
Hell, let’s go a little further down this rabbit hole in inanity.
“Spike Spiegel” doesn’t make any sense in the original cartoon. “Spiegel” is a German last name. “Spike” is an English first name, by way of the Normans. And he spends the entire show speaking unaccented Japanese! How can this combination of characteristics possibly exist in one human being!
Never mind that his actual name is Supaiku Supīgeru
Jesus fucking Christ people. This is just argumentative. Pathetic.
Argument? In the Pit? Perish the thought.
Piss off, snowflake. You’ve clearly lost your edge in your (not at all missed) absence.
Oh, fucking bite, Dibble, I’ve been here since the fucking 90’s. Ya’ll’s fucking problem is a lack of intelligence. Romani are Gypsies you fucking Moron. Look it up on Wikipedia. The fact that you argue with me on a casual aside on fucking Gypsies being stereotypically Eastern European means you are argumentative and NOT arguing in good faith. I could say “water douses flame” and you assholes would start screaming about elemental Lithium.
I believe the comment was based on the fact that Romani are originally from India- Not Eastern Europe.
Indo-European you fucking…
Re- Gandalf, (in the unlikely event I’m wrong, I defer to Qadgop as the SDMB’s ultimate Tolkien geek) Gandalf, mithrandir, the grey pilgrim is mostly based on Odin. Except for the fact that Gandalf has two eyes, he’s a perfect match. Tolkien was very much into Norse mythology and it shows. Ian McKellen would make a fine Odin. Idris Elba (despite his great acting ability) not so much.
Well, Doc, the fact that you do not believe a black man can play a wizard, or should play a wizard tells us a lot about you.
More Väinämöinen than Odin, really.
Like I said, you have no fucking clue about Romani. “stereotypically Eastern European”? Like fuck.
What the fuck does a language family have to do with anything, you tedious twat?
Given that Odin is an entirely fictional character, why can’t Elba play him just fine?
I liked him as Heimdall. He’s got the gravitas. Damn, you folks have got me wanting to see Elba as Gandalf.
This is news to literally nobody in this thread. Also, if you’d looked it up on Wikipedia yourself, you might have noticed this:
Romani are often depicted as being from Eastern Europe, because Eastern Europe has a large population of Romani. However, since we’re specifically talking about ethnicity, Eastern Europeans are stereotypically white, and Romani are stereotypically brown. Faye being a “white chick” because she has a Romani background makes about as much sense, race-wise, as casting John Cho to play a guy named Spike Spiegel.
In the real world, of course, there are Romani with white skin, just as there are Japanese people with German surnames, and Jews of Asian descent. Because humans are messy, and don’t stay in the boxes we’ve created for ourselves. In a post-Earth diaspora like Cowboy Bebop, those boxes should be even less defined.
The ethnic background of a fictional future Martian and the casting of a live action version that has the tacit blessing of the creators is a strange hill to die on, but I suppose it’s a step up from some kind of Q type conspiracy or the ‘scientific’ racists we tend to get.