Not really “yellowface” but was there a reason to have Keanu Reeves as the token white samurai in 47 Ronin? Then again, they could always “whitewash” the entire story like the Clive Owen film Last Knights.
Maybe. But it seemed to me that being 1/4 Hawaiian wasn’t material to the completely fictional story about love and an Air Force rocket test, so why include it at all?
I don’t think Othello needs to be specifically black or African, but isn’t a main theme of Othello that he is an “other” to the rest of Venice? I would imagine you could tell Othello’s story by casting anyone who is culturally different from the rest of whatever the cast is cast as.
I think the line is pretty bright here. Tahing an actor of one race or ethnicity and putting them into a role, but having them play it without artifice is fine. Hello Dolly was staged with an all Black cast, with Pearl Bailey as Dolly Gallagher Levi. Then the movie knocked approximately 30 years off the character’s age so Barbra Streisand could play her.
Casting a 46-year old Mary Martin as Maria in The Sound of Music on Broadway (she was actually older than the actor who played the Baron) was ridiculous but not offensive.
On the other hand, putting Mickey Rooney in false teeth and thick eye glasses or Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd in a minstrel show is clearly offensive.
At disparagement or stereotyping. Not everybody can discern that so the default now days is to avoid any make-up that makes someone look like a different race. Racial cross-casting is something different and is being (carefully) experimented in interesting ways these days.
The Villain from 1979 starring Kirk Douglas, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Ann-Margret. It was a live action Road Runner cartoon. It also featured two of the whitest people ever as Native Americans, Paul Lynde and Robert Tessier. If I remember correctly, Douglas also wore Indian apparel in a scene.
In late-medievalJapan, Kai is a teenage English-Japanese outcast found in the woods near Wakkanai and adopted by Lord Asano, the benevolent ruler of the Akō Domain. Kai and Asano’s daughter, Mika, fall in love despite the scorn her father’s samurai hold for Kai’s mixed ancestry
If they had hired a Japanese actor- it still would have been offensive.
The ludicrous overreaction and inability to read context of satire on these thing (Community, Its always Sunny), might lead to people taking offense of the genuine dramatic moment in the movie Babylon where a black musician is told to put on boot polish because he wasn’t black enough for a music movie in 1930s hollywood.
Boy, you go away for a weekend leaving the pot on the stove and come back to find it boiling over. I didn’t expect this topic to have such legs.
I’ve often pondered how the performers felt about their roles, and particularly how this changed with time. Al Jolson was called “The King of Blackface”, but it was at a time when this was a widespread feature of vaudeville and minstrel shows. Nevertheless, it was clearly offensive to some people. yet Jolson was reportedly not prejudiced himself, and socialized with the black performers that he performed with.
I think in cases like his, he was guilty of confusing the mores of the Familiar In-Group with the Public Out-Group. The people he hung out with saw Jolson and his jokes as acceptable “among family”, but then he went on and did the same thing in a public setting.
The 1943 Bob Clampett cartoon Coal Black and the Sebben Dwarfs is another case. It’s one of the “censored Eleven” WB cartoons. It’s never been released to home video, is never shown on TV anymore, and the only times I’ve seen it were at art house shows and retrospectives. It’s a collection of the most outrageous insulting stereotypes and images. But at the time, the animators saw it as simply a send-up of Disney’s Snow White , using the most over-the-top gags, each one pushing the envelope further. But they reportedly weren’t trying to be insulting or racist. They saw it as a case of trying to outdo each other in going further beyond the bounds of propriety. They said their black friends thought it was hilarious. And it probably was – in private. In “just between us friends” mode. But pushing all of that into the public spotlight was simply too much. What had been a case of “can you top this?” became simply an ever-increasing round of slaps in the face.
The cartoon has a frantic energy and speed to it. There are lots of non-racial gags and jokes in it. And the opening and closing animation of the mother relating the story, shown in silhouette in front of a fire (all probably rotoscoped) is gorgeous, sentimentally moving animation. But it’s all ruined by the misguided excess that makes up the bulk of the cartoon.
It is on YouTube, and I agree, not meant to be racist. Mind you, pretty cringeworthy today.
Another one is All This and Rabbit Stew with a Black version of Elmer Fudd. Yes, a caricature, and not for today, but if you think about it, Fudd is himself a caricature of a white hunter.
The hate for Cumberbatch as Kahn is mostly due to the fact that in the JJ Abrams Trek universe, we (and Kirk) have no idea who the hell he is and have no reason to care aside from being a person of interest in their particular in-film mission. And yet we are supposed to give his big “Kahn” reveal the same emotional weight as Shatner’s Kirk finding out one of his most dangerous adversaries has escaped and turned the tables on him at the same time Kirk is wrestling with age, career, and his failed relationship to Dr Carol Marcus that produced a son (as opposed to a cheesy underwear-scene). It feels cheap and unearned.
Plus the whole kabuki they had done in the run up to the movie’s release. “Oh no, he’s not going to be Kahn. He’s playing a character named ‘John Harrison’.”
JJ Abrams should have never been allowed near Star Trek.