This element seems to me to be missing from much discussion in this thread and similar discussions elsewhere. Much of the time it’s simply “this film depicts X so the film is bad” without any serious consideration of whether the film is arguing on X’s behalf.
Further, you are “exasperated” by the argument that action movies encourage violence because you see them as clear fantasies but this very thread contains examples of people suggesting flims could use a “woke” remake because of depictions of un-woke things in highly fantastical contexts.
The cartoon was called “Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips”, which is even better (or worse). If you get a chance o see the film, it’s pretty cringe-y by modern standards.
Popeye did a similar cartoon in 1942 – “Popeye Scrap the Japs”
It was wartime, after all, and they were poking fun at the actual enemy. I’ve no doubt that these were received with wild applause when they were new, but they’re a distinct embarrassment today.
Pretty sure that if one updated, say, RotN to 2025 ‘woke’ standards, then there will be a bunch of people in 2075 saying “ZOMFG, there’s no WAY you could remake RotN 2025 today, not with all the… scenes!”
But not in the 1970’s when I saw them after school. Either programmers didn’t find them offensive or just weren’t paying attention. I suspect the former.
The reason you can’t make Revenge of the Nerds today is because nerds are no longer an underclass. Make the nerds trans or immigrants and it might actually make sense today.
Perhaps it is possible to be so miscast that we enter the land of cultural appropriation.
“John Wayne played Genghis Khan in the 1956 film The Conqueror. This casting was widely considered a misstep, as Wayne’s signature cowboy persona was ill-suited for the role of a 13th-century Mongol leader, leading to criticism and the film winning a posthumous Golden Turkey Award for “Worst Casting”.”
Thanks for the correction. It certainly is a better title as it uses Nips as a verb and a collective noun. Clearly a pun on “Nippon,” yet Popeye’s noun became the much more common one.
Have seen both - I think most likely on Project Gutenberg than YouTube. If every cartoon back then didn’t say “Buy War Bonds!”, these two did afterwards.
When I worked at the museum, one of my coworkers thought it was appropriate to show some of those WWII propaganda cartoons produced by Warner Brothers and Disney to a group of second and third graders. I had been working there for at least a year, but it was my first time I took a group of kids to the theater, and oh boy, I thought their teacher was going to jump out of her skin and half expected her to rip me a new one when we left the theater.
I ended up speaking to our director that afternoon, explaining the cartoons were completely inappropriate for a younger audience. It was only appropriate for an older group of kids if we were explaining how propaganda and dehumanizing the enemy works. We stopped showing the cartoons.
“Race Bending”, as it’s sometimes called, has been around a long time. Native Americans were rarely cast as Indians. You likely won’t find any on F-troop (TV show). And in Hogans Heroes it was intentional that all Nazi’s be played by Jews.
Eli Wallach played Tuco (The Ugly) in “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly” and Calvera, the leader of the bandits in “The Magnificent Seven”.
Heck, some fuss was made when Denzel Washington was cast in a version of “Much ado about nothing” in 1993 and less fuss when he was in “Macbeth” in 2021.
I would think nowadays a director would need a good reason not to cast a black actor in “Othello”
On top of that, doing this movie probably lead to the cancer that finally killed him, in a region (Nevada or Arizona? I don’t quite remember) that had been heavily contaminated by US nuclear bomb testing.
I am surprised no one has mentioned Joel Grey as the Korean martial arts master in “Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins” where according to producer Larry Spiegel (per Wikipedia) "We assumed, of course, that we would be using an oriental actor. We couldn’t find one and then I thought of Grey."He went through 4.5 hours of makeup every day to play the role.
I think it’s much messier than that. It feels just a bit too neat and tidy to me to say that art that is, as you say, clearly fantasy, does not encourage violence (or whatever other thing one might be talking about) because it’s clearly a fantasy.
The ways we are influenced by culture are not so conveniently categorized. Nor is the art itself. What about a realistic character in an unrealistic narrative. Is it fantasy or not? What about a mundane or non-fantastical interactions and activity in an otherwise fantastical setting?
Southern Utah (St. George), less than 200 miles downwind from the U.S. Nevada Test Site, where there had probably been 30 or 40 atmospheric test detonations in the five years before the movie was shot.
Another one in this line of thinking: Song of the South. I only know it from clips of the songs, like Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah and the old ride at Disneyland. Are the base stories too rascist to show today, or was it just a misstep in casting?
The biggest problem with Song of the South (same as with Gone With the Wind) is it shows slaves as happy in their environment; kind of a passive racism.
Birth of a Nation is more problematic because it shows the Klan as heroic. At the time, I’m sure many people were on their side (possibly including President Wilson); now it’s seen as EXTREMELY racist. I’m hoping that it will take less time for people to see the ICE raids as equally racist.