The possible race related issues of the casting of non-Asians in the lead roles of The Last Airbender, as well as casting a black Spiderman, have been hot topics of late, not just on the SDMB but elsewhere on the net as well. I started wondering about the correlation between views on both. To keep this fair, we’ll poll on a black Peter Parker rather than a black Spiderman, since that’s a more specific identity. So which category do you fit in, and why? Especially explain, if the views are disparate! I’ll add that feel free to use your own definition of “OK” and “NOT OK” as long as you explain. I’ll give up my own answers after a few people have posted.
In my opinion, I’d say a black Peter Parker would be more acceptable, at the very least because the character’s ethnicity isn’t tied that closely into his basic backstory—compare, say, making Black Panther into a white man, or Doctor Doom into a black man—but on the other hand, it also depends WHY they’re making Peter Parker black.
Is it because they’re recasting the role for a new movie, and a black actor just turned out to be the best?
Are they recasting the role, and a black actor who’s the hottest drawing star in Hollywood is available, and the producers want to cash in?
Did they deliberately decide to make Peter Parker black, to try a new direction with the character or franchise—which could be interesting and good, or just stupid and crass, depending on both why they did it and how it was executed?
Or are they just recasting Peter Parker with a black actor because they think the audience won’t be interested in a white kid as a main character, or won’t take their kids to see it and buy the toys, or wouldn’t go see what they thought was a “white movie”?
Or, hell, is it even because Peter Parker is just a supporting character in the movie they’re making (helluva movie, that’d be), and they cast him with a black actor because most or all of the lead characters are white, and they were worried that it’d look racist if they didn’t have at least SOME black characters, and Peter Parker is one of the guys that doesn’t have a $15 million actor pre-signed to the role?
Once again, a black Peter Parker makes no sense, it’s nonsensical casting that will make the character ring false. A black non-Peter Parker Spider-Man will work just fine, but you’re going to need to develop a new background for him. Unless, of course, the black actor passes for white in the film.
In Avatar, it still makes no sense, given the cultural surroundings of the movie, unless the actor passes for something that looks vaguely appropriate. Makeup might work slightly better here as it involves earth-like cultures, not earth cultures.
Either way, the race of the actors seems to be one of the lesser issues in the film.
Finally, in general, it’s all about perception. An italian male can apparently play a Native American just fine. But John Wayne doesn’t really make a good Mongol chief.
Note: Actually, Peter’s ethnicity is relevant in any movie that includes his relationship with his aunt, I think. If he were black, it’d appear considerably differently. Asian might work, though. Or hispanic.
I think that it is ridiculous to make Peter Parker black. After a fifty-year history of a well-established comic character, switching ethnicities seems a bit preposterous to me.
If they want a strong black character in the next Spider-Man movie, why don’t they have Storm/Halle Berry guest star? That might be fun!
Heck, they could bring my “Panther Girl/Monica Denise Campbell” character in as a possible love interest for Spider-Man. I created her to be a Marvel Universe character, after all, way back in the early 1970s, several years before they created Storm. She is a pretty interesting gal! She makes for a nice visual, too…
http://www.comicartfans.com/GalleryPiece.asp?Piece=468218&GSub=38079
I’ve never really understood the bruhaha over The Last Airbender casting. I’ve never watched the show, but its my understanding that while the show is based on Asian myths, the action actually takes place on an alien planet. On top of that, the show is drawn in the anime style where none of the characters have an obvious race. A case could be made that they have no race.
On the other hand, Spider-Man/Peter Parker has been depicted as a white kid from Queens for the last 50 years. Making him black would require tremendous suspension of disbelief by the audience and a real effort by the writing/directing team to make sure the story they tell is still Spider-Man. You can change the race of an iconic character if you make that effort and the actor is up to the task (look at Michael Clarke Duncan, who was awesome, as The Kingpin in Daredevil). But I don’t think it would work with Spider-Man.
I personally don’t see the problem with changing the skin color of a character. Admittedly I don’t know a ton about the back story, but I don’t see ethnicity being an important part of Peter Parker/Spiderman’s character. Just because he’s been depicted as white forever doesn’t mean that he’s inherently white and must always be white.
Similarly, there’s no reason one needs to cast Asians for The Last Airbender just because they were Asian before; the story does not take place in Asia as we know it. This isn’t like, say, Seven Samurai, where casting non-Asians would make no sense. The Magnificent Seven was able to adapt the story to an American setting, where Asian actors would make no sense.
I actually am stunned they cast white people to be the key characters in Airbender.
However, I guess I’m find with it.
I wouldn’t care if an Indian man played George Washington, for that matter, though it does seem to be unrealistic, especially when we have relatively accurate paintings of the man.
Heck, I wouldn’t care if white people played Native Americans and a Native American plays a cowboy/soldier out hunting Native Americans.
Moreover, a major plot point in Airbender revolves around the fact that a group composed of three of the four “nations” can hide out in the fourth without being noticed, merely by changing clothes. Thus, they cannot be visibly all that different racially, even though the “styles” of the different nations are inspired by different human cultures.
At the risk of stepping into a morass I know little about, here’s my 2 cents:
Airbender was originally an “Asian” story done in anime style from my admittedly limited knowledge. Knowing that, I’d expect a heavily Asian cast. There are surely Asian or part-Asian actors out there capable of being the lead, and lots of competent Asian actors for the other roles.
Failing that, if the cast was truly multi-racial and diverse - that is, not just white people but a wide range of ethnicities - that could also work. But my understanding is the casting is overwhelmingly Caucasian. Which is jarring to me on a certain level.
As an example - the rebooted Battlestar Galactica did not follow the casting of the original, with characters of the same name not only being different ethnicities than in the original (the actor playing Commander Adama, for example, was European descent in the original and Hispanic in the reboot) but different genders (Starbuck: male in the original, female in reboot) but sometimes both (Boomer: black and male in the original, Asian and female in the reboot). They didn’t change from a mostly Caucasian cast to, say, a mostly black cast, they really mixed it up. Thus, for me at least, it became more about the actors’ portrayal of the character than the skin color of the cast as a whole.
That may or may not make sense to anyone else, but there’s a certain subjectivity about these matters anyhow.
Another thing to think about with The Last Airbender is that it was directed (and produced) by M. Night Shyamalan, an Indian American. Presumably he had some say in the casting process and he’s said in interviews that he’s familar with the show. So if he had wanted a multiracial cast, there probably would have been a multiracial cast.
Of course, it’s also worth noting that the only non-white actor in most of Shyamalan’s movie is Shyamalan himself.
There is a multi-racial cast in Airbender, but the good characters are white and the evil ones are brown/-ish:
The reviewer watched the series on Nickelodeon and liked it, too.
I enjoyed watching the Airbender series (especially loved the humor) and I’ve never thought of Aang as “asian”. I’ve always thought of him as “air nomad/nation”.
For me it’s more of how closely the actor resembles the character physically and less of whether they’re Asian, Caucasian or Vulcan. I’m ok with the casting in the movie because the actors playing the main characters do not deviate too far (for me, anyway) from the appearance of the characters they’re playing. I would find a black Peter Parker jarring because he would look very different from the character he’s supposed to play. A caucasian actor with blond hair playing Peter Parker would also be jarring for me.
I voted other.
Broomstick pretty much said what I was going to on the Airbender casting.
On the arachnid side, while I think a black Spider-Man would be cool, a black Peter Parker wouldn’t make much sense. Peter Parker is a white kid; race isn’t just part of “ethnic” characters’ backstory.
See, I don’t understand how that would work, plot-wise, assuming the other two movies ever get made.
Eventually, the “good” characters have to wander around in the Fire Nation. Won’t a bunch of White folks look a wee bit out of place, a tad noticible, in a nation where everyone is Indian?
I think I have only ever seen the first Spiderman movie but what is it about Peter Parker that wouldn’t translate to a black kid? From what I remember he is a high school student living in NYC with his aunt and uncle. He has a best friend, a crush on the girl next door and is interested in photography. That couldn’t describe a black kid?
It’s more the 40-50 year history of him being a scrawny white kid from New York that is the problem. So many people are so familiar with that they might have a hard time moving past it.
On the other hand, Nick Fury, another comic character dating from the 1960’s, successfully transitioned from Caucasian to black in the comics and few if any blinked with Samuel L. Jackson cast as Fury in the Ironman movies (Jackson being who the black Fury in the comics was based on). Then again, Fury was never as popular or widely read as Spiderman and never as much in the mainstream consciousness. Perhaps that is a factor.
So, while it wouldn’t be impossible (clearly, at least one white comic hero, Fury, has been recast as black) it would be a stretch. It would have to be a spectacular actor to pull it off. Of course, we do have spectacular black actors. And with Spiderman being totally covered by his costume it’s not like anyone seeing him as Spiderman would know the difference, right?
I don’t know much about the show that it’s based on and have no intention of seeing the movie either, but I want to point out that in the same way American animation shows Americans as sort of race neutral and use specific racial features to distinguish non-Americans, anime tends to draw Japanese people that way. As such, pretty much anyone that doesn’t have an obvious race is Asian.
I completely agree here; in fact, I entered this thread intended to mention Duncan’s performance of the Kingpin as a rare example of doing it well. It worked well because, despite the character being white, it took minimal work to adjust the character to be black (in fact, as I recall, they utterly ignored his race) and Duncan is one of the actors who had the physique to play the part anyway.
The problem is, I think Peter Parker’s character is just too established as is, and it would be much more difficult to just ignore the change of race especially since the audience would be curious as to why they did it. Moreover, it would require other necessary and probable changes to the universe.
For instance, his aunt and uncle would have to be black too. More troubling, would they make Mary Jane black? If they do, that name seems off (probably need to drop the double name) and now a lott of the major characters are black which would require some tweaking of all of the characters to some extent. It also draws more attention to the racial changes and moreover has the audience wondering why they did it.
If Mary Jane isn’t black, now they have an inter-racial love interest, and dealing with that will almost certainly involve issues around that that just would distract from the main story. If I’m going to see a new Spider-man movie, I want to see a super hero movie, not something involving racial tension.
Unlike Kingpin where there isn’t a whole lot of backstory gone into in the movie and doesn’t affect other characters, they could just plug in Duncan and go from there. But they can’t do that with Spider-man, so they’d really just be better off dropping much of the establish back story of Peter Parker and starting fresh. And if they’re going to do that, they’re pretty much not making a Spider-man movie anymore except that it’s some other guy with the same powers.
This is why I am fine with the Airbending casting. In the tv show everyone looked white to me. They just happened to dress in similar fashions to different cultures and races we have here on Earth.
I am not ok with a black Peter Parker. Doing that is pretty much just remaking the first Spiderman movie with a black actor instead of a white one and that would be dumb.
Now if they changed the characters name and origin story then I would be fine with a black character. Take for instance Spiderman 2099 with Miguel O’Hara becoming Spiderman. I am perfectly ok with this new Spiderman because he is not Peter Parker and has a different origin story.
I think it would actually be kind of neat to have a new “Spiderman” story.
I suppose it depends on whether you grew up with a certain image of the character. Spider-Man was never may favorite as a kid, I really wasn’t all that aware of him, so to me you could change him to a Black kid and it would make no difference, bcause his race really had nothing to do with the plot.
However, those who grew up with a character looking a certain way may feel otherwise, since they are used, over several iterations in different media, to the character having a certain “look” and giving him a totally different “look” changes the feel of the character for them.
It is similar to the controversies over comic superhero costumes. Many strongly dislike changing the "classic’ look of the costume, not because it makes any difference to the plot, but because it changes the mood or feel for the character. Someone who is a kid now, and did not grow up with that character looking a certain way or wearing a certain costume, may not care.
It helps that the Kingpin didn’t have as extensive a backstory as Parker, even in the comics. It did jar me for about 10 seconds, as I was a long-time Daredevil reader and thus used to a white Kingpin, but after that initial “Huh?” Duncan’s performance was so spot on to the character that the actor’s color no longer mattered. It’s a non-issue for me now, just like the white/black versions of Nick Fury. Jackson nails the character of Fury.
Of course, it depends also on the viewer being fairly non-biased towards people of various races. Some people will NEVER accept a black actor in what is perceived as a white role.
Some other changes of comic characters from print to screen have jarred me for a few seconds, but may have slipped past others. For example. Wolverine in print is a short guy. For 40-50 years there have been a wealth of references to his shortness, bad jokes, etc. But in the movies he’s played by a guy six feet tall. Believe it or not, that bothered me - for a few minutes. Because Jackman got the character right so after the initial “Hey, this guy is supposed to be short - !” I stopped worrying about it. OK, so movie Wolverine is a tall guy, no big deal.
And THAT is a good point - we don’t have a society (yet) where inter-racial relationships are a complete non-issue. Now, it’s conceivable there is a script writer, director, and a bunch of actors out there who could pull off a movie like that… but not likely they’d all be on the same movie at the same time.
Interesting tidbit: I hear they are casting a black man, Idris Elba, to play the role of Heimdall in the upcoming Thor movie. Um… as the actor himself said, the Aesir are Norse, and he himself very much isn’t. It’s already generated some complaints. On the other hand, if he can pull it off, so much the better. Then again, Heimdall, while important, is not THE main character - like Kingpin in Daredevil and Nick Fury in the movie versions of Ironman he’s important but not central.
It does, however, have the twist that Heimdall and Sif are supposed to be brother and sister, and Sif is to be played by Jaime Alexander, who is not black. I suppose their choices are 1) make them not full siblings, 2) not mention it, or 3) come up with some pointless excuse. Whatever - we’ll find out soon enough I suppose.
Given that some black actors have turned in stellar performances I have to say I’m in favor of casting that concentrates more on the actors’ *abilities *than arbitrary details of skin color. There are some characters for whom ethnicity is very important, but in other cases I fully approve of “non-traditional” casting.