And of course a black Superman might be set in a Metropolis where his race is inconsequential.
Plenty of movies have depicted New York with almost no minorities or as hell-holes of crime, or where there’s no racial tension, or as a place where people spontaneously burst into singing and dancing on spotless streets.
Realism has always been relative.
Present-day Metropolis, sure, and I stated as much. Or in the past, if it’s a fantasy aspirational version of Metropolis.
Heck, if we relax our requirements of realism enough, we could even have a Metropolis where green people are mainstream.
Yes, we certainly could. But a Metropolis in which a black Superman faces no negative racial consequences is somewhere between the green people Metropolis and an absolutely racially realistic Metropolis. And, as I said before, the movie business can certainly escape any accusation of having a history of being 100 percent realistic in terms of racial issues.
This really is an awesome point.
If I am watching a super hero movie, my disbelief is already suspended. If I can believe that the average Metropolite is uunfazed by a guy flying around in the air in his underwear, then it really isn’t that hard for me to imagine that Metropolites could be enlightened enough not to be wigged out by his skin color. Just because we have that hang-up doesn’t mean people in alternative universes have it too.
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To add more to this…
It is not important for every hardship and challenge a character has faced in his life to be fleshed out in full detail. Because an audience has an imagination. Frequently it is more important just to know that the character has faced some hardship and challenges than to know the specifics of those hardships and challenges.
I just watched the movie “Ma” that is now playing in theaters. Spoiler:
The hardships and challenges that Octavia Spencer’s character has faced in life are shown in flashbacks, but we never find out why she was the target of such suffering. We just have to guess at it. Was it because of her race? Her physical appearance? Her nerdiness? We never know. No one ever calls her an ugly nigger nerd. All we know is that she was bullied by the popular kids in high school and that it made her crazy. Octavia could be white and skinny and her character could have had the same arc.
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I don’t mid elves that look black, or elves that look Chinese, or elves that look Polynesian. Any or all of these would be cool, and relatively original. My problem is seeing a community of elves, some of whom look white, some of whom look black, and some of whom look Asian, because I’d have questions: are some of them immigrants? Are they different castes? Are elves racist (with other elves, I mean; obviously they’re racist against humans, because, you know, elves)?
Because let’s be honest: in many cases, race is evidence of racism. It’s not normal for people of different races to live alongside each other, because in a normal society, everyone has sex with everyone, and within four or five generations, everyone looks more or less the same (within the normal range of human appearance). A multiracial society is either a society in flux, or a society that places social restrictions on people fucking. Either way, I want to know the story. Ignoring it is lazy worldbuilding.
…had Pam Greer play ‘Jackie Brown’ in the movie of the same name. In Elmore Leonard’s original novel, ‘Rum Punch’, Jackie is a blond white woman.
He didn’t do it on purpose. He just didn’t read the book.
The traits we associate with racial categories will continue to exist in a population even when everyone is fucking each other. Because we not talking about paint being mixed together. We are talking about genes.
So in another four-five generations, you will still find people who could be classified as “black”, “Asian”, and “white” according to today’s standards. It is just that the “Asian” person will have curlier hair and the “white” will have a broader nose and the “black” will have more almond shaped eyes. People may stop categorizing themselves racially but that does not mean they will be so homogoneous that you couldn’t classify them racially. To whit, a typical African American clan exhibits huge phenotype variation (blue-black skin all the way to damn-near-white). But chances everyone in thay family will be perceived as black according to the rando who looks at them.
People are more likely to have sex with the people who are in close proximity than people far away. So even when we do become racially enlightened, I would expect to find more darker-skinned Americans living in the Deep South than in New England and more Asiatic-looking folks on the West Coast than on the East. I would expect this pattern to last for a really long time, actually. Especially if the economy ever crumbles and people can’t afford to travel as much.
At any rate, most societies–or at least the most interesting kind–are in flux. That is much more “normal” than a society that has remained homogenous for centuries. If I were to watch a movie with a motley-looking crew of elves, I would tell myself the same story I tell myself when I see Vulcans of different hues. “Oh, they have the same phenotypic diversity that Americans/humans do.” Hell, maybe they have more diversity. Maybe elves are prone to more mutations than humans are. You don’t need to have a world built for you. Just use some imagination.
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Yes, but Othello doesn’t have to be black - he just has to be different than everyone else in the play. There has been at least one reversed-race Othello with a white man cast in the title role and everyone else in the play being African American (way back in 1997, so more than 20 years ago). You could have an Asian Othello and everyone else either white or black. A black Othello and everyone else Asian. The major point of the play would still work.
But an Othello with a cast all mixed up racially and ethnically? No, I don’t think that would work, the primary message of the play would be diluted to meaninglessness.
What? Both Miranda and Hamilton are/were Puerto Rican… Oh, you mean the rest of the cast. 
Funny how no one seems to get their nickers in a twist over a black George Washington… but Hamilton works with casting that ignores historical race/ethnicity based on its popularity. I haven’t personally seen it myself, but it would seem to be a production where musical and dance talent are primary requirements, and with the entire cast being all “mixed up” it seems to work because you don’t expect the actor’s race/ethnicity to match with the historical figure’s. I think if the majority of the cast had been tightly selected for matching with the historical physical appearance of the people they portray with only one or two standing out that might be problematic.
Vincent D’Onofrio was also a great choice - another big man, one who happens to be white just as Michael Clarke Duncan happened to be black.
Given that Kingpin is from New York, which has long been a multi-ethinic, multi-racial city with lots of people from all over the world “typical New Yorker” could really be any race or ethnicity or any combination of them. I think you’re right - Kingpan’s main physical attribute is that he is a big man - not a fat man, but a tall, strong, physically imposing man. His ethnicity/race really could be anything.
That’s not true for all characters in all contexts, though.
Actually, my father’s family is from the part of the world portrayed in Fiddler on the Roof and looking at old photos of people in grandma’s generation and further back on her side… it’s very clear there’s Asian in that family tree. There actually were/are Jews of both part Asian descent, and there used to a branch of Judaism in China that were very much ethinic Chinese.
Given the time and location someone of African ancestry as a random casting in that play would look odd to me. On the other hand, if you made the entire cast African-American I could probably go with it after the first few minutes. Yes, you’d know it wasn’t precisely historically accurate, but if they were true to the character and the text/music (that is, it was done respectfully and not as a farce or a joke) and were good at their roles I frankly wouldn’t have a problem with it. What, are you going to say kids in a high school drama class in a predominantly black neighborhood aren’t allowed to do that play because they’re the wrong ethnicity? How sad. And if kids in high school can do it why can’t a group of live, professional actors?
Or it could reflect the realty that Jews aren’t all just one skin color - it depends on how it’s done. I mean, sure, I’m Ashkenazi, but even the tiny little Jewish community in my neck of the woods have Jews of all sorts of backgrounds, from Ethiopia (CEO of the local Jewish Federation) to Argentina (the local Orthodox rabbi) to folks born and raised in the American Midwest to folks even more Russian than I am. The local Jewish-run nursery school looks like the United Nations.
Maybe if we had more multi-racial productions of Jewish themed stories it would sink in that not all Jews are European in appearance.
I’m sort of reminded of an on-line recreational outrage about the casting of Skye/Daisy Johnson in Agents of Shield, a character revealed to have an “Chinese” (actually Inhuman) mother - outrage! They cast a white girl as a half-Chinese girl! No, actually, they cast a half-Chinese, half-European actress to portray a half-Chinese, half European character. A lot of people don’t seem to know what multi-ethnic people look like, or the possible range of variation. Seems you can’t win no matter what you do.
“You can’t have an X that’s also a Y” - um, yeah, actually a lot of the time you can. It’s just that we’ve had such a long history of stereotyped casting that we no longer remember, or never learned, that the past was not as “pure” as film and TV have portrayed things to be.
Yeah, in a historical narrative like that I think it only works with
You have a cast that is almost entirely 1 or 3 then make an exception I think it pulls you out of the narrative in a was #2 doesn’t.
Except in the original myths Thor (and Loki) was portrayed as red-haired… so your image of a “big blond white guy” is already deviating from the source material. Perhaps because Marvel’s blond version in the comics set the image for a lot of folks who never went to the original source myths.
Hel was in some myths - but then, she was supposed to be half living woman and half dead woman. And her father, Loki, also fathered a giant wolf, a giant serpent, and gave birth to Odin’s horse Sleipnir (which somehow never made it into the Marvel version, I just can’t imagine getting that past the Comics Code back in the Silver Age of comics). Since Loki was a shape-shifter who could turn from humanoid into a fully functioning female horse there is absolutely no reason you couldn’t cast anyone as Loki.
Actually, Marvel’s version of the Norse deviates all over the place - in the original myths Odin and Loki were blood brothers and thus Loki was a sort of uncle to Thor and not his brother, Hel/Hela was Loki’s daughter, not a sister to either Thor or Loki. Heimdall was described as “the whitest of the gods” on at least one occasion and had golden teeth and not one but nine mothers - a lot different from the Idris Elba portrayal with golden eyes. You know what? I’m totally OK with that - with Elba being Heimdall, Loki being a brunette, Thor being blond, Marvel’s Asgard being multi-racial/ethinic. Why? Because they tell a good story. Because it’s fun. You know, the reason entertainment like that exists in the first place.
^ This.
I thoroughly enjoy the Marvel mythos, but I also know it’s not the historical Norse mythos, which I also enjoy. It’s fine to like both, but I think it’s a good thing when people know the difference between historical accuracy and a modern re-imaging.
A for those responses that say, “but that’s different than race!,” it’s not because there’s something inherently different about race, but because we as a society have serious hangups about skin-color race.
Yeah, that spoiler works because the change is made in 2019. It’s a situation where context in time actually does matter.
Um… maybe. “Dark” could have referred to hair color. Or maybe they’re “dark elves” because they live in a dark place (underground).
Frankly, I loved the fact that Marvel just ripped up the preconceptions on that one and hired an actual dwarf to play a Dwarf then made him a member of a race of “Dwarves” that, apparently, average 10 foot tall or so, completely dwarfing (sorry) Thor. At this point, Marvel is having fun with casting decisions and they could hire a gecko to play a lion and I’d probably pay to see it because they seem to be able to make non-traditional casting work more often than not.
I could go for a lesbian Bond womanizer.. but you’d still wind up offending several categories of people. Hiring a man of any other ethnicity than Caucasian to play Bond is probably a safer “unsafe” choice.
Hmm… wonder if you could make a homosexual Bond “man-izer” work? Bisexual?
Is sexuality really THAT important to the character, or is Bond really more about spying, assassination, and cool gadgets?
I would have been a lot happier with a black Johnny Storm if they had also had a black Susan Storm. Having an interracial Sue/Reed relationship isn’t THAT outrageous in today’s world. Making either Sue or Johnny adopted was a cop out - just hire two people who could conceivably be biological siblings without a lot of plot contortions.
Well… then he’d be the Martian Manhunter
(While we’re on the topic of trangressive casting and decisions - in the current TV version of the Martian Manhunter his human form is played by a black man and the character has imitated Supergirl, an alien who looks like a Caucasian human woman, and said male African-looking alien commenting that the miniskirt was surprisingly comfortable in a very mundane, ordinary manner might be missed by the inattentive but is delightful for someone with the cultural background to realize just how different such a thing is than what was permitted 50 years ago. Oh, and in the same multiverse on the Flash’s version of Earth the police chief is a man married to a man and it’s treated as so ordinary and normal - a good example of how to write a homosexual character that isn’t a caricature)
… and that’s how progress is made.
Yeah, I mean, it’s not like you’re trying to sell the public on a character that’s a California governor with a strong Austrian accent, how ridicu-- oh, wait…
I’m sure you could sift through the population of LA and find more than one person who speaks with a strong Austrian accent, even if Arnold is out of town that week. It’s a very multi-racial, multi-ethnic city with people from all over the world living there, not just a mix of stereotypical white people with American accents and brown people with Spanish accents of one sort or another. Maybe if more white people in productions set in LA spoke with a variety of accents it would no longer stand out so much but just be part of the fabric of the setting and seen as authentic (which, in reality, it is).
(I mean, hell, where I live isn’t nearly as cosmopolitan as LA and the owner of the laundromat down the road is a native German speaker which you can tell the moment he opens his mouth - don’t know what *particular *brand of German-speaker he is but maybe he’s Austrian. And my former landlord of 20 years is half-Austrian - German accents aren’t THAT unheard of in the US on either coast or in fly-over country between those two.)
Then he would be the Martian Manhunter… who in at least one iteration spends quite a bit of time looking like a brown-skinned human of African descent… when he’s not imitating a flying, bulletproof alien who looks like a human Caucasian woman…
And it works. It actually works pretty well.
The reason a green-skinned superman would not work is because it’s part of Superman’s backstory that by happenstance Kryptonians look enough like human beings to pass as one easily - and there are no green-skinned humans.
Now, if you set the Superman story in a future/alternate timeline where there ARE green-skinned Americans then a green-skinned Superman would work because he could blend in.
(The Martian Manhunter is a shape-shifter - that, more than his other Superman-like powers, defines the character. So he can blend in literally anywhere even if his real skin is green because he can change his skin color.)
Actually, the Marvel universe does have black-skinned elves
Or maybe for elves varying skin colors are about as big a deal as varying hair colors are for humans and while they have different skin colors they all have the same hair… like in that picture I linked to. Maybe they’re hair-color bigots instead of skin-color bigots.
Except, as already noted, mixing human genes isn’t like mixing paint. Even if in a 100 years most people are some intermediate shade of brown skin/brown hair/brown eyes the genes for things like blue eyes or red hair or really dark or really pale skin are still in the population and will manifest themselves from time to time when recessive traits or the required grouping of genes come together.
For comparison, there’s very little discrimination based on hair color, but you still see blond hair and brown hair and black hair and red hair (and shades in between all of those). And blue hair and green hair and pink hair and purple hair, because people have decided that hair colors shouldn’t be restricted to those determined by genetics. Maybe, by the time the race-mixing has happened, people will similarly view skin color as a mere cosmetic detail that can be changed on a whim.
And yeah, I figured someone might mention Martian Manhunter, but I didn’t want to get into the whole shapeshifter thing.
I agree, but I was referencing Susana from the Steven KIng’s The Dark Tower series. She HAS to be black because so much of her character is about the crap she went through in 1960’s America. So bad that she even lost her mind. Her character arc is to learn to trust people again - even if they are the same race that abused her. So, to make that work, they have to be of the same race of the ones she hates. That is my one and only problem with Idris Elba as The Gunslinger. He’s perfect for the role in every way except for that subplot.
And another thing just to address the the thread in general. This is not “a lack of imagination”. This is a question of how far you can take imagination and still have a cohesive story. Sure, you can have Thor be an actual frog or whatever, but what does that do to the world building? And the world stories are set in matters.
There’s a corollary to that, though. If it’s comedy or satire everything goes out the window. If it’s an episode of say, Drunk History, then a black woman playing Abraham Lincoln is freaking PERFECT.
The idea that plots need to be focused, and that storylines should support the plot and avoid useless diversions, while not a universal truth, is a fairly decent general principle.
Or maybe viewers evaluate the work on its artistic merit, and decide that a black Thor was a confusing element that added nothing to the plot, the movie is derided, and nobody tries that idea again because it’s already been done and failed.
Schwarzenegger was playing Schwarzenegger. For a better example, Dwayne Johnson did Hercules. But he didn’t really play Hercules, he played Dwayne Johnson. And he certainly didn’t play Hercules as a Greek or Roman. Keep in mind, I’m not arguing against a black Thor regardless of setting. I’m arguing against a black Thor in a 9th century Norse setting with strong Viking imagery. Is that an example where switching the race of a character is a bad idea? I believe it is.
There were none that I recall but there could have been with little issue. Vikings in the show had a habit of capturing people during raids and bringing them back home as slaves. They didn’t particularly “other” these slaves, and some were given their freedom. Mostly the slaves were white (from England), but some were Asian.
The main stumbling block would be that the show depicts the first ever Viking trips to England. It’s a plot point in the first few episodes of season 1 that Ragnar Lothbrak comes up with a new way to navigate on the open sea so they can explore new lands farther away than they’d ever gone before, and then we see them make their first ever raids on England. (Wessex.)
Several seasons later we see what is implied to be the first ever Viking raids in Africa. Thus it would be weird if they already had African slaves when the show started, but only because of geography. But even then, they could have been found in the East, I suppose. The attitude and community of the Vikings wouldn’t have batted an eye about black Vikings.
As far as I recall, there isn’t a single Viking in the entire series who cares a lick about race. As far as I can tell, the attitude seems to be that skin color is equivalent to hair color: Wholly irrelevant.
Missed edit window:
Actually, in addition to slaves they captured on raids, they were also quite accepting of travelers regardless of race. I think some of the Asians on the show were travelers who decided to stay on for a while, so African travelers who decided to settle with the Vikings would have been welcomed and been perfectly normal to them.
One of the more interesting aspects of the show (to me) was the Viking attitude toward religion. They believed their gods to be literally real, but they also believed that everyone else’s gods were equally real. They were somewhat hostile to Christianity, but mainly because Christianity itself is somewhat hostile to other religions. (Thou shalt have no other gods…)
One of Ragnar’s sons becomes interested in Buddha, for example, and Ragnar himself loved his Christian slave so much he almost wished he would go to Heaven instead of Valhalla so he might be reunited with him in the afterlife. (Not in a gay way, but not NOT in a gay way either.) Generally speaking, their view of other religions was that of interest and curiosity. They generally wouldn’t disavow their gods for fear of reprisal, but I get the sense that they wouldn’t care at all if their neighbors worshiped different gods.
Derek also makes sure in some eps to cast exactly according to themes. See the ep about disabled or the Natives on Alcatraz ep.
Love me some Derek Waters
I’ll drink to that. 
But to get back to thread at large, I thought of another character that I really don’t think should be played by a black guy. It’s the Incredible Hulk. I was thinking about how in the first Avengers movie Hulk has that scene with Loki where Loki tries to do the mind control thing, but Hulk, well, he just grabs Loki’s ankle like a gorilla and swings/ smashes him back and forth. It was cool as Hell, but, well, he moved like a gorilla. Unfortunately, a black guy who turns into a giant rage monster that moves like a gorilla is problematic for I think should be obvious reasons.
