Saying that a character in a fantasy TV show setting should be a member of a race and gender that is appropriate to that setting is silly. This was a TV show that the creator called James Bond on horseback.
I’m looking forward to Ryan Gosling’s interpretation of Shaft. Though I will admit, the WWW movie has many faults and I don’t count the race of the lead actor to be one of those.
You feel the United States in 1869 is a fantasy setting?
To be fair, the steampunk elements push it well into Spec Fiction at least.
In The Wild, Wild West? Sure.
You mean a show with an alien spaceship, a man inventing television, a machine to generate earthquakes, and men being turned into cyborgs is hard edged realism?
You need to distinguish between the setting and the plots.
No, you really don’t.
I disagree. A person creating a work of fiction needs to get the reader/viewer to suspend their belief and buy into the work. That means the creator can’t just throw anything into his story, shrug his shoulders, and say “It’s all make believe.” If they try, they run the risk that the reader/viewer will shrug their shoulders and say “Pass.”
So the giant steam powered spider was fine, but an African-American secret agent is just over the top?
No, not at all. The giant spider robot was ridiculous. I’ve said that in several posts.
One of the most welcome changes in recent TV and film offerings is ignoring racial differences when casting historical dramas (something opera has been doing for years). It won’t be long before the audience is trained to ignore such unimportant historical discrepancies the same way they ignore Julius Caesar speaking Shakespearean English.
Good point. I remember seeing Lucia di Lammamore years ago where Lucia’s father was played by a Black actor. And I’m thinking “Here’s a black father of a white Scottish woman and they’re singing their dialog – in Italian!”
That’s when I fell in love with opera, and stopped nitpicking those sort of things.
I think a lot of people forgot all the over-the-top nonsense from the original series which included time travel, putting people into two dimensional paintings for easy transportation, cyborg soldiers, a potion that makes someone so quick they’re invisible to the naked eye, and an evil geologist who figures out how to cause earthquakes. I think I could have lived with a giant spider just fine had the movie been enjoyable. My biggest problem with Will Smith wasn’t his skin color it was with him being Will Smith. I like Will Smith but he was miscast as Jim West.
Yeah, the movie was bad, but not because of the spider. But also not because Will Smith is black. It was just a bad movie. I feel that if you can accept a giant Steampunk spider you can accept an African-American secret agent. The world of TWWW is not our world, there will be differences that simply don’t matter once you accept the premise of that world.
And in the right movie with the right part, Will Smith is fine. I thought he was great in the Men In Black movies. (I read some place that Chris O’Donnell was originally supposed to be in that role and the movie would have been very different with him in it.)
“One of the most welcome changes in recent TV and film offerings is ignoring racial differences when casting historical dramas (something opera has been doing for years)…”
And it kind of fits within the Hollywood tradition. A lot of the people who insist that West remain white, we’re perfectly okay with the mishmash of American Indian tribes presented on screen, or with the generic Africans in Tarzan movies.
It’s why New England racist cops in Lovecraft Country spoke with southern accents.
I see more color-blind casting in UK productions. Like last year’s film version of David Copperfield with Dev Patel in the title role. Or Bridgeton, with black and brown titled individuals in eighteenth century England (although I think they explained the reasons for that). And Patrick Stewart performed the title role in Othello on stage, with the race of the entire case reversed. (So not color-blind casting, but interesting.)
I think part of the problem is that we already had established who Jim West was in a previous version where he was played by the very white Robert Conrad. Let’s take the character of Blade. He started out life as a comic book character who was black, was played by Wesley Snipes in the movie adaptation, and by Sticky Fingaz in the television series. I can accept the premise of a world with vampires being hunted by a half-vampire without any problem. But I would not accept Blade being played by a white actor.
On the flip side, sometimes changes are made in adaptations and they don’t bother me. Tulip is a white woman in the Preacher comics but she’s played by Ruth Negga (Irish/Ethiopian) in the series. I didn’t bother watching more than a few episodes, but Negga as Tulip was just pure dynamite as far as I was concerned. I loved the Dark Tower books by Stephen King but I didn’t bother watching the movie because I figured it’d be a terrible adaptation. But it didn’t really bother me that Idris Elba played Roland.
Robert Conrad was also 5’ 8" and wore lifts, and they weren’t allowed to cast actresses over 5’6" opposite him. Would you object to a taller actor playing the role?
I can understand when a character’s race is important to the plot or the character (Do the Right Thing, Othello, Hidden Figures) but I never saw James West’s race as being intrinsic to the role. It’s basically James Bond on horseback, and it’s the same reason I could accept a black James Bond even though there are parts of James Bond’s history that don’t really work for a black Englishman. But none of those are so important as to define the character.
I’m not as familiar with Blade (movies or comix) but is Blade’s race important to the plot or backstory? Producers and directors often diverge from previous depictions of characters - sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. But unless race (or gender, age, physical characteristics) are important to the role I’m willing to give them a pass.