In Spartacus the upper-class Romans speak in British accents and the slaves all speak with American accents (most notably Tony Curtis). The sole exception is Jean Simmons’ Varinia, with her very pronounced British accent. But she was supposed to be a governess, among other things, teaching children, so she had an excuse.
I think I’ve seen this same dodge used in other films, or something like it. IIRC, in the TV movie Masada the officers had proper British accents while the enlisted met used dialects.
This fits with Wendell’s idea about Star Wars - Fisher used a British accent when speaking with Tarkin, suggesting that the Leia was using more elevated language in a diplomatic situation than she did when calling a member of the lower classes a “nerf herder”
As an aside - I’ve never seen it that way. As far as I’m concerned, they’re humans, just like the people in Middle Earth and Westeros are human. It’s a fantasy story set in an alternate universe.
(Why do you assume that the ‘Long Time Ago…’ was addressed to us? Maybe the movies are a tale told to people in the future of their own universe).
It seems unlikely to me that there was only one accent of Latin spoken in Rome.
There’s a couple problems with this assertion. The first is that it’s just broadly incorrect - even in the first film, you have Carrie Fisher code switching between talking to Imperials and talking to Rebels, and later films you’ve got actors like Ewan MacGregor and John Boyega completely abandoning their native accents. There’s overall a clear attempt to sort characters by accent to at least some degree - generally, Imperials have British accents, Rebels have American accents. It’s debatable the extent to which this was deliberate world building versus Lucas copying what he’d seen in other movies, such as the previously mentioned American/British accent split in Spartacus, but it was definitely a conscious decision around handling the actors’ accents.
The idea that the human characters in Star Wars aren’t supposed to look human is novel to me. Do you make the same assumption about characters in other fantasy stories that don’t have a connection to the real world? Do you assume the characters in Game of Thrones are similarly non-human?
I did that in the remake of Battlestar Galactica. They were related to humans, but had at least some significant differences. In the episode “33”,
After over 130 hours and 237 jumps, the fleet’s crew and passengers, particularly those aboard Galactica, have been operating without sleep while facing the strain of nearly constant military action.
…they were only just starting to talk about using stimulants to keep fighting. A normal Earth Human would have collapsed long before that.
That’s just standard Hollywood over-estimating how durable humans are. Sam Spade isn’t a near human because he can take repeated head trauma without brain damage, nor John McClane for being able to run barefoot over broken glass without crippling himself. Wendell was saying that he views the characters in Star Wars as actually looking non-human, but “translated” to look human the same way their speech is translated to sound English.
Can anyone familiar with the Star Wars universe tell me whether the “human” characters are supposed to be homo sapiens and, if so, how people who lived “long ago, in a galaxy far far away” are related to the natives of our planet?
If they are human, does that mean they’re all either Asian or Black (i.e. looking like people of African ancestry) or White (i.e. looking like people of European ancestry) or… well, resembling humans as they evolved in some part or parts of our world? I certainly wouldn’t assume that humans in an unconnected fantasy world have the same racial/ethnic categories as those of our world. But that gets tricky when you try to put them on screen, by casting actors who do fall into the racial/ethnic categories of our world.
Humans in Star Wars have been a space faring species for tens of thousands of years, and nobody remembers what world they originally came from. Physically, they’re identical to humans, except that some of them have Force powers. It’s possible that lost home world was Earth, but I prefer to think of Star Wars as existing in an unconnected fantasy universe. “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…” means that we’re watching a myth or legend - not one from our past, but from the past of whatever universe Star Wars takes place in.
It’s pretty common in visual adaptations of fantasy works to use real-world ethnicity as a stand-in for fantasy ethnicity. The people of Fantasica are Europeans, the people of Madeupia are Asian, and so forth. It can get problematic sometimes when the fantasy version reflects real world stereotypes, such as the people of Madeupia always being super obsessed with honor, or when someone uses a real world culture for the culture of a nonhuman race, like World of Warcraft’s Jamaican voodoo trolls.