Current Events > It impresses me when the modern remake is somehow MORE racist than the og.

(+) Yeah! (+)

I'm watching Peter Jackson's King Kong for the first time since 2006. In the 1933 original, the natives were stereotyped but they were played by Black people and presented as having some measure of culture. They barter, they have ritual dance, they work with the sailors in an effort to hold back Kong. In the 2005 remake, they're subhuman cannibal monsters played by White actors in Blackface.

It reminds me of The Lone Ranger. In 1949, they hired Native American actor and athlete Jay Silverheels to play Tonto. He was significantly less stereotyped than most Native American characters of the era; presented as an educated, intelligent, and focused individual who was dedicated to the cause of justice. In the 2013 movie, he was portrayed as by Johnny Depp in KISS makeup as a man who had been driven insane by tragedy.

I'm not sure if I'd place Transformers in this category or not. Skid and Mudflap are embarrassing, but I'm not sure whether or not they qualify as more racist than the Socialist Republic of Carbomyia.

I agree with most everything you said. But your conclusion that these products are "racist" sounds judgmental and unnecessary. You could say racially insensitive or ethnocentric. A lot of stories are told from an ethnocentric point of viewthat is, from the viewpoint of the nation telling themselves the story, and will have inaccurate portrayals of other peoples oftentimes from ignorance rather than malice.

And before the extreme levels of globalization we have nowadays where any nation's storytelling can be telecommunicated on the news and complained over by another people on the other side of the planet the next day, there were nations that told stories from their points of view and they just didn't care what anybody else thought about it. That's human nature.

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That's fair to say the word racist is a bit too strong. Racially insensitive is more accurate since it's not like it's being done out of malice.

But there are character limits to titles, so I had to word it how I could.

FortuneCookie posted...

It reminds me of The Lone Ranger. In 1949, they hired Native American actor and athlete Jay Silverheels to play Tonto. He was significantly less stereotyped than most Native American characters of the era; presented as an educated, intelligent, and focused individual who was dedicated to the cause of justice.

This example proves that some of these movies were rather progressive for their day, even though they're sometimes looked down upon by modern audiences.

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