Hurr Durr Derp said:
Therumancer said:
#1: Why is this only a factor when it's a white guy taking the role(s)? Let's be honest over the years we've seen situations where we've replaced Marvel Comic's "Kingpin of Crime" and DC Comic's "Harvey Dent" with black guys, and very few people made serious complaints other comic purists who wanted the characters to be more like the comic originals. The most recent example of this that I can think of off the top of my head was again from a comic movie series, where people have been casting Samual L. Jackson as "Nick Fury" in most of the current marvel movies.
It's funny that you should mention those examples. First of all, the Nick Fury thing is a non-issue, as I explained in my earlier post.
Your other two examples are what's interesting. In Prince of Persia, the Persian hero is made Caucasian. In your examples, the white
villains are made black.
Not saying it's deliberate racism (I don't know anything about a black Harvey Dent, but I do know that the black Kingpin had nothing to do with skin color), just that they're a bit... uncomfortable examples in the context of allegedly racist race-swapping shenanigans.
I didn't read your post about Nick Fury, but I'm guessing you are talking about the "Ultimate" universe version. For many younger people that isn't as much of an issue, but for older folks like my dad, and I guess me to some extent (34, pushing 35) it's not the version of Nick Fury we grew up with. Especially given the change of backround (making things more current) as opposed to Nick Fury having been around since World War II, and some of the Howling Commandos stories really wouldn't have worked (and they influance some things that happen in 'modern' comics once in a while) with the ethnic change given when the stories were set originally and how things were back then. That gets into another entire discussion though.
When it comes to "Harvey Dent", he was played by Billy Dee Williams (Lando in Star Wars) in the original Batman movie with Michael Keaton. This was before he became Two-Face and he was acting as a straightforward good guy as far as the role went.
Generally speaking I agree that none of it is a big deal, however it's being made into a big deal here simply because it's being done "in reverse" with a white guy replacing a minority character... which is ridiculous.
As I also mentioned in my post nobody bothered to bat an eye when they decided to have a Korean play a Japanese guy either.
When it comes to characters being re-done to be black only occuring with villains, I'm not entirely sure about that, but even if it was the case, I think most people would still have preferred to have them played by actors closer to the original character's apperance, without ethnicity entering into it. It would be more accurate to say it happens more often with villains or minor characters though, since they changed Pete Ross to be black in the first few seasons of "Smallville".
In the end though I don't think it's a big deal. The bottom line is that the guy they picked to play "The Prince" looks like the character from the video games, which was the idea. If someone was going to complain about the portrayal, this really seems like it's a day late and a dollar short so to speak.
What's more when I look at characters like "Blade" and "Spawn" who had movies made out of them, I think it disproves the more paranoid whitewashing rants because neither of those characters were ethnically changed, despite the beating that was admittedly dished out to some other elements of the storylines.
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