A lot of people were overwhelmed simply because a short guy got the role
the first time. Me? I'd much prefer a short guy than a goofy comic.
> Ian Fleming said James
> Bond looked like Hoagy Carmichael, so casting Idris Elba in the role is
> an issue.
Maybe its only an issue for people who read the books and have very
little imagination. As it is, that Bond guy seems to look quite
different every few years so I think people are just being extra anal
when they do things like complain about a Scottish accent when he is
supposed to be English (or whatever). There was another recent example
in HARRY POTTER(?) where people flipped out about a black
character...only to find out later that the character was always black
and people just hadn't noticed.
I can sort of see the issue because we all make up the character in our
minds...which is why when you first hear Garfield talk it is shockingly
wrong compared with the voice in your head. But that initial shock
should not cause people to fail to watch the character at all. If Bond
shows up on screen as a black guy instead of a white guy it really
doesn't make a lick of difference to the film...the Bond guy never
really wore any disguise or tried to fit in anyway. Instead, he just
walked around announcing to all his enemies that he was James Bond, 007 spy.
> The thing that makes this even more problematic with comics characters
> is that you have actually SEEN them.
Yep...and they change size depending on their surroundings and they have
tiny waists and tiny necks and HUGE breasts and are in no way
proportional to human beings so why aren't you complaining about every
real human that tries to play them?
> I didn't imagine Mary Jane Watson
> to be a white girl with red hair who always wore a yellow sweater: I SAW
> her depicted as such every month for most of a couple of decades of my
> life.
And? You cannot imagine any new vision?
Can you at least imagine that the 95% of the population that is in no
way burdened by having played with comic books won't be suffering from
the same issue and as such will be perfectly capable of seeing a brown
skinned girl on screen without cramping up.
> Now, is there an argument that can be made, and Stan Lee and others
> would be the ones to make it, that if the times had been different in
> the early '60s that they might have conceived the characters
> differently, and would have represented a wider variety of ethnicities,
> sexual orientations, etc? Perhaps so, and seeing it in that light I try
> really hard to excuse it. It is not a secret that a lot of the topics
> tackled in the early Silver Age magazines were thinly veiled metaphors
> for real life social issues. But at the end of it all, I keep coming
> back to the idea that the existing ones should be left alone and if
> anyone wants to go down that road, do so with new characters. I still
> think the main reason they don't is because of fear of what it will
> reveal about where peoples' tastes really lie.
Introducing any new characters to the public is a major uphill
battle...which is the entire reason that there are so many remakes and
sequels and such in the first place. How many manga character films
have you rushed out to see? Even currently, the movie studios are
trying like mad to move on to 'new thimngs' by bringing all the new teen
book series characters to the big screen instead of the ones from half a
century ago, but it is an uphill battle because the old folks won't even
go to watch HARRY POTTER, much less MAZE RUNNER or DIVERGENT. Heck, with
SPIDERMAN and SUPERMAN they cannot even seem to get much past the origin
story before everyone loses interest and they have to start again.
> With historical figures, as long as someone plays a reasonably accurate
> version of the character I'm not sure who plays the part matters much,
> especially in a play. Movies matter a little more in that regard because
> so many of the movie-going public are so low-brow that if you cast a
If you think comic book readers are somehow less low brow than movie
watchers, I think you are kidding yourself...and especially if you are
talking about people who were reading comics decades ago. There is
really nothing high brow about the SPIDERMAN story. Geeky kid gets
super-powers is every geeky kid's wet dream and has been going all the
way back to when the geeky kids still lived in caves.
> black guy as George Washington in a bio-pic many would walk away
> thinking he really was black and that the racists just made him look
> white on money.
Like Jesus has been recreated as a white man and now many people believe
that? I think it only works if people cannot look up the real character
and know that Washington/Jefferson/etc... were old white men.