Why was Robert Hooks Replaced with Brock Peters in TVH

I don't think it's weird. In general, casting a white person as a character who's supposed to be Asian is a troubling practice, because it's been going on for a long time and has been a form of institutionalized job discrimination against Asian actors. It was just as wrong in the '60s as it is today. The point is that by now, we should've learned better and stopped doing it. It can be rationalized away in-story in the case of STID, but that doesn't mean it wasn't a problematical choice in real life.

The actual weird double standard is going on here in the present. Lots of movies these days are casting nonwhite actors as characters originally created as white in past decades -- Kingpin, Lana Lang, Pete Ross, Nick Fury, Heimdall, Perry White, Felix Leiter, etc. In those cases, old racial biases are being corrected and casting is getting more inclusive. And yet recently there's been a spate of movies where nominally nonwhite characters have been played by white actors -- the Mandarin (though that was an in-story satire of yellowface casting), Khan, Tonto, the Shredder in Michael Bay's upcoming Ninja Turtles movie. (Although a couple of those were offensive racial stereotypes to begin with.) And that's in the wake of the casting controversy over The Last Airbender a few years ago. So there's this strange and disturbing backslide going on in many films at the same time that progress is being made in others.

 

Generally agreed with your points there, Christopher.

Race is quite the touchy subject, and it can be difficult to not appear insensitive when discussing it. It's interesting to note how folks like John Colicos and Michael Ansara were made (and I quote) "swarthy" to play Klingons on TOS, similar to what was done with Montalban, who, unless I'm mistaken was never particularly dark of skin without makeup assistance.

I think the reason some folks find fault with Cumberbatch vs. Montalban is that Cumberbatch is obviously Caucasian, where Montalban gives the appearance of not, which is somewhat fitting for a character whose name certainly would seem to indicate non-Caucasian ancestry. It doesn't make sense, but Montalban was more acceptable as a part of the standard casting procedures of the time.

Personally, I just choose to assume that Section 31 had Khan cosmetically altered to be unrecognizable to anyone who might have had a history book. I'm not opposed to changing the race of a character for the sake of diversity, if the nature of the character remains unaltered by it. Michael Clarke Duncan's Kingpin for example. However, such things often get accused of tokenization.

 

Although Ansara was Syrian-American, so he often got cast as Arab characters, as well as Native Americans and other "brown" ethnic groups. It was pretty much standard practice in the day for anyone with an exotic look to be cast as various other races interchangeably.

Except it's not an entirely new problem, since Montalban was put in brownface to look Indian in "Space Seed," but used his normal complexion TWOK. Not to mention that Khan's supposedly multiethnic followers were cast as a bunch of blond Nordic types (who were also far too young to have been stranded as adults 15 years earlier). So there were issues with the portrayal of Khan's ethnicity decades before Cumberbatch came along.

I don't see it as tokenization. I see it as correcting a past imbalance. If these classic comics had been created in this day and age, they probably would've been given more diverse casts to begin with.

Really, I'd say tokenization is including a minority character just for the sake of having one and then not having the character be important to the story. What we see these days is colorblind casting for characters who were already important. Okay, Perry White was not particularly important in Man of Steel, but that's just part of the film's larger storytelling issues (Jimmy wasn't even there). But Kingpin was certainly important to Daredevil, Heimdall played a supporting but pivotal role in Thor, Lana Lang was immensely important in Smallville, Nick Fury is hugely important to the MCU, etc. If the character has a worthwhile and meaty role, it's not tokenism, it's genuine inclusion.

 

I agree with you, Christopher, basically on all of that, I'm just outlining how I see others reacting to it the way they do.

 

Well, sure, I don't see it as me vs. you. I'm just expressing my thoughts in response to those other people's view.