No argument here!
What has the new series done to ruin Star Trek this time?
- Thread starter Ray Hardgrit
- Start date
I mean this with all sincerity......
If Robert April being a black man in SNW bothers anyone in the fandom, they can go straight to hell. We do not need them in the fandom. We're far better off without them. There's the door, get out.
Wow, it's a good thing I went with the 'TAS is non-canon therefore April is fine' side of the argument not the 'SNW is wrong because he is canonically white' side, as I'd hate to suddenly become a racist and get banished from the fandom.
Sorry, but as Wormhole said, making April a black man means something. Its significance should certainly matter more to people than honoring a one-off appearance from a Saturday morning cartoon from the 70's. If some fan takes series issue with that? Fuck 'em.
Is April significant at all to anyone who didn't watch that Saturday morning cartoon from the 70s? It introduced him and it's his only appearance before SNW. Aside from being a name on Saru's high score table.
I don’t mind April being black. Actually I didn’t even know that he was white before I read about it on here. It’s a pithy detail.
But where’s the line? Would people accept a black Kirk? Or a white Uhura? If a character is more established, does that mean it can’t be done or are we alright with it?
Not meaning to kick a hornets nest. Genuinely asking.
But where’s the line? Would people accept a black Kirk? Or a white Uhura? If a character is more established, does that mean it can’t be done or are we alright with it?
Not meaning to kick a hornets nest. Genuinely asking.
Marvel has done this with Nick Fury. Samuel L. Jackson's version of the character is based on the Ultimate Universe version. But the original (616) version is white.
My view is that unless ethnicity is intrinsic to the character (e.g., Magneto being a Jewish holocaust survivor, Black Panther being the king of an African nation, etc.), then casting should be wide open to whomever the best actor is for the part.
For example, in Stephen King's short-story on which The Shawshank Redemption is based, the character of Red (Morgan Freeman) is white. And the movie alludes to that, since they leave the line in where Andy (Tim Robbins) asks why he's called Red: "Maybe it's cause I'm Irish."
TAS notwithstanding, I don't think there's anything about April that requires a certain ethnicity.
Sure, and I have no problem with it at all.
It’s not an Apples/Apples situation though because Marvel has explicitly had its stories take place over a multiverse for decades before even Ultimate became a thing.
If SNW takes place in the so-called Prime Universe, is it okay to have a black Scotty, even though he’s been established as white in earlier shows?
Or in other words, is it okay to do this for characters who are more established, as opposed to minor players like Kyle or April?
As I said, the casting of April doesn’t bother me in the slightest. But where is the line? Would those championing the decision be as effusive if (say) Ncuti Gatwa was cast as (say) Scotty? Choosing Gatwa there because despite being black, he is an actor with Scottish heritage.
If they're saying in-universe that they've changed their appearance, then I'm fine with it. David Tennant can become Ncuti Gatwa in sci-fi.
If they're from a parallel universe, then I'm fine with it. Alternate timeline, less so.
If it's a new adaptation with its own canon... I'm not entirely fine with it, but whatever. Representation (or casting the best actor for the job) is sometimes more important than my own personal feelings about iconic characters retaining their iconic image and being instantly recognisable. Unless it's Superman or Batman. Or James Bond. Or...
If it's the same universe, same timeline, and I'm supposed to believe that they've always looked the same, they should cast someone who looks the same. Or better yet, don't cast anyone at all, and just make a new character. Because let's face it, as good as Robin Curtis was in the role, no one was buying that being the same Saavik. Valeris worked better.
There's two ways of looking at this.
People who know more about Broadway and stage productions can probably give a better answer, but I believe having people of different ethnicities play established characters that don't match their own personal background is a common thing. I want to say, like back in the 1980s, Miss Saigon caused a bit of controversy when the British actor Jonathan Pryce took on the role of a Vietnamese pimp. So you have entire stage productions that don't sweat whether all of the actors in a family "match" ethnically or whether the actor playing the role fits the written ethnicity. They just cast the person they believe best fits the role.
When you get into main characters that have a deep legacy in other live-action works (i.e., I'm sorry but I just don't think April in TAS had that much impact to require some sort of fidelity) I think it would probably require acknowledging it's a different continuity since the life experiences of the characters will be different. If you recast Uhura or Sisko with white actors, I do think it would be borderline offensive and at the very least awkward to just pretend they're the same people as Nichelle Nichols in TOS or Avery Brooks in DS9, especially given that Sisko's family history and historical racism comes up a few times in episodes.
I mean if you gender-swapped Janeway to make the character male, I do think that changes a lot of the dynamics of how that character is perceived, even though the fact Janeway is a woman is not something that's put front-and-center in most stories.
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I think this is the correct answer.
The fact that people even bring up April as some sort of problem (or Alternate Timeline!!) is ridiculous beyond belief.
The first version was a white guy with white hair in his senior years. The live action version is a middle-aged black man. Same character, same continuity. Just different creator interpretations separated by almost 50 years.
Any stage production really as you draw up on the population you have. I played a rabbi in a Holocaust based play in highschool, though I'm hardly Jewish. My Irish friend played a British aristocrat.
In a local production of The Hobbit, Thranduil was played by a female friend of mine, since their version was more truncated.
You work with the best actor you can get. And, even Trek is famously bad with this with Khan being played by a Spanish heritage man as an Indian.
Same here. And feels extraordinarily arbitrary.
This is more relevant to when people do stage productions of Trek episodes, not the episodes themselves.
It's always relevant in casting considerations if race is not a critical feature of character
I'm still struggling with the idea that moving a major war fifty years down the timeline doesn't substantially affect the timeline. That for me, is a stretch too far.
I'd never have done it. Screw "the modern audience and believability" in that regard. It's fiction. It's not like this stuff actually happened in the 1990s or will in the 2030s or whenever. But that said: it's done, dialogue can be ignored or looped over with new ADR and it still all fits and works for me.
Everyone has their own litmus for this stuff. But I still don't understand, "a war was moved fifty years, yet it is all the same". Which Khan is the ancestor of La'an? Can't be both, they clearly would be two very different people being born fifty-plus years apart.
So, either one has to overwrite the other, which means it isn't the Prime universe that started with TOS, or it is a multiverse, where everything happened, just at different speeds.
It's a critical feature if we've seen them before.
You're making me feel like I'm trying to defend my weird opinions that no one else would have. But absolutely no movie or TV show recasts characters that look radically different to how they used to look, none I'm familiar with anyway. Unless they're shapeshifters or alien replicator nano clouds or whatever.
Star Wars goes to the trouble of using CGI faces and deep fakes to recreate previous actors. Star Trek maintained this kind of consistency in its characters for almost 60 years straight, to the point where Saavik is the example of recasting everyone comes up with. A character recast with a fairly similar looking actress in 1984 and then never again, because they thought it'd be weird if a third actress played her in the next film.
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