They took an existing character and based an entirely new one off of him using the same rule about basing his appearance on someone that was cool at the time - in this case Jackson.
Then what's the freaking problem? Every time you create a new live film franchise, a new animation film, a new television series or whatever, you are engaging an act of creation and recreation--of invention and reinvention. You have characters based on already established figures, who are like these characters but unlike them, never exact copies (Heisenburg would have something to say about that). Those in charge of (re)creating a character and his/her adventures does so for a new medium, a new time, a new setting and a new audience. There's no difference between what Marvel did when they created a new version of Nick Fury for Ultimates and what the people who made the Daredevil film did when casting their Kingpin.
I haven't made the argument you claim I have. My argument is that Stan Lee and his various partners created characters the way they wanted to created them.
And nothing must ever change? I think somebody mentioned Shakespeare; hs plots and characters have been transposed to every setting imaginable, because that is the flexibility inherent in art, and most of the characters we're talking about here share that flexibility. The recently released Iron Man film had him injured in Afghanistan, not Vietnam. Is that, too, needless meddling with the character, distorting the story the creators set out to tell? Because it is the injury and the experience of it that is relevant, not where it occurs. Similarly, you could have a black or asian Tony Stark, because ethnicity matters as much to the character as where he was wounded: which is to say, they don't. So unless you're a complete purist who will accept nothing but a panel by panel rendition of the source material (and even then, new media means new interpretation, no matter how faithful one tries to be), I would like to know why you are fixating on this idea of ethnicity as unchangeable--as transgressive to even mention it--when other, equally relevant things can be changed?
Do I care if they change a character's race, gender, ethnicity, etc? Only if they do it to placate some ridiculous argument, otherwise I couldn't care.
And who, pray tell, is doing that? You claim not to be discriminatory, yet you seem to know the talking points of the Thurmonds and Limbaughs fairly well, shoe on the other foot and all that. Here's a reality check: the pricks who run the political correctness myth would like you to believe that everybody is just as racist and prejudicial as they are, and they are just the ones who say so openly. That the 'libruls' are just cowards and hypocrites, and that diversity is code-word for some for of conspiracy as though as those who embrace the idea do so at the behest of some shadowy cabal somehow controlling the lexical and ideological strings of their puppets. This is pure crap. I love diversity, for no other reason than because it is diverse. I call myself 'heterophile', a lover of difference. Maybe it's the city-boy talking, but homogeneity has always creeped me the fuck out. I consider the benefits mentioned here, and it is just a perfunctory, limited description, worthwhile goals in and of themselves, legitimately pursued.
If they were to take a minority character and make them white (which obviously has been done) you'd hear all kinds of protests over it. But do it to a major white character and it's suddenly acceptable?
That's because it's usually done for racist reasons, because of the belief of producers that straight white men don't want to see characters different than themselves, can't relate to them. Individually, as a straight white male, if someone were to lay that on me, I would be thoroughly insulted--and yet, the statistics are there. That's not saying that white = racist, but it is a demonstration of how many people out there still cling to benighted views, howsoever they justify it to themselves.
And there is a good converse example: nuBSG and Saul Tigh. Unlike many characters of minority background in contemporary settings, who producers insist on making jive-talking or fitting some other pigeonholed stereotype, the futuristic setting meant one could detach them from our habitual notions of race or gender (or invent new ones, like the Sagiterrons), and as such could, and were, mixed up to produce an overall more diverse crew--one that just happened to have a white man in what had been a role played by a black man. No problem there.
I always end up having to defend the kind of crap I usually dispise, but it's because the threads almost always turn into a us vs them discussion. "Us" being minorities (usually blacks though) and "Them" being white people as if there is some right to attack whites because they can't fight back against racism against them without sounding racist themselves.
Oh, cut the persecution crap. You're the one who has been trying to introduce an "Us vs. Them" paradigm with shit like this:
Let's surmise: You're white, you're racist. That's the argument I've seen time and again. No one dares out-right say it but that's the implication.
I have never said such a thing. I have never believed such a thing. I will say, however, that I am concerned about the assumptions you've jumped to, that this should be a conflict divided along racial lines, and in trying to paint yourself as a victim of some kind of reverse discrimination and other such trite regurgitations.
Fictitiously yours, Trent Roman
