Posted on 09/18/2022 1:43:34 PM PDT by Ennis85
A teaser for the forthcoming live action remake of The Little Mermaid has been released. There’s a brief glimpse of the underwater kingdom — fish, coral and the wreckage of a ship — then a swish of red hair and a glimmering green tail as we hear a snippet of Halle Bailey’s glorious rendition of Part of Your World.
Social media has been flooded with videos of parents showing the trailer to their young black children, capturing their reactions when they realise this version of Ariel looks a lot more like them than in the original Disney movie. “That’s Ariel?” one little girl asks, wide-eyed. “Mommy, she’s brown like me,” another says, grinning.
Their delight was incredibly moving, one of those rare moments when the internet is united in pure joy. Of course, because we can’t have nice things, it was followed by a swift and brutal backlash. Bailey might have all the necessary prerequisites to play this character. Beautiful? Check. Incredible singing voice? Check. Red hair? Check. But the mere idea of a black mermaid was enough to add fuel to an increasingly unhinged culture war.
Between the cost of living crisis and rising energy costs, we are facing a true winter of discontent, and yet all some people can get energised about is the skin colour of a Disney princess. An “artificial intelligence scientist” decided to “fix” the trailer and, according to one Twitter user, “turned the woke actor into a ginger white girl. He says he can fix the whole movie when it comes out . . . It’s over for wokecels.” The Twitter user quickly clarified: “This is for purely educational purposes, please do not misinterpret this in a racist way.” Because what could be racist about literally whitewashing a black woman’s face?
The Little Mermaid isn’t the only remake attracting this kind of deranged criticism. The Rings of Power, Amazon’s much-anticipated prequel to the Lord of the Rings movies, features a more diverse cast, with women and people of colour playing key roles. Online trolls have been “review bombing” the series — Prime Video had to suspend reviews as a result — and some of the actors have been subjected to “relentless racism, threats, harassment and abuse”, according to a statement released by the stars of the show.
Tolkien would be rolling in his grave, the fanboys bemoaned, despite the fact the author rarely mentions skin colour in his texts. In the Oxford don’s own words: “I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones; and most of all, I detest the segregation or separation of language and literature. I do not care which of them you think white.” I would love to see a Venn diagram featuring people who cannot cope with elves of colour; people who are perfectly happy to believe that Jesus, a Jewish man from the Middle East, had light hair and blue eyes; and people who threaten to bomb movie theatres if a black man is ever given the chance to play James Bond. I imagine the intersection between the three would be tight. “But James Bond isn’t black,” some racists cry. “It would be like if a white actor played Barack Obama in a biopic. Have you ever thought about that?” I wonder how long it would take to explain to these poor unfortunate souls the difference between fictional characters and real people? Would it be like an episode of Father Ted? “These are small,” Ted tells Dougal, picking up the plastic toy cows on the table. “But the ones out there are far away.”
While, yes, there’s an argument to be made against Hollywood’s recycling of old intellectual properties rather than creating new ones, that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t do their best to ensure that these retellings reflect the world in which we live. Representation matters. We all deserve to see ourselves reflected in the culture we consume. When Halle Bailey told her grandparents about the criticism she had faced when she took the role of Ariel, they told her: “You don’t understand what this is doing for us, for our community, for all the little black and brown girls who are going to see themselves in you.”
She told Variety magazine: “I want the little girls just like me who are watching to know that they’re special and that they should be a princess in every single way. There’s no reason why they shouldn’t be.”
Frankly, I don't believe that. The series has been getting overwhelmingly bad reviews period, exclusive of all the woke casting.
Reminds me of that awful all-female Ghostbusters remake, that they blamed its failure on “Trump Voters”.
The Critical Drinker addressed that exact topic just recently, and decided that the studios almost certainly are doing this, deliberately, to boost publicity for their films.
I think it used to be a lot worse. New “ratings” are pouring in. (Where have we seen that before?).
JFTR, I didn’t see the first one and won’t see the second.
Or the latest Charlie's Angels. If you don't like these flicks you are a chauvinistic misogynistic male pig! So there! Of course the fact that these were terrible flicks has nothing to do with it.
Everyone knows blacks can’t swim. /s
You are right, but there will always be people online who rush like lemmings to play the parts the studio has already written out for them.
More so than most others
Sure. How would the woketards react to a remake of the Jackie Robinson Story with, say, Mel Gibson in the title role. Or a remake of Lady Sings the Blues with Lady Gaga, or Taylor Swift portraying Billie Holliday.
Could it be Tom Hardy instead of Jeremy Renner?
A few years ago there was a musical called Hamilton that replaced all the white founding fathers with a cast of black people.
If a troupe of white people performed Hamilton, would that be racist?
Liberals would probably think so.
“Could it be Tom Hardy instead of Jeremy Renner?”
*********************************************
Absolutely! They could then cast Jeremy Renner as Wakanda’s Minuster of Science.
Sure, kick the gingers out the door. Everybody knows gingers have no souls.../s
“Why isn’t Ariel Latino or Asian if you really want diversity?”
For the same reason all the white liberals threaten to move to Canada instead of Mexico. Hypocrisy.
:) that works.
Who cares?
Critical Drinker called it.
They're making terrible movies aimed at a virtue-whining audience because no one else will buy such tripe. It's been downhill for the industry for more than a decade and it's not coming back.
Why spend a hundred million making a decent movie when you can spend a fraction of that, stir up controversy and sell the movie to virtue whining losers who want a pat on the head for supporting some anti-fake racist movie?
It's the same with "green energy", recycling, and any other virtue-whining cause. It's much easier to sell garbage to virtue whining losers instead of actually making a real product that can compete in the market.
What the hell? I thought you were kidding!!! But there it is! That is crazy. I must have heard about this cartoon and somehow it came back up, unreal.
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