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.”
How many boys want to marry a girl who has been raised to think of herself as a princess?
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Good point. Even though that’s how I treat my grand daughters.
If we were to take a traditional African fairy tale and depict it with White characters, the Wokesters would be screaming “racism” at the top of their lungs.
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I cannot imagine “Little White Sambo”
Little Black Sambo was about a kid from south India.
The first trailer that Google shows up
https://m.youtube.com/watch/pHZdnopVgTI
Has 2.2 million views, 63k likes and no dislikes, which just screams manipulation.
That’s right... Just like car jacking... Can’t hit the charts on your own so you steal the part and ride in style on someone else’s hard work... Complete joke...
Christine Agulara(sp?) Did a fine job in Burlesque!!
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