From the article, the movie changed him to Comanche, and made it political and racial.
“”‘All the men were killed, and any men who were captured alive were tortured; the captive women were gang raped. Babies were invariably killed.’
Not that you would know this from the new Lone Ranger movie, starring Johnny Depp as the Indian Tonto.
For reasons best know to themselves, the film-makers have changed Tonto’s tribe to Comanche — in the original TV version, he was a member of the comparatively peace-loving Potowatomi tribe.
And yet he and his fellow native Americans are presented in the film as saintly victims of a Old West where it is the white settlers — the men who built America — who represent nothing but exploitation, brutality, environmental destruction and genocide.””
The point I was trying to make is this. I watched the Lone Ranger as a kid. Until I read this article, I had no idea what tribe the original Tonto was from.
This is much ado about nothing.
The movie probably flopped because most young people don’t even know there was a tv series about the lone Ranger.
I recently read, “The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl” [Timothy Egan]
In the book it was pointed out that the bison were slaughtered as a measure to help stop the Indian tradition of following the bison and the migration of tribes throughout the land. Interesting!