Ok, What Gives?

I spent a lot of time in college watching cartoons and playing video games.

I did not spend a lot of time getting laid.

Maybe they were connected.

I bring up my cartoon watching because this weekend I saw a commercial that took me back to those mindless college days. One of the cartoons I watched in my friends' dormroom, was something called "Dragonball Z." This was a Japanese anime cartoon that focused on the adventures of several alien martial arts experts who had running battles between themselves and other aliens.

Like I said, I wasn't getting laid, although my friends were.

Anyway, the protagonists in the cartoons look sorta like Japanese men despite their alien origins and they all have Japanese sounding names. I always assumed that that the characters were Asians. Turns out, I was wrong.

Well, let me be clear, I may not have been wrong. I'm basing my new assumption on the fact that I watched a commercial this weekend for the new Dragonball Z movie, that featured a run-of-the-mill white guy in the role of "Goku," the cartoon's main character. Since there is no way Hollywood would cast a white guy in an Asian guy's role, Goku must have been white all these years.

Right?

For the sarcasm-challenged, I know for a fact this isn't right. I know that Hollywood has a long and tortured history of "fixing" stories so that main characters who are people of color, suddenly become pale. Just recently, there was a movie made about a group of MIT students who used a complicated system to break casinos in Las Vegas, that featured a patented "whitewash." In real life, the masterminds behind the scheme were Asians, but in the movie version, the white guy was the genius, and the Asians were just his geeky sidekicks.

Over the years, yellowface, redface, blackface and brownface have been a pretty good cottage industry for white actors. It seems that studios often don't want to go through the trouble of locating talented minority actors, so they just hire white people and add makeup. Presto, chango, and we're ready to rock.

Obviously, I'm not a fan of that practice, but I find it even more bothersome when studio executives change massive, plot points in movies just to write in white people, and write out minorities. It happens so often despite the complaints of minority groups across the country, that it forces me to ask one question.

What gives?

Why is it that minorities are viewed as such bad earners at the box office that studio execs would basically rewrite the entire Dragonball Z story? No longer is the movie about bands of warring ninja aliens, now it appears to be about a white dude who learns the power of martial arts from a random old Asian guy, falls in love with an Asian woman, and then saves the world. All while going through some weird transformation that makes him look kinda, sorta Asian, a little.

What type of world do we live in where it makes more sense financially to alienate your core audience, with the aim of maybe attracting families who prefer their superheroes white?

I just don't get it. If anything, recent history has taught us that making quality "niche" movies is a good way to make money. Every movie does not have to appeal to everybody, and by everybody, I mean the stereotypical random white family. Tyler Perry makes moves about black people for black people and he's a freaking millionaire. And his movies aren't even good!

Why is it that Hollywood execs can't seem to grasp the idea that making movies that insult the intelligence of your viewers, and also dabble in racism, just isn't smart? The loyalists who might normally see your movie three or four times will now stay away in droves, and since the movie is a piece of redundant crap, even the families you're trying to attract won't come out.

Who is on the master committee in Hollywood that decides when movies will be "whitewashed" and what focus groups are they talking to? Who is telling these people that digitally scrubbing colored folks out of movies is the way to go? Better yet, who is telling them that sticking to the same trite stereotypes is the best way to make their movies relevant.

I really want to know who is on that committee because I need to meet them.

And shove my foot up their asses.


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