Barsoom or Bust: Bow down and be humbled, fools!

[kali921]

So, I have a ton of links to post about Andrew Stanton's collaboration with Disney for the upcoming John Carter of Mars films, particularly about the fact that there's some rather horrific whitewashing going on in the casting of the Red Martians in the same way that the cast of the live-action Avatar film is being whitewashed

Comments

[merrickm]

So what are they going to do, put her in redface to play Dejah? Well, yeah. That's what I'd do, regardless of the ethnicity of whoever was playing her (though I'd probably have someone darker-skinned playing her as well). I never pictured them as having the complexion of any real human ethnicity. They're reddish copper. Yeah, a lot of art has Dejah as a stereotypical Exotic Beauty of Persianish appearance, but as you pointed out, a lot of art of her has her wearing clothes. (Which of course she'll have to be in any live-action movie adaptation in order for the movie to be remotely marketable enough to get the budget such an adaptation would require. I don't think any studio is gonna go for the naked thing

[kali921]

Mind you, were it up to me- well if it were up to me this wouldn't be live action, but if it was- I'd still cast a Middle Eastern or possibly Native American actress just in homage to the way she looked on a lot of covers, as well as to emphasize her being racially different than John Carter, but I'd still put coppery makeup on her if there was the budget for it. Er...the Red Martians always read to me as Burroughs' partial inversion - a sci fi fantasy inversion, partial - of the Red Indian trope. Yes, even with some of the problematic depictions in the Barsoom books when it comes to race and gender. (I thought it was sort of a poetic justice that the White Martians were assholes while the Red Martians were most clearly not

[merrickm]

Huh, well, like I said, it's been years since I read the books (and I don't think I read them all- mostly drawing a blank on Black Martians, for example) so no doubt you are right, in which case this casting is even more clearly no good at all than I thought. (Also, as I recall, the books I read as a kid didn't have pictures, which probably contributed to me imagining less human Red Martians than others.)

[jmatonak]

I don't think it was deliberate, as in "an attempt" to do anything- I thought their hybrid vigor just enabled them to survive where the "purer" races mostly didn't.

But I am working from extremely spotty memory here.