Racism in Star Wars

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Post by kojikun »

paladin wrote:I bet instead of a lightsaber, he would carry a white flag!
It'll be a lightsabe only a white flagshaped blade comes out. :)
Crazy9000 wrote:So why doesn't he just make the next villian German?

Oh wait. The Imperials already use modified German hardware, and their military system is loosely based on the German system. Nevermind, there's no point...
Well, the next villian IS german then, sort of, isn't it? The next "villain" is the EMPIRE!
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Post by Wicked Pilot »

kojikun wrote:It'll be a lightsabe only a white flagshaped blade comes out. :)
"Your father's white flag sabre. This is the weapon of a Frenchmen. Not as clumsy or random as hands in the air ... an elegant surrender, for a more civilized age."
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Post by Darth Servo »

Spoonist wrote:Here you have one of the articles of some of the protests against Jango and son.
Article
:roll: Jango is anti-latino because the clones were grown on Kamino which sounds like camino? :roll: Could these people make it any more obvious that they are grasping at straws delibrately hunting for something, anything to criticize?
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Post by Montcalm »

kojikun wrote:Well, the next villian IS german then, sort of, isn't it? The next "villain" is the EMPIRE!
I thought the evil Empire was America. :mrgreen: :mrgreen:

Don`t flame me its just a joke. 8)
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Post by kojikun »

I never said the Empire was evil! :) Just that its the next Quote-Unquote villain.
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Post by RedImperator »

Montcalm wrote:Well since there is a country most people on earth like to bash,then make the next villain(Canadian) :roll:
What would he do? Bore everyone to death?
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Post by Darth Wong »

Montcalm wrote:I thought the evil Empire was America. :mrgreen: :mrgreen:

Don`t flame me its just a joke. 8)
Actually, the Evil Empire is Old Europe, and the plucky Rebellion is America. Listen to the accents of the actors.
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Post by kojikun »

Darth Wong wrote:Actually, the Evil Empire is Old Europe, and the plucky Rebellion is America. Listen to the accents of the act
Exactly! It's the revolutionary war all over again.
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Post by Montcalm »

Darth Wong wrote:
Montcalm wrote:I thought the evil Empire was America. :mrgreen: :mrgreen:
Actually, the Evil Empire is Old Europe, and the plucky Rebellion is America. Listen to the accents of the actors.
Well i was just going with whats happening in the world now,America is the strongest country on Earth. :wink:
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Post by Enforcer Talen »

Montcalm wrote:
kojikun wrote:Well, the next villian IS german then, sort of, isn't it? The next "villain" is the EMPIRE!
I thought the evil Empire was America. :mrgreen: :mrgreen:

Don`t flame me its just a joke. 8)
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Post by Grand Admiral Thrawn »

Stupid article

George Lucas, sometimes accused of reinforcing racial stereotypes with his movies, has done it again, according to critics.
Latino critics in particular charge his latest Star Wars epic, Episode II: Attack of the Clones, toys with American paranoia about Mexican immigration with its cloned army of swarthy lookalikes who march in lockstep by the tens of thousands, and ultimately end up serving as Darth Vader's white-suited warriors.

You mean Southern American "paranoiaa." How the fuck could this relate to clones of an actor who is from the other side of the world, especially since the clones SAVE THE DAY?!

[quote[ Modeled on bounty hunter Jango Fett, the clones, we're told, are genetically modified for docility and obedience.[/quote]

Actually, we're told they're less independant then the host, who's a BOUNTY HUNTER!
The breeding project, conducted by long-necked aliens who look like refugees from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, takes place on the planet Kamino -- soundalike for the Spanish word "camino," which means "road" or "I walk."
So?
Temuera Morrison, the actor who plays Jango, is a New Zealander of Maori descent. But that didn't get in the way of some members of an eight-person Detroit News panel assembled to review the film.
"He looked totally Latino," says Martina Guzman, a Detroiter who's managing a State House election campaign.

Fuck you. I'm sure Mr. Morrison wouldn't appreciate that.
"And his kid," says Wayne State history professor Jose Cuello, referring to the young Boba Fett, "looked even more Latino."
Fuck you too.
It reminds Cuello a little bit of "those Reagan ads in the 1980 campaign, that suggested if Nicaragua went communist, you'd have wild-eyed Mexicans with guns running across the California border."

Which has anything to do with CLONES FROM A MAORI ACTOR WHO SAVE THE MAIN CHARACTERS FROM DYING?!
A flabbergasted Lucasfilm spokeswoman, Jeanne Cole, says "This is the first we've heard of this. Star Wars," she says, "is a fantasy movie filled with creatures and aliens from all different planets and universes and galaxies. There is no basis for this."
Thank god, some reason!
Lucas was in Cannes and could not be reached for comment.
The celebrated mythmaker has been through what some might call the p.c. mill before.
In 1999, a furor erupted over The Phantom Menace's Jar Jar Binks, a floppy-eared alien whom some read as a sort of Stepin Fetchit by way of the West Indies.
"Everyone I've ever spoken to says there's a Rastafarian element to his speech, his walk, and in his 'dread' ears," says copy editor Robert del Valle, who was on The News panel with Guzman and Cuello.
So Rastafarians all talk, walk and have GIANT FLOPPING EARS like a ALIEN with a accent?
But such allegations were dismissed as "absurd" by Lucas in a Thursday interview published in the Washington Post. "People say, 'He sounds Caribbean.' Well, he doesn't. He's a complete invention. It's a different language. Just because he speaks with that accent doesn't mean it's a racial stereotype."

Exactly. I'd like these rascists accusers to provide ONE person who talks even remotely like Gundans
The interview did not address the clone issue.
A somewhat muted Jar Jar makes another appearance in Clones, but it is the dark-skinned Jango-copies that seem to have caught some audience members' attention this time around.
Still, not everybody's buying it.
Harry Knowles, on-line film reviewer and author of Ain't It Cool: Hollywood's Red-Headed Step-Child Speaks Out (Time Warner), says the whole Jango ethnic premise is "reading racism into something that's not there -- it's just in the minds of the viewers. It's like calling Jar Jar racist when all he is is Bullwinkle."
The Jango dispute surfaced in internet chat rooms devoted to Star Wars days before the movie's release, says panelist Gary Anderson, the artistic director at Detroit's Plowshares Theatre and longtime Star Wars student and critic.
If the planet name "Kamino" caught some Latinos' attention, three Arab-Americans on The News' panel seized on the fact that Jango's son calls him "Baba."
"I frankly think the bounty hunter is Arab," says college counselor Imad Nouri of Royal Oak.
"He's basically a terrorist," explains Nouri, "and 'baba' is Arabic for 'father.' "

Oops, sorry dumbass, his name is Boba.
Such allegations have a long history in that galaxy far, far away. A number of observers noted that the 1977 original was, at least at the human level, an all-white party -- looking, in Anderson's words, "like the Ku Klux Klan's fantasy of the future."
The only exception was Darth Vader's basso-profundo voice, supplied by African-American actor James Earl Jones.
Ignoring the fact this was because the majority of actors were British because local actors were cheap, and Star Wars was not a giant budget film.
Which leads to all sorts of ironies, intentional or not: Darth Vader has a black man's voice when he's bad, but in Clones -- before Anakin Skywalker does the Darth-thing and defects to the Dark Side -- he's a white guy, played by Hayden Christensen.
The big question lurking beneath all this ethnic deconstruction: Could any of this possibly be deliberate?
For their part, The News' panelists were divided.
"The plot is so superficial," says Cuello, "I don't think they could possibly have any deliberate intent about manipulating images."
Like almost everybody who commented on Lucas, Anderson doubts there's anything malicious going on.
"If your entire world perspective is based on 1950s TV and films, what do you expect?" he asks. "Garbage in and garbage out."
For her part, Guzman was astonished that, given the Jar Jar flap, Lucas didn't scrutinize everything a little more critically this time around. "He's been criticized before," she says. "So he had a choice."

I still don't see what's wrong with giving the job to 2 actors who "look Latino." You fucking critics complain about ethnic actors, and then all white casts?

Furthermore, Jango Fett is so popular he got his own video game "BOUNTY HUNTER" and Boba Fett has long been loved by SW fans.
It's not that she's opposed to Latin-looking baddies per se. She just wishes the occasional swarthy good guy would get as much on-screen time as the villain.
"Jimmy Smits had all of two lines in the whole movie," Guzman says. "And Samuel Jackson had like five. Then there's the bad guy."

Ignoring the biggest villains are white of course.
For pop-culture professor Robert Thompson at Syracuse University -- who has yet to see Clones -- the issue boils down to whether Lucas really wanted to tweak Anglo fears.

By making the evil bad guy white. Or did you people go blind every time Palpatine appears?
He's inclined to say no, attributing Lucas' occasionally confusing choices to "a certain degree of cluelessness. Look at Jar Jar Binks. The moment that guy comes on the screen, you wonder what in the world they were thinking. This isn't 1957. Didn't anybody say, 'Have you paid attention to what this guy is doing?' "
The big problem with Binks doesn't have anything to do with rascism. It's the fact he's a fucking annoying character.
The sad thing, he says, is that the Star Wars saga is also "about tolerance and dignity.
Which is why one of the man characters of the original was a 8 foot hairy snarling monster who is said to rip people's arms off. But everybody loves Chewie.
But then you've got this 'camino' thing, which sounds a little creepy, and swarthy people who march in uncountable masses."

May I remind you WITHOUT THOSE MASSES OF SWARTHY PEOPLE THE JEDI WOULD HAVE BEEN SLAUGHTERED?!
Thompson calls the imagery in Star Wars a "great big Rorschach test, not just for the people who watch the movies, but for Lucas himself." With the latter, that leads him to two possibilities.
"One is that this is coming out of the id of the creator without translation -- a West Coast fear of the Latino population in America." (Lucas grew in the 1950s in Modesto, Calif., the agricultural town immortalized in American Graffiti, and one visited annually by thousands of migrant workers.)
Mr. Morrison IS FROM NEW ZEALAND!
[quote[
The second hypothesis, he notes, is that it's all deliberate -- a way to prompt deep emotional response in audiences by probing "a phobia that's afoot in America. And that's the scarier interpretation."
Or, as some argue, perhaps it's all stuff and nonsense.
Knowles at aintitcool.com keeps emphasizing on the fact that Temeura Morrison, the actor who plays Jango, is Maori.
When asked how audiences are supposed to know that, he says, "How can you tell? You stay for the end credits. Is his name 'Raul Julia?' No." [/quote]


WHAT DOES IT MATTER?!?!?!
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Post by TrailerParkJawa »

What do you expect from people who view a movie with the mindset that it is a tool of the man ?

I hate this shit. Make your own movie, risk ruining yourself financially for life, then you can tell other directors what to do.

I have not even seen the entire Clones, but the Jango guy looked like a Pacific Islander to me, sure he could pass as some form of Latino but who the fuck cares?

I personally thought Jar Jar was some bad stereotype and the Trade Federation guys sounded like they had bad 50's movie Asian accents but thats me, and I dont expect Lucas to owe me anything. Fucking A , these people need to get a job where they actually build or fix a product.
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Post by Lord Poe »

Darth Wong wrote:
Montcalm wrote:I thought the evil Empire was America. :mrgreen: :mrgreen:

Don`t flame me its just a joke. 8)
Actually, the Evil Empire is Old Europe, and the plucky Rebellion is America. Listen to the accents of the actors.
Not altogether true! I think Tarkin was the only Imperial with a British accent in ANH. Everyone else was dubbed with bad "DJ" (American) voices!
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Post by Hethrir »

... the actor who plays Jango, is Maori...When asked how audiences are supposed to know that, he says, "How can you tell?
duh! Listen to his heavy kiwi accent!

So in the future, whenever a person auditions for a role and happens to be the best actor, it MUST be a racial slur.

The PC police must be so bored to come up with such mindless dribble.

Racism is saying that someones colour/race/origins etc... determines culture/behaviour, therefore if someone thinks a black person playing an evil character is racist, THEY are the person who actually thinks black people are evil.

I can say i didn't once think the gungans were slurs at black, 'cause i don't think blacks are lazy or dumb. I didn't think nute and rune were slurs at asians, 'cause i don't think asians are "economically agressive," and i don't think the empire is a slur at the english, 'cause i don't think the english are evil.

quite simply, if someone thinks SW is racist, they truely are racist themselves.
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Post by Vympel »

I gotta admit, Patrick Stewart in Star Wars would be kinda cool.
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Vympel wrote:I gotta admit, Patrick Stewart in Star Wars would be kinda cool.
maybe if he died...
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Post by Enforcer Talen »

woah. the clone troopers are mexicans? Ive seen the movie, like, 20 times, and I never knew that.

we must do a preemptive strike against the evil empire of mexico!
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Post by Hethrir »

No, the clone troopers are Kiwi.
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Post by Kenny_10_Bellys »

My friends and I still crack up every time we here the Clone Troopers talk, it sounds like the bloody Australian Army to us. "G'day Sir!"

I don't think the Americans do too well with distinguishing accents, from personal experience I found that the Americans I met on my travels through that country were a tad 'insular' to say the least. I'm from Central Scotland and have a broad Scots accent (Scotch is foreign talk for whisky) yet in America I was indentified as being Australian, Canadian, English and as a native of Baltimore? I think the reason American film makers pick English luvvies as bad guys as so they don't have to make Americans look bad, they act better and the Yanks know the accent.
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Post by Montcalm »

Enforcer Talen wrote:woah. the clone troopers are mexicans? Ive seen the movie, like, 20 times, and I never knew that.

we must do a preemptive strike against the evil empire of mexico!
They can`t be mexicans when they recives orders they don`t say "Si senor" :mrgreen:
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Post by Col. Crackpot »

Wicked Pilot wrote:
kojikun wrote:It'll be a lightsabe only a white flagshaped blade comes out. :)
"Your father's white flag sabre. This is the weapon of a Frenchmen. Not as clumsy or random as a hands in the air ... an elegant surrender, for a more civilized age."
ha! thats going in the sig!!!
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Post by NecronLord »

Yes Jango's a terrorist. Boba's a terrorist too. Thats why he's a registered (freelance) imperial law enforcement officer... *Bangs head on the wall*

For fucks sake, when I see Jar Jar I think "Moron" when they see Jar Jar they think "Black." What does that say about these people.

BTW, they'd be better if they said the Kaminoans are the english. 'cold' miserable weather and led by a prime minister.
Jango's son calls him "Baba."
WTF? were they watching a different film.

It's Boba or 'BOA-BAH' as Taun We pronounces it. And it's the kids name dumbfucks.
She just wishes the occasional swarthy good guy would get as much on-screen time as the villain.
She missed twenty fucking thousand plus of them 20,000 'units' so at the very least that's twenty thousand of them. You know, those guys with the guns? and the space-hueys, and the acclamator gunships. The ones that were fighting the 'evil' sepratist droid army and rescue the jedi from certain doom?

I want to know what film these people were watching.
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Post by Hethrir »

Kenny_10_Bellys wrote:My friends and I still crack up every time we here the Clone Troopers talk, it sounds like the bloody Australian Army to us. "G'day Sir!"
To us there is a BIG difference between Australian and Kiwi accent, but it is understandable that others would find them similar.
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Post by Companion Cube »

Wicked Pilot wrote:
kojikun wrote:It'll be a lightsabe only a white flagshaped blade comes out. :)
"Your father's white flag sabre. This is the weapon of a Frenchmen. Not as clumsy or random as a hands in the air ... an elegant surrender, for a more civilized age."
ROFL!! :lol: :lol:
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Post by Peregrin Toker »

Grand Admiral Thrawn wrote:By making the evil bad guy white. Or did you people go blind every time Palpatine appears?
Good question - the most evil villain in the whole trilogy is actually played by arch-british Shakespearean actors such as Ian McDiarmid. They should not forget Tarkin and Count Dooku, either. (played by the arch-british Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, respectively)

But why do so few british people complain about this?? I would like to know the explanation for this.
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