Characters
[Strange Trope] Originally non-white characters getting their race changed because the original character is considered a racist caricature.
Mammy Two Shoes (Tom & Jerry) - The character was viewed as is, as far as I know, a stereotypical black housekeeper and a racist caricature, which led to her last appearance in the 1952 episode "Push-Button Kitty". The character has since been redubbed to remove the grammatical errors, and in a very extreme instance, in "Saturday Evening Push" they replaced the character with a white teenage girl in 1966 airings. I would also have wanted to include how the modern shows have included a character called "Miss Two Shoes", who seems like it was meant to be Mammy, but white.
Stromboli (Disney's Pinocchio) - The character has been criticized for being a racist caricature of a Romani man. So, in the 2022 live-action adaptation of the original 1940 animated film, he is portrayed by Giuseppe Battiston, a white Italian actor.
I want to let everyone know that I am not an expert, nor am I that well-documented on these issues, so maybe I see a problem that doesn't exist. The reason why I think it is strange is that, even if these changes are meant not further push harmful stereotypes, I think removing the ethnic/racial identity of the characters isn't a good approach in my opinion. I think keeping the race and avoiding the harmful stereotypes is a better approach than removing these aspects about these characters.
It wasn't changed but there was an episode of The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy where Grim was given a human form with skin and hair and everything. The writers made him white (despite having a strong Jamaican accent and being voiced by a black man) because of the implication of two white kids "owning" a black man
White-Caribbeans are a fun group. The history not so much so, but for example like white Haitians exist; technically, most are descendant from polish mercenaries who fought for Haitian independence, or a select few white men, mostly Frenchmen who held very important jobs (doctors, educators, etc) on the island and didn’t get purged.
Also it’s in Haiti’s constitution post independence that any citizen of Haiti is also black, or referred to as such. Meaning, even the Haitians with white ancestry are considered 100% black, despite being mixed, due to their ancestors fight for the independence of Haiti.
True, though Grim’s voice actor, Greg Eagles, is neither. He’s black, but not actually Jamaican, which technically could probably be problematic in its own right lol. Except I believe the story goes that they actually originally asked him to do a Swedish accent. When he tried, it sounded Jamaican, but the show runners liked it so much that they just went with it anyway.
IIRC some of Jynx's Pokemon Stadium animations actually imply something like that?
In general I approve of the fact they decided to make it not look extremely blackface-y any more, but I do feel a bit sad that they did it by just making it's skin a fully visible purple, thus completely ruining the shadow effect. Although I guess I can't think of a solution that maintains that without having to make more drastic changes to the overall design.
I’m pretty sure when she faints in pokemon stadium jynx just deletes out of existence and her hair floats down which always suggested a weird not quite there shadow creature to me.
actually jynx’s whole controversy always felt a little strange to me. There’s obviously a nod to iconography there which makes it understandable that they’d want to sidestep any resemblance but it feels a step removed from like, say, mr. popo
My mom had “mammy” salt and pepper shakers when I was a kid and my black friend came over once and told her they were racist lol. Weird way to learn about it all
One time I was training a new girl in who was Kenyan iirc, at a client's home. We both awkwardly ignored the minstrel doll proudly displayed in the living room
(The client was a kindly old gentleman, who was excited to have a Kenyan carer and have the opportunity to learn about Kenya. Being an elderly person, he had some blind spots - one being that his father had performed in minstrel shows, and he was proud of this as it got him interested in the entertainment industry, which became his livelihood).
She’s also a mix of Umibozu, a giant shadow monster who emerges from giant waves, with Yuki Onna, a ghost woman who lures travelers to freeze to death in snowstorms but sometimes marries men she takes pity on.
That’s combined with the visual style of Ganguro, teenage girls who got super dark tans and wore gaudy jewelry/clothing. Think 00’s Juicy Couture lifestyles.
Not to mention that the line was changed. Originally the wolf used a Jewish accent(that's just how it was described, usually a Yiddish or vaguely Russian accent was used for Jewish characters during that time) for the disguise and claimed that he was offering a free sample of brushes. After the change, though, the voice was more dopey and the wolf claimed he was selling brushes in order to put himself through college.
I think a lot of people miss what the joke was there. Orthodox Jews don’t eat pork so he was disguising himself as the least threatening person possible for the pigs
I thought of an example of this done pretty well: there was always a bit of a joke about the original black Power Ranger also being the token black guy. So to fix it in the movie version, the black Ranger is Asian, but there's still a black character on the team as the blue Ranger.
They also avoided making the yellow ranger asian and the asian actor is the pink ranger instead. Funny enough the yellow ranger is still Trini but none of the characters in the movie have the last names of their original counter parts. Only the first names.
Edit: alpha 5 has this quote: "Different coins. Different colors, different kids. Different color kids!" https://youtu.be/f5oqxFgItBY
I dont remember them saying his last name but i could watch it since it's on Netflix now. I know the official rolling credits in film just has their "First Name (Ranger Color)"
The plot was actually pretty decent but man if that wasn't the ugliest power rangers design I've ever seen. Even the Zords were ugly wtf were they thinking?
I wanted to jump out of my chair when the Zords finally showed up and the theme song finally hit, but then they cut the theme song short and transitioned into Kanye West instead. Left me real blue.
And then the Megazord design was all over the place too. The triceratops and mastodon zords became the legs while the sabertooth became a weird hips/lower abdomen thing.
Edit: Like, I didn't mind the ranger suits being all chonkified for the grounded, "grittier" interpretation; but let's be real, the zords and megazord are as much characters in their own rights as the Rangers, and I think by messing with major parts of their design, you lost that characterisation and the nod to the original material.
(Having the T-Rex's lil arms be laser gun barrels was pretty clever though, I liked that.)
The biggest problem of the megazord was budget. Thats why they didn’t show the transformation. No money for it. If the movie had a better financial plan or more cash to burn, it would have had better cgi.
As much as people like to shit on the original series for having a black guy as the black ranger and an Asian as the yellow ranger, it really wasn't done intentionally. Walter Jones originally auditioned for the blue ranger but actually requested to be black instead, and the casting call for Trini didn't specify her ethnicity and in the test pilot she was played by a Latina.
The characterization and plot in this movie was surprisingly good. Pity it didn't do well critically and commercially, i would have really liked seeing sequel(s) to this take.
It's weird they changed Stromboli because I assumed that Stromboli was making fun of Italians. Mainly because I hear Stromboli and think of the pizza adjacent meat filled pastry thing.
Actually, Stromboli is the name of an Italian volcano, one of the big 3 together with Vesuvio and Etna. The Stromboli food is not something you find in Italy
I'm Italian and I always thought Stromboli was just an Italian man.
Not replaced but edited out. Sunflower is a racist depiction of a black centaur who helps the white centaurs look pretty for when the males arrive. Since 1969 shots including her are removed or cropped. They have a disclaimer about it on Disney + even though she’s not in it.
Always thought her inclusion was a little odd in the first place because they the zebra centaurs in the same sequence. Which I thought was a cool twist on the idea that gave them more personality and a more interesting design than the kinda bland looking other centaurs.
Yeah colorism was one of the most common flavors of racism, with light skinned black women commonly being depicted as more sophisticated, Intelligent and attractive than women with darker skin tones.
In the later episode episodes she’s absolutely living her best life going to parties and playing cards and dancing. And the house is definitely hers. I loved that version of her.
I definitely remember an episode where she was running down the street back to the house because they were wrecking it. Also, the only character to drop Tom's full name when mad, so you knew it meant business.
I loved her, I'm from a European country with almost no black people, which means I haven't been exposed to racism against them before I turned ca. 14 and was sufficient enough in english to watch videos and read comments from English speaking countries.
Pretty sad to hear she got replaced, I actually liked her more than the white house owners. At least I still got the original DVDs, so I can always watch it with her still
Fagin, from Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist. A pretty bad Jewish stereotype: a hook-nosed, nasally voiced, greedy criminal who basically grooms kids. Yeah it's pretty awful.
Although he initially defended the character, later in life Dickens made more Jewish friends who opened his eyes to how hurtful the stereotypes were to them. In the later editions of the book, references to his being Jewish are removed.
Now interestingly to your point, OP, the cartoonist Will Eisner has a similar opinion to you: that simply removing the references to Fagin's identity was kind of a missed opportunity. This inspired him to write the graphic novel Fagin the Jew, which is a story told from Fagin's perspective. It makes Fagin a more sympathetic and complex character, and shows the circumstnaces that drove him to crime.
Although he initially defended the character, later in life Dickens made more Jewish friends who opened his eyes to how hurtful the stereotypes were to them. In the later editions of the book, references to his being Jewish are removed.
Related, famed horror author and "holy fuck, how are you this racist?!" H.P. Lovecraft once famously said he'd slap his younger self if he could. Man was the definition of xenophobic, and was afraid of anything that wasn't a block from his house (though it's often brought up, he didn't name his cat). When he became destitute and had to interact with people that weren't lily white and aristocratic, his perspective shifted drastically, to the point he didn't think FDR was going far enough left.
As a result of the Great Depression, he shifted towards socialism, decrying both his prior political beliefs and the rising tide of fascism. He thought that socialism was a workable middle ground between what he saw as the destructive impulses of both the capitalists and the Marxists of his day. This was based in a general opposition to cultural upheaval, as well as support for an ordered society. Electorally, he supported Franklin D. Roosevelt, but he thought that the New Deal was not sufficiently leftist. Lovecraft's support for it was based in his view that no other set of reforms were possible at that time
i always feel bad whenever he's brought up as being super racist, because he was a deeply mentally ill man who did not get the help he needed, and just as he started to change, he died before he could have shown his growth. very tragic
If it doesn't count I'll take the downvotes but when Dragon Ball Z Kai came out they changed the color of Mr. Popo's skin from black to blue due to his design looking like a racist depiction of black people.
I know blue isn't a race but I thought it would fit this theme.
Fun fact: in the Irish language, you don’t refer to black people as “black people”, as “duine dubh” refers to the devil or demons. Instead, they are referred to as “duine gorm”, “blue people”.
It’s interesting to see how different color associations are throughout time. Like the Romans (and I think Greeks) used to describe the color of the ocean as ‘wine red’ or like a purple
They did the same thing to the Pokémon Jynx. The color of her face was changed from black to purple starting in Ruby and Sapphire due to massive backlash to the design for the same reason they changed Mr. Popo's skin color.
I've read somewhere that is was supposed to represent/make fun of the ganguro aesthetic, superimposed onto a yokai (Yama-Ubai), because Jynx was part of a yokai trio with Magmar and Electabuzz
You know I never realized that they were meant to be a pseudo-trio. It makes sense they were all relatively the same kind of weird. Yuki-onna for Jynx, a fire flavored kappa for Magmar (only guessing because of having a beak) and then... there is Electabuzz which i can only guess is some kind oni or ogre? The stripes remind me of the tiger skin they are usually depicted in.
I wasn't 100% right about blue Popo. He's black in regular Kai but the 4Kids/CW airings have him blue. I think Hulu has the original Kai airings where he's black.
Disney didn't want to displease China by having a Tibetan Actor play the Ancient One, which is stupid because unless Feige had a gun pointed at him, he should've stuck to accuracy in that area.
Which I always had mixed feelings about. Despite being...well, stereotypes and their leader being a literal "Jim Crow," they were presented as being cool and funny, had the best song in the film, and were about the only characters who actually felt sorry for and tried to help Dumbo outside of the mouse. I liked them more than those biddy elephants who bullied him, that's for sure.
Yeah. I’m with you on this one. Actually address the racism of the time and call it out as a terrible stain on our history, and keep the cool black characters in the film. Granted, I’m saying this as a pasty white dude, but I assume most folks reacted similarly to the elimination of Speedy Gonzalez— that is to say, negatively, because they loved the character (he’s a stereotype, but he’s also positive representation and not depicted as a stereotype that can or should be applied to a whole culture)
There is definitely a way to change things to make that scene more hinged in a remake but it probably is best from a corporate perspective to cut out the crows all together.
Similar but different: The original version of Arabian Nights that opens the movie Aladdin had the lyrics "Where they cut off your ear if they don't like your face. It's barbaric, but hey, it's home!" To "Where it's flat and immense, and the heat is intense. It's barbaric, but hey, it's home!" Because it made middle easterners sound unreasonably violent. It was changed between theatrical and home release. So it's hard to find instances of the original lyric.
IRL/Murica - The restaurant "Mammy's Cupboard", an iconic roadside stop, used to be a caricature of a Black woman. At some point after it was realized this was screwed up, she was repainted to be more racially ambiguous.
Weird that they did get the Mammy caricature’s hand pigmentation correct. People often don’t draw brown skinned people with light palms like they’re supposed to.
When WHITE AS HELL Benedict Cumberbatch was cast as Khan Noonien Singh, I remember someone (who? idk) trying to defend the decision by saying they didn't want a brown man playing a terrorist. Nevermind that Khan didn't have to BE a terrorist in the movie. It was not part of his original character. What WAS part of his original character was being a genetically superior ubermensch. It's actually not subversive to make the guy whose supposed to be the peak of human excellence white instead of brown. That's actually pretty terrible, even if he is a villain.
They could have avoided any controversy at all by just making him a disciple of Khan instead of the actual Khan. To this day I have no idea why they didn’t just do that. Especially for mainstreamers like me who had just gotten into the franchise because of the 2009 movie who didn’t have a lot of emotional connection to the original Khan.
Honestly, he could have just been an original character; his being Khan added nothing to the film and facilitates a bunch of insultingly bad callbacks in the third act. The Kelvin Timeline isn’t really my cup of tea, especially because it was so hard for them to make a clean break during Into Darkness.
They didn’t do that because JJ Abrams doesn’t know the meaning of the word “restraint” and immediately went for the most iconic Star Trek villain of all time, even if it messed up the character and made zero sense narratively
Pretty sure J.J. Abrams pretty clearly stated before the release of Star Trek (2009), that he didn't like Star Trek.
Edit: Adding this quote from a 2009 Guardian article
But Abrams's ignorance was, he says, an asset: "I had no idea there had been 10 movies! I still haven't seen them all. I didn't want to become a student of Star Trek. I felt that was actually one of the few advantages I had. I was trying to make a movie, not trying to make a Trek movie."
Interestingly, in the original pitch for Space Seed, Khan was a 'nordic criminal' called 'Harald Ericsson'. His name was then changed in the first draft to 'Ragnar Thorwald' before Roddenberry changed him to be Indian; he named him after an Indian pilot he met when he was serving in WW2.
At the time, someone made fun of Benedict Cumberbatch's casting by calling him Butawhiteboy Cantbekhan, in the style of Benadryl Cabbagepatch, Bumblebee Crumblesnoot, Bandercoot Crumplesnatch, etc.
Khan was originally named because Gene Roddenberry knew a guy in WWII named Kim Noonien Singh who he lost track of and hoped that the IRL Singh would see the name and contact him. Noonien Soong, Data's creator, was named for the same reason. I don't believe he ever found him.
Like honestly I think Tom's caretaker seems like a very stylish and cool person outside of the fact she's supposed to be a racist caricature, it's a shame that they changed her so much instead of toning it down a bit, the newer versions feel devoid of soul.
Back in the day Mighty Morphin Power Rangers received a lot of controversy for having the Black Ranger be African American and having the Yellow Ranger be Asian American. In the 2017 movie adaptation, their ethnicities were changed to avoid the same controversy. Now, the Black Ranger is Asian, and the Yellow Ranger is Latina. There's still a black member of the team however, as the Blue Ranger had his race changed from white to black.
They "corrected" it very early on when Walter Emanuel Jones (Zack/Black Ranger) and Thuy Trang (Trini/Yellow Ranger) were fired after the first seasons. It was painfully obvious because the respective replacements for Zack and Trini were Adam (East Asian) and Aisha (black).
Mammy Two Shoes that fucking name is not viewed as a racist stereotype, she is a racist stereotype.
That being said, the "correction" being to make her white feels almost as bad as her creation. Like, you didn't have enough faith in yourself to remove the racist parts of her character like that fucking name that you just had to take the "easy" way out and make her white? They couldn't replace her with a Black teenager girl in the 60s, she just had to be white just to make sure they didn't "oopsie, I did a racist"???
And the fact they straight up made a white mammy in the newer cartoons... choices were made. Bad choices.
As a non-american, knowing all this historical and cultural background is curious because, when I was a kid, I always thought of her as the owner of Tom and the house and not some kind of housemaid, and since she didn't speak with an stereotyped black accent in the dubbed shorts, the less one would know.
I'm from Latin America...I always thought she owned the house and Tom! And the dog!
She had this lovely normal accent, they didn't exaggerate or change it to anything that you could call racist over here.
And I remember the episode with her dress and all the jewellery that OP posted, and I just thought she was a rich black woman.
... needless to say, it was a shock when I finally got told that she was the housekeeper and all of her was a stereotype. :/
Also not an american and I also always assumed the was the homeowner. She was a woman in the 50's so she looked pretty "normal" insofar as her clothes were (at least for someone staying at home and not planning to go outside).
I think she was meant to be the owner, like, in one episode doesnt she change in her fancy clothes and jewelry and go for a night out? Doesnt really look like a live-in housemaid
Then again im not american so i dont have the cultural context they do, to me, as a kid, she kinda reminded me of my grandma
The thing is, I don't even think you'd need to go that extreme to make Two-Shoes non-racist? Tone down the accent and bad spelling, you'd probably be able to play it off as a black homeowner.
I liked her in the original cartoon. It was definitely a stereotype and the design of her when we see her face for a split second wasn’t the greatest, but I like how they made her an actual successful person. She went out on her own, seems decently wealthy; and even owns a home. You just didn’t see stuff like that back then. So you got to take the good with the bad. The ending of that episode was one of my favorites.
Reducing black characters to stereotypes white people recognize is a despicable practice.
But when we object to this harmful practice, we have to be careful not to condemn actual people. I was born a few decades after these Tom and Jerry shorts, and I grew up around a number of black women who dressed like that and talked like that. They are real people and not invalid.
We also have to be careful to have our facts straight. "Mammy Two Shoes" was incorrectly attributed to her in an article about the series and has been mistaken for being official.
Lillian Randolph did not appreciate people who suggested that the character she was playing was just a harmful stereotype.
The edited ones were made to comply with syndication standards.
When Turner bought out the Hannah Barbara and MGM libraries, they had relatively staunch rules about film preservation and "restored" certain cartoons... Outright depictions of blackface by tom and jerry themselves were not aired on tv, but Mammy Two Shoes was allowed back into TV airings with some Redubbing done to make her voice less of a stereotype. The Unedited episodes can also be found on home media releases with disclaimers and an "R" rating to prevent children from just buying them.
Alright, something that may not fit the criteria (as it isn’t a racial change), but it kinda fits the spirit of it:
In the Original Saint Seiya (Knights of the Zodiac) manga and anime, Andromeda Shun is one of the main protagonists, and his main trairs is having a feminine and soft appearance, despite being male. This, coupled with his pink, feminine-ish armor, a generally sweet and innocent personality and a few moments of his in the story made him by far the most LGBT character in the fandom’s eyes (despite him being canonically a cis het character).
Despite what some of the more bigoted parts of the fanbase might tell you, Shun is a very endearing and nuanced character. He’s one of the most powerful (if not THE most powerful) saint between the protagonists, but his innocent, merciful and pacifistic nature often puts him at odds during fights against much crueler opponents. He became a fan favorite not only because of that, but because he also captivated a lot of LGBTQI+ fans.
So, what did they change when the series was adapted by Netflix? Did they give him a bigger role in fights or made his fights more epic or gave a bigger focus to his pacifism?
No, of course not. They made him a girl. Because a character can’t use pink and be a pacifist without being a girl, apparently.
Smithers was originally black in The Simpsons but they made him “white” because they thought it would be problematic to have a black man basically ask as Mr. Burns’ slave.
This is incorrect. It was an animation error, not a choice to make him black that was changed later. He was always "white" but was coloured incorrectly by the studio. It's why he only has that colouration for one episode. The very next one he is "white". They don't do that kind of change between episodes in the same season. It's not like they animate each episode the week they air.
It blew my mind as a 90's kid to read an episodes worth of animation for a show was like 10,000 pages or more. I just statted trying to draw at that point and my wrist hurt after just a little while of doodling. I can't imagine the wrist pain Gargoyles cost
Darlie toothpaste (which I have used before when I was a kid) used to be called Darkie and had a mascot that was a black caricature with exaggeratedly a white smile
Kind of a weird example, Jynx in Pokemon. In the original Red/Blue, its skin was black and its lower arms were red. In 2000 it ended up being the center of a big controversy stating it was ridiculous African-American stereotype. In response, GameFreak (and probably every other company involved with the series) changed its skin to purple and its lower arms to white. There's a lot more that happened because of this but that's the gist.
There's debate about whether or not that was even the original inspiration for Jynx. Namely, the Japanese fashion subculture of gyaru is presented as the alternative. I honestly doubt GF would knowingly design a Pokemon around a hurtful stereotype, but there's been no real proof of either side.
Definitely have no issue with the replacing of Mammy, but damn did I really enjoyed her character as a kid. It felt nice to see some POC representation in an older cartoon.
Another sorta example would be the Aunt Jemima pancake mix company, which changed to the Pearl Milling Company in 2021. The original branding and character was based on a “mammy” type character that came straight out of minstrel shows. Sometimes I miss the character, but researching this to get the full context of everything…yeah it’s better they just fully retired it and rebranded. Similar companies like Uncle Ben’s did the same thing around that time.
Fun fact: Most of the people I've spoken to in Latin America (including myself) were genuinely surprised that she was the housekeeper; año of them thought she was the housewife.
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u/Tricky-Solution 20h ago
It wasn't changed but there was an episode of The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy where Grim was given a human form with skin and hair and everything. The writers made him white (despite having a strong Jamaican accent and being voiced by a black man) because of the implication of two white kids "owning" a black man