Finally saw the movie Thor last night. As a comic book reader and fan I thoroughly enjoyed the movie. Sure it had a couple of rough spots here and there but they were few and far between. Add a couple of winks and nods to the source material and cameos of other characters; I must say I enjoyed myself. If you didn’t know Thor, the Hulk, Iron Man, Captain America and a few other movie characters will combine in the movie Avengers in 2012. All of those movies lead up to that one. Should be a lot of fun.
But me being me I got to point out a little nonsense that came along with the movie. Maybe you heard about it, maybe not. I won’t name the group because you can look them up for yourself. They have been called a hate group by others. Well by a lot of others. Apparently there is a group out there that is calling for a boycott of the movie.
Their reasoning is that one of the fictional characters, Heimdall, is played by Idris Elba, a black actor born in England. Since Thor is loosely based on Nordic mythology, they feel that this is an insult to the white race.
Or something.
In an industry where there are hardly any minority/ethnic characters of substance at all you would think they’d let this one slide. You just can’t please some people. They must have really been ticked when they found out that Nick Fury, a white character for decades, is being played by Samuel L. Jackson. Hope, haven’t heard a thing about that. Perhaps they will really get upset when they find out that Anthony Hopkins who played Odin in the movie actually played a black man in The Human Stain.
Somebody should tell them about the character Hogun being played by Tadanobu Asano an obviously non white guy.
I haven’t heard them complain about that yet. Must it's only a certain group they are concerned with.
Figures.
2 comments:
Actually, Fury was "recast" to look Jackson back in 2002, well before he got the role in the movies:
"Actor Samuel L. Jackson did not originally give his consent for Marvel Comics to use his likeness in their redesign of the Fury character for The Ultimates[9], and first appeared with this revised look in The Ultimates #1, as drawn by Bryan Hitch. The similarity is even noted within the comic itself, in a scene in which the Ultimates discuss who they think should play each of them in a hypothetical movie about the team. Fury's answer for himself is "Mr. Samuel L. Jackson, of course, no discussion." It was only after seeing the redesigned Nick Fury in the first issue of The Ultimates that Samuel L. Jackson learned of the use of his likeness and contacted Marvel in order to secure the role of Nick Fury in any future Marvel movies."
There have been other black superheroes in the Marvel Universe as well.
Joe H.
Stevensville, MD
I know Jackson's likeness was substituted for the "original" Fury. One of the reasons was that most if not all of the early Marvel world didn't have any ethnic characters. Except maybe the Black Panther.
Unfortunately both Marvel and DC tend to keep that particular choice today.
The closest they got to changing that was the comic book New Warriors which had many different ethnic characters when it first came out.
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