There’s a new Disney movie coming out in which the cast is not all white, so naturally, the right-wingers are throwing a fit about “wokeness” and the alleged evils of race-mixing–sorry, race-swapping.
I hope you’re standing near your fainting couch because in the new live-action Peter Pan & Wendy movie, debuting on Disney+ in April, Peter is brown, Tinkerbell is black, some of the Lost Boys are girls–and some of these girls aren’t white! Sure, most of the main characters in the film remain white, but this proves cold comfort for the film’s critics, some of whom took to Twitter to complain that the beloved childhood classic that none of them had thought about for years was … different than what they remembered. And not just because Peter is played by an actual boy.
Meanwhile, more than a million angry downvoters clicked “thumbs down” on the trailer on YouTube and posted vaguely racist things in the comments.
The right-wing press jumped on board the hater train. The Daily Wire proclaimed that “Disney, apparently ever eager to implement their woke agenda into their productions, has now altered the immortal story of Peter Pan by making his band of Lost Boys include girls.” Breitbart complained that “the results are as woke as you would expect.” And Bounding Into Comics sniffed that “Disney has gone all-in on bastardizing their original animated classics to their altar of contemporary revisionism.”
But the racism behind the complaints was nowhere so evident as in a lengthy article on the film in the far-right Western Journal. There, writer Jared Miller lambasted “the woke culture warriors at The Walt Disney Company” for
distort[ing] the memory of more beloved stories and characters in the name of social justice.”
Unable to come up with narratives that are new or interesting that minorities could be cast in, these woke executives seem content to simply race- and gender-swap popular stories from the past.
Miller began with a swipe at Black Ariel.
Disney is soon to release a remake of “The Little Mermaid,” with a black actress playing the main character — Ariel — in stark contrast to the traditional blue-eyed, fair-skinned mermaid of Danish author Hans Christian Andersen’s fable.
Evidently, mermaids–who are, by the way, imaginary creatures–should all be as white as the Klan’s bedsheets.
Miller quickly moved on to the latest outrage:
This week Disney also released the trailer for “Peter Pan & Wendy,” a live-action remake of the timeless tale of Peter Pan with the same types of character re-imaginations.
For the role of Peter, Disney’s producers chose a young British actor whose professional call sheet describes his appearance as suited to characters who are “Indian, Hispanic, Middle Eastern, Mixed Race, Latin American.”
It’s doubtful that’s what anyone pictures when they think of the Boy Who Never Grew Up and his dealings with the Darling children.
Well, the Darling children and their parents are still all white, so enjoy that, at least.
A traditionally white Tinkerbell has also been replaced by black actress Yara Shahidi who starred in the race-baiting, gentrification-themed comedy show “Black-ish.”
These recasts weren’t enough for Disney, however, as even the twins in Pan’s band of Lost Boys, who were white males who wore matching raccoon skin cloaks in the Disney animated movie, have been recast as black girls.
The horror!
Much like the left has actively torn down institutions like the Boy Scouts, the Lost Boys also appear to have been infiltrated by “wokeness.”
Hate to break it to you, dude, but the thing that “tore down” the Boy Scouts wasn’t “wokeness.” It was the fact that scoutmasters kept sexually abusing children, leaving the Scouts on the hook for $850 million in restitution payments.
The main antagonist of the story remains white, with Jude Law being cast as the villainous Captain Hook.
Much like the mindlessly celebrated play “Hamilton” recast the Founding Fathers as black but kept King George as a white villain, “Peter Pan & Wendy” follows the intersectional pattern of keeping whites cast as villains and the protagonists recast as various minorities.
Uh, Wendy is the heroine of the movie, and she’s white. Most of the main cast is white.
The dangerous narrative being propagated here is that to be white is to be evil by nature, while to be non-white is to occupy the moral and spiritual high ground solely on the basis of skin color.
Oh lord. I guess all movie villains should be black, then?
The double standard is so appallingly apparent that you have to wonder what the real agenda is as these “woke” movies have not been performing well but continue to be made. (“Lightyear” the “Toy Story” franchise prequel that infamously included a lesbian kiss, and “Strange World,” the science fiction saga featuring an openly gay teenager, both bombed at the box office.)
The agenda is to uproot white, American culture so dramatically that even the stories that have been embraced and cultivated for the world to enjoy have to be subverted to such an extent that anyone who doesn’t like it is a racist.
Apparently, Peter Pan belongs collectively to white people and no one else. No substitutions!
Miller ended by attacking Disney’s “cunning tactics” in
push[ing] woke agendas in these seemingly harmless remakes that are clearly attempts at erasing the culture that made this country the greatest the world has ever seen.
Dude, if you’re an example of the culture that allegedly made this country great, it’s well past time you were replaced.
Follow me on Mastodon.
Send tips to dfutrelle at gmail dot com.
We Hunted the Mammoth relies on support from you, its readers, to survive. So please donate here if you can, or at David-Futrelle-1 on Venmo.
Sharing the goodness.
@Surplus
Bears are quite smart actually, and are known for it. e.g. like raccoons they can open trash bins and unlocked car doors. People who train them tend to think they’re on a similar level to gorillas if not chimpanzees.
@Vicky: Thank you! Everyone needs some feminist soul music.
Works regarding recent topics:
“Bears Discover Fire”, a gentle, moving short story
“When the Earth Had Two Moons”, which has all the planet-forming goodness you want. Math is in the footnotes, but you can skip those.
Really? I’d always figured that bears could open such things because they were big enough to just go “Hulk smash!” and bust them open by main force.
Maybe all patchy-diverse-food-sources omnivores are smart and have at least some tendencies toward tool use. Land octopodes, as it were. But only the social ones might develop language and bust the glass ceiling, and language seems to be a “hard step”.
There was a mathematical proof somewhere that the successive intervals between “start of planetary habitability”, each successive “hard step”, and “end of planetary habitability” would be uniformly distributed (which isn’t the same as “exactly equal”) for any planet that did originate a starfaring civilization. If that applies to Earth (which may be a very big “if”) then based on planetary habitability starting with liquid water around 4GYa and ending somewhere from 0.5 to 2GY in the future we would expect that hard steps would be achieved near 2GYa and near the present if there were exactly two of them. Eukaryotes and/or meiotic sex would then be a good candidate for the earlier of them, and language and/or taming fire for the later. In neither case was “life first appears on Earth” apparently a hard step, since it happened instantly (geologically speaking) after liquid water showed up. Either abiogenesis is not hard, or … it didn’t happen here. Or Earth will not originate a starfaring civilization. Or it’s an even bigger statistical freak than it already seemed. Maybe this can’t really be properly evaluated until the outcome is fully known (so, starfaring civilization or Earth’s become a cinder, whichever comes first).
A variant with only one hard step would suppose that the background requirements include both general habitability, and the ability to support complex life on land specifically. In that case, ozone and the geodynamo seem to be required, and the applicable timespan is shorter, perhaps from as recently as 500MYa to as soon as 500MY in the future based on some models of the inner core’s solidification. If so, that’s the Phanerozoic Eon, and it’s funny that us (and therefore the advent of language, and/or tamed fire) happen to land smack dab in the exact center of it …
@Alan: I love it! Having spent my youth camping in national parks with bears, etc. in, I can but agree. Luckily the Girl Scouts taught us how to keep food away from all critters and how to police your camp.
But a lot of the random tourists hadn’t been Scouts and were used as cautionary tales for us.
The Earth’s axial tilt also probably helps a bit in making the place more hospitable to life, I think I read somewhere.
GSS noobie
Axial tilt? Certainly does. Mainly by the storage and release of heat moisture and nutrients throughout the changing seasons.
However we shouldn’t be too confident in this. If we had different seasons or none at all, evolution would have taken different paths for most, if not all, forms of life.