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.
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Hmm, the only thing I can say is a strange choice is putting girls in the Lost Boys, given how a large part of Peter’s fascination with Wendy is that she is a girl, and he (and by his influence the Lost Boys) has a highly idealized fantasy of ‘girls as mothers/caretakers.’ 🤷♀️
But REALLY, my only major complaint is that I’m super tired of Disney doing these remakes of all their animated films. They’re all pretty tired and lifeless and no one ever asked for a goddamn live action Lilo and Stitch.
Just a few points.
J M Barrie deliberately didn’t describe Peter just so anyone could imagine him anyway they wanted.
If they want to be totally traditional then Peter should be played by a girl…
https://www.autostraddle.com/15-ladies-who-played-peter-pan-from-nina-boucicault-to-alison-williams-253416/
Over here Peter Pan is still in copyright. That’s because Barrie assigned all the royalties to Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital. So whilst normally copyright would expire 70 years after Barrie’s death, there’s a statutory exception for Peter Pan.
So GOSH could, if they so desired, prohibit the showing of the Disney version here. If they don’t then we can perhaps presume they’re cool with it.
I saw someone on fox (parents had it on) try to make a deal out of “lost girls? How girls lost?” and the anchor wasn’t having it, haha. “Girls can be lost too.”
I’m a fan of all things Pan and this looks like fun. Looking forward to Jude Law! Keep up the diversity, Disney. Do better for lgbtq people, though.
I seriously recommend the webcomic series <i>Namesake</i> namesakecomic (dot) com. All fairy tales cross over to stop the universe from ending, and also everyone’s queer.
Anyhow, their version of Wendy is black.
While there’s nothing wrong with the casting choice, it would suggest a different spin on Barrie’s themes. Girl characters who refuse to grow up might be interpreted as avoiding motherhood.
Presumably girls fall out of prams in the park and are lost as well. Maybe even more so since girls weren’t thought much of in Victorian days. Also, the concept of lost children ending up on an island and having adventures with flying, faeries, pirates menaced by stalking alligators, etc. isn’t exactly realistic to begin with.
And as everyone said, Peter Pan is usually played by a woman on stage (I saw the Mary Martin version as a wee one, and again in my 20s), so it could have been EVEN MORE WOKE.
Tink looks cute. Also, when you can get Jude Law to chew scenery, you should.
I bet they didn’t like “Hamilton” because they hate rap and couldn’t understand the excellent lyrics the cast was spitting. And never mind that George’s songs in that are show-stoppers. “1776” has an all-white cast (and only 2 of them are women — Adams’ and Jefferson’s wives) but it’s got that killer song in the second act about the uncomfortable truth of how the Founding Fathers were complicit in slavery, so there’s that*. Plus they had to cut out the song mildly dissing conservatives from the movie, because Nixon. It’s in the Blu-ray.
Really, I can’t recommend 1776 enough. It’s not 4th of July till I’ve watched it. Now followed by Hamilton. Lin-Manuel Miranda loves it too, and there’s a direct quote from the first song which had us ROFL.
https://playbill.com/article/lin-manuel-miranda-and-william-daniels-talk-hamilton-1776-mr-feeny-and-more
I also aced one of my college US History exams. The prof asked why I was apparently talking silently to myself; I was, of course, singing the songs till I got to the part I needed to write on the exam. Luckily, the historical inaccuracies weren’t in anything on the test
*I met the man who sings it in the movie and previously on Broadway many years later, and the first thing I did was compliment him on that. He was surprised and pleased.
Gotta keep those IPs in their grip somehow until they can turn over the public domain system…
I don’t think that the original concept of “copyright” envisioned perpetual corporate ownership, given that it dates from 1790 (according to a quick google check). I’m pretty sure that Disney *is* the company which invented the modern idea of corporate entertainment media.
You poor boy. How you and all Whitefolks suffer. I wonder what EVERYONE will do with the chopped-up, butchered pieces of YOUR culture. Shudder.
@GSS
“Presumably girls fall out of prams in the park and are lost as well. Maybe even more so since girls weren’t thought much of in Victorian days.”
Oddly enough, this question was raised in the original story, if I’m not mistaken. I don’t have it ready to hand (can’t remember which of the boxes I still haven’t unpacked yet that book is in) but Peter says something to the effect of “little girls were too clever to throw themselves out of the pram and get lost”. As freneticferret mentioned, that’s why Wendy caught his attention, as she’s a girl willing to go come away with him.
Having said that, I like this cast, I’m willing to give it a watch.
@GSS: The three genders:
1)Open the window, it’s 90 degrees
2)Don’t open the window, there’s too many flies
3)Vote for independence!
@snowberry
John Philip Sousa founded ASCAP so that composers would be paid for their work. He would be turning over in his grave…
All we need is a sword, a map and some pixie dust (The fairies gave it to me so I could fly, but only in emergencies!)
In the book, the lost boys’ skin colors are never mentioned but never mind, they think they just have to be white. And of course they don’t say anything about Tinker Bell being played by a thin actress (as usual!) despite being described as “slightly inclined to embonpoint” in the book. Did they even read the book?
In the odd (but sometimes very good) Fox’s Peter Pan and the Pirates from the 90s, the “Twins” of the Lost Boys were different races, to emphasize how Peter didn’t really understand the concept.
I don’t think right wingers understand what literature and creativity are.
People – though I may be jumping to conclusions by describing them so (I truly am an optimist, however tempered by realism) – like this only today repeatedly demanded that I “get a life” instead of calling them out for being stupid, banal, racist shits for cheering on the Family Research Council awarding my Congressturd an “award” for his cowardice, stupidity and fealty to their brand of evil.
They spend every spare moment doing things like the above, but think I’m the one lacking a life?
Irony, however painful or debilitating, they somehow pretend doesn’t affect them, which is as obviously untrue as their being on fire would be.
What uselessly evil, self- and other-harming loses they insist on being.
Agreed, but also important– who’s playing Mr. Smee?
You know the only thing that doesn’t surprise me about this is that they’re not going “Look a brown Peter Pan is abducting the pretty white Wendy!” about it all. *sigh*
“[T]raditional blue-eyed, fair-skinned mermaid”? Nonsense: everybody knows that actual mermaids are silvery blue-green.
Just because Andersen in 1837 took it for granted that a beautiful mermaid had to be described as having white skin doesn’t mean that anybody nowadays has to do the same. (Also, Andersen’s mermaid was only fifteen, and using her dearly-bought new human legs was physical agony like walking on sharp knives, and [spoiler alert] she didn’t end up getting the prince, but committed suicide rather than murder the prince in order to return to her mermaid nature. Where are all the “traditionalists” whining that the animated Disney film didn’t follow those original specifications?)
So all the previous versions of Peter Pan – both animated and live action – somehow cease to exist because this remake has non-white people in it?
It’s amazing that the previous remakes left the older versions available for viewing; I guess white folks just aren’t strong enough to bend reality to their whims like that.
“Woke” must be some powerful magic, if it can “erase culture” just by touching something, making it utterly impossible to access any older versions, in any way, by anyone, ever.
Clearly, racism is our only defense against such an insidious retcon ritual!
(/s, in case it wasn’t obvious)
Imaginary characters in fairytales are very rarely described as being from specific ethnicities, no? Our own imaginations are what are supposed to inform what they look like when we read the books. The problem was with Disney portraying them all as white to beginwith. Had Disney been more diverse from its inception then there would be no hue and cry now.
@Nequam:
In the odd (but sometimes very good) Fox’s Peter Pan and the Pirates from the 90s, the “Twins” of the Lost Boys were different races, to emphasize how Peter didn’t really understand the concept.
One from the “Fiction is obliged to stick to the possibilities; truth ain’t” column; apparently this happens quite a bit, and the families involved have to deal with a lot of rude assumptions:
https://archive.ph/0dnX9
@Kat:
You poor boy. How you and all Whitefolks suffer. I wonder what EVERYONE will do with the chopped-up, butchered pieces of YOUR culture. Shudder.
I recall a conversation about how MCU mannerisms have turned up in Chinese dramas—and pointing out that there’s nothing a Chinese mystic flying-sword-wizard epic can steal from Doctor Strange; Steve Ditko drew upon Asian mysticism and Stan Lee upon Western occultism—which is in itself a cumulative British Museum hoard of anything that looked shiny, including Kabbalah and the theme-park Asian mysticisms the Theosophists brought in.
@GSS ex-noob:
I also aced one of my college US History exams. The prof asked why I was apparently talking silently to myself; I was, of course, singing the songs till I got to the part I needed to write on the exam. Luckily, the historical inaccuracies weren’t in anything on the test.
Schoolhouse Rock for grownups! (See also Tom Lehrer on the elements and Animaniacs on the planets of the solar system and countries of the world.)
Someone is re-imagining imaginary characters? Heaven forefend!
But Whitefolks…pay attention…because YOUR culture is to be chopped up, butchered and the pieces distributed to EVERYONE!
Which is totally wrong and unfair, because white people never ever EVER chopped up or butchered anyone else’s culture or distributed pieces of same to anyone, amirite?
Oh wait, I’m not…never mind…