Image description: a screenshot from the Wikipedia page for the Doctor Who TV series, with a user-added caption that reads “Preserve the media you can before it’s gone forever.” The Wikipedia article reads, “No 1960s episodes exist on their original videotapes (all surviving prints being film transfers), though some were transferred to film for editing before transmission and exist in their broadcast form. [88] Some episodes have been returned to the BBC from the archives of other countries that bought prints for broadcast or by private individuals who acquired them by various means. Early colour videotape recordings made off-air by fans have also been retrieved, as well as excerpts filmed from the television screen onto 8 mm cine film and clips that were shown on other programmes. Audio versions of all lost episodes exist from home viewers who made tape recordings of the show. Short clips from every story with the exception of Marco Polo (1964), “Mission to the Unknown” (1965) and The Massacre (1966) also exist.”
Don’t even have to go that far back. Look at Netflix removing the DnD Community episode because Chang dresses as a drow elf (black skin, white hair). He even says he’s a drow in the episode yet Netflix removed it from the series since it was “racist”. Without pirates that episode would quickly be forgotten.
Shirley even says “we just gonna ignore this hate crime right here?” like it’s 100% meant to be a meta joke about blackface. But, even comedic irony isn’t allowed in this context with streaming services. Disney cut like 5 episodes of Sunny from streaming because Dee in brownface and Mac in blackface.
Oh true, I didn’t even think about preservation of different versions of episodes
Yes this is a real concern, this is called “cultural genocide” or destruction and is the kind of thing that expressive regimes do to their history or culture in order to mold generations of people to their desire… I wonder what’s going on with the world right now.
Removing an episode for being racist (even though this one wasn’t racist) is not cultural genocide. Wearing blackface (I know, this wasn’t blackface) is not a culture that needs to be preserved.
Yes it is, you’re destroying culture. And it isn’t only one episode or one tv show, there are countless reports on episodes and movies that are suddenly missing parts, episodes etc because it “hurts” someone. Let alone “politically correct” remakes from Disney. How come you don’t see this is what China and others do with imported media?
Our mistakes as a culture absolutely need to be preserved in order to prevent history from repeating itself long after the people making said mistakes have passed on.
Not every part of preservation should be a celebration of the past. It is as vitally important that we learn the things we did wrong as well as right.
Just do what WB did and add a slide saying that these were products of their time and that we know better today.
I think an Asian man wearing drowface is a complicated issue with no right answers. But the multiple times Pierce wears explicit brownface are way worse, and if anything was to be removed, they should have gone first.
Even if it would be full on black face it would be totally aslong as it isnt gloryfied to do so since it’s art. Do you think all actors who dressed as nazis should be shamed aswell?
Wearing traditional black clothes is not necessarily racist. Wearing blackface has a long history of being directly racist.
There isn’t an equivalent with wearing Nazi clothes.
Sure wearing a swastika is totally normal… the outlash after prince harry had one on halloween wasn’t equivalent to someone wearing blackface at all…
The point is art has the right to open a discussion and to show the bad sites of society. It’s ok for a non racist artist to play a racist and that includes letting that character wear blackface or a swastika.
It’s also fine to do something controversial like wearing a blackface in the context of cosplay to have the society talk about it.
The context being that Chang is a freak that doesn’t understand being a regular human, and Pierce is politically incorrect because he’s a fossil of a human. They’re both immediately challenged for wearing blackface by the group.
I agree on the count of Chang, but not Pierce. The group allowed him to use his “shwami” act as part of a plot-crucial heist while taking Greendale back from Chang’s army. And besides, I’ve heard rumours that Chevy Chase really was like that offstage too. Apparently the rest of the cast hated him.
A lot of people have come out of the woodwork saying they hate Chevy Chase over the years.
The group didn’t allow him to use his “notoriously awful Swami impression”. Pierce did it because he’s a narcissist and thought he knew the best way to fool General Chang.
I don’t think Pierce is a narcissist. Jeff is the narcisstist. And even if he were, NPD doesn’t make anyone racist.
I agree with you that it’s a complicated issue with no right answer and I don’t think that warrants the total destruction of the piece of media in question. And I don’t think you meant that it did either, but it seems that people think you did.
This situation reminds me of the old episodes of Mickey Mouse (Steamboat Willy? I can’t remember the exact cartoon the episodes came from, if they even came from a specific series at all and weren’t just one-offs) where Disney has a disclaimer on them if they’re ever shown anywhere about how they are for archival purposes only and that they reflect the views and culture of the time that they were made in, and how that doesn’t make those views okay. Because they’re super fuckin’ racist cartoons, like full on black people = monkeys racist, and Disney knows that that’s not okay (more like they know that showing that would lose them money at any rate), but that doesn’t mean that they’re not worth preserving so that we don’t lose sight of what the past actually was like and allow people to slap rose colored glasses on the “better days” or something.
As others have mentioned too, it also depends on how the depiction is used. Like when there was all that outrage over the Cyberpunk 2077 Chimaera “Mix it Up” posters of the girl with the giant “package” under her one piece. Yes, those posters are gross sexual objectification and horribly transphobic, but that’s the point. They’re intended to show how fucked up the dystopia of 2077 America is and how advertising has always used sexual objectification to sell products, and if a company thinks that using trans people’s bodies will sell a product, they absolutely will. Just like they do every year with Rainbow Capitalism during Pride.
There are times when the destruction of something horrible is absolutely the way to go, like when Germany destroyed all the Nazi statues right after WW2 and put a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust where Hitler’s bunker had been. But even then, it’s vital to preserve that past so it can’t be washed away. The Germans also took photos of the statues they destroyed, to preserve it so that something like that can’t happen again. We can’t learn from our mistakes if there’s no evidence that they even happened.
I agree that preserving the bigotries of the past to show people what they were like critically is important. Although I don’t think Cyberpunk counts in this instance. Yes, the artist who originally drew that poster had the intention of satirising the way capitalist companies use trans bodies to sell anything. The problem is, then CD Projekt Red, the capitalist company, used the poster to sell their game. They did the exact thing they were trying to satirise. At one point they held a cosplay contest, and the winner was a cis woman who stuck a glowing dildo up her pants to cosplay as the woman in that poster. And CDPR put images of her cosplay all over their twitter. A cis woman dressed up as a satire of the commodification of trans bodies to win a contest, and a company used her image to sell a video game. You can’t have effective satire while doing the very thing you “satirised”. I believe the original artist intended to satirise, but the company that owns the rights to the image just played it straight and did the horrible thing in sincerity.
That’s a great point about the poster and the contest, I’d never made that connection before. I mostly remembered the backlash targeted against the original artist of the poster and the bitter irony of the company using the poster to do the exact thing it was created to criticize. I remember the cosplay contest and thinking that that was a gross costume, but didn’t think any further about their use of the photos of a cis woman cosplaying as an over-sexualized trans woman to sell the game or anything. Just goes to show that even as a member of the targeted community, you can miss these kinds of things.
It’s great that you’re so open minded to seeing things from another perspective.
I don’t blame the artist who originally drew that poster, but I do think she could have played it smarter than to give a AAA gaming company the rights to a controversial and nuanced satire of transphobia. The result of that is kind of inevitable when you consider the capitalist context of big companies like CDPR. I totally want to see political media exploring these issues in indie games, but trusting big corporations to have a nuanced discussion of the most delicate trans issues is a bad idea. A cis woman with a glowing dildo up her pants on CDPR’s Twitter was kind of inevitable