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Avatar, The Last White Bender?

Thursday, December 18th, 2008 at 10:59 am by Jamie

Avatar Facepalm
image from AvatarSpirit.net

We have some horribly alarming news from Angry Zen Minion Tyler Anderson and AZM Ally Kensei Dave. Please head on over to slash film to take a gander at the casting choices for Aang, Sokka, Kitara, and Zuko for M. Night Shyamalan’s live action The Last Airbender.

Back?

Where to begin.

I think it’s fairly obvious that the casting director never watched the show. If he had (and I’m just going to assume the casting director is a guy for simplicity’s sake), he may have noticed the heavy Asian influence of the show. When the casting director approached Shyamalan with his choices, he should have been fired on the spot. Slapped around and then fired. I suppose you could make a decent enough argument for casting Aang as Caucasian. He’s certainly one of the most pale characters in the show. But Sokka and Kitara clearly have some decent tone to their skin color. I’m sure there are some darker toned Asian actors out there who could have fit those roles easily. But the choice that pisses me off more than anything is Jesse McCartney for Zuko. Dante Basco IS Zuko. The casting director and Shyamalan should have done everything in their power to cast him. There are bags of money I’m sure Shyamalan could have thrown at Basco to get him to sign on. Inexcusable.

I give Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko a lot of credit for creating a show featuring characters with ethnic backgrounds that don’t get much representation. Even in the new millennium, there’s a dearth of starring roles for Asians both in animation and live action television. For DiMartino and Konietzko to pitch a show starring non-white characters and for Nickelodeon to air it was quite gratifying. Finally, a show that stars people who kinda look like me. For Shyamalan to ignore the Asianianess, or hell, other worldliness of the characters is so very disappointing. Hey Night, your kids like the show because it stars people who look like them!

It really seems like Shyamalan doesn’t believe in the source material strongly enough to cast non-white actors. That actually kind of hurts. Fans would fill the theaters to see brown people in Airbender! New fans would love to see a movie starring brown people! You’re a brown person! What! THE! FUCK!

If this is the direction it’s going, I cannot and will not support the live-action Airbender. I will never buy a ticket, I will never Netflix it, and if it comes to broadcast television, I will change the channel.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 18th, 2008 at 10:59 am and is filed under Chop Socky, Diversity, Dumb Ass, Movies, Tele. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

7 Responses to “Avatar, The Last White Bender?”

  1. Avatarclara
    Posted: Dec 18th, 2008 at 11:21 am
    1

    angry black woman (http://theangryblackwoman.com/) posted about this recently too.

    having never watched avatar… i was able to go through the elation at discovering a popular show that features a diverse cast and the disappointment of the liveaction casting decisions all in one go.

    shyamalan… tsk tsk.
  2. AvatarLurklen
    Posted: Dec 18th, 2008 at 8:29 pm
    2

    NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

    Damnitt two of the damn characters are fairly dark skinned and we have these pale teeny bopper white folks next to them what the hell, like what they couldn’t have gotten any young actors with darker skin thats just stupid.

    This is so annoying I love that show and part of it was the fact the characters weren’t any one ethnicity they didn’t look specificly asian or white and so had no previous associations and could simply be. So yeah Aang and Toph and even Zuko Iguess could be played by white people and not look too odd. But Sokka and Kitara? The only way that would work is by darkening the skin tone of the people they’ve picked and thats just stupid when theres hundreds if not thousands of young actors out there just dying to be hired.

    And frankly you’d think M.Night would be more sensitive to that fact.
  3. AvatarJohn
    Posted: Dec 18th, 2008 at 10:49 pm
    3

    I’ve got a link to watch this series online soon (I think you posted it, in fact). However, I am pretty well convinced that Shyamalan is exceedingly over-rated as a director, so what has been said here really doesn’t surprise me much at all. Given how popular this show seems to be, I would not doubt the movie will do reasonably well, but expectations (strictly imo, and I know I am in the minority with this director’s apparent popularity) should be pretty low. Hope, however, will be high! (aka Hope for the best, but expect the worst)
  4. AvatarTugboat
    Posted: Dec 19th, 2008 at 6:24 am
    4

    Honestly, I think at this point they should scrap the live action and do it animated. At least it’d have a prayer of retaining some of the flavor of the original. I concur with John on Shyamalan being overrated.
  5. AvatarSamurai Penguin
    Posted: Dec 19th, 2008 at 5:41 pm
    5

    POR QUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
  6. AvatarFm
    Posted: Dec 20th, 2008 at 3:20 am
    6

    Well there was no reference other then culture that indicated they’re race.personally i thought sokka and katara were Native American or Inuit from what i seen from they’re culture.Wile i seen some of India culture in the fire nation this make me think it was more like south west china.Wile the earth kingdom seem to be central china. At first i thought they were hiring well know child actors for the roll to put people in the seats.With that being said who the hell are these kids!?
  7. pingback pingback:
    Posted: Jan 2nd, 2009 at 1:58 am
    7
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