Tuesday, April 26, 2005
I Will Be Heard
The best thing about having your own website is it offers you a platform to speak out against issues that are of particular concern to you but most people don't really care about. So I'm going to take this opportunity to complain about last night's episode of Robot Chicken.
If you haven't seen it, Robot Chicken is a stop-motion animated TV show that premiered in February. Each episode is really short (~11 minutes) and the segments are presented in a rapid-fire style. Some "skits" are essentially one punch line and may be only a few seconds in length. Typical episodes contain at least one or two segments which last a few minutes each and resemble a "normal" comedy skit.
So last night's episode featured a parody version of an E! True Hollywood Story on The Incredible Hulk. It was pretty funny as it portrayed the Hulk as an actor who had trouble finding work until he ran into Bill Bixby and then they found success together. They were depicted partying hard, throwing up and snorting coke together. Good clean fun so far as I'm concerned.
What pissed me off was when they came to the subject of that terrible Hulk movie directed by Ang Lee. At first, they were making fun of the fact that Ang Lee's movies are overly-sentimental and boring, which I won't argue. But then they start making fun of him racially which is fucked up. He spoke with a heavy Chinese accent and used broken, fortune cookie sentences. To add cultural ignorance to the fire, he even compares the Hulk to a haiku. For the record, Ang Lee is from Taiwan. Yes, he speaks with an accent but he went to college in the U.S. and speaks English very well. He certainly wouldn't feel the need to reference Haiku which is from Japan.
I'm offended here because mocking Ang Lee racially is both hateful and lazy. It's so simple to mock him as a director, why did they have to turn him into a degrading stereotype? Would they have mocked Spike Lee by dressing him in chains or having him speak like Rochester? I doubt it.
And before I get any hate mail let's make something clear: I'm no prude or a censorship junkie. I'm not crying about "protecting children" or "indecency." If they want to make fun of Asian people like that, I will fight for their right to do so. But I think people who use these kinds of stereotypes don't fully consider the ramifications of it. Yeah, sure, it's just supposed to be a "joke" and I'm being too serious. I just think that representation is a very powerful tool.
If you haven't seen it, Robot Chicken is a stop-motion animated TV show that premiered in February. Each episode is really short (~11 minutes) and the segments are presented in a rapid-fire style. Some "skits" are essentially one punch line and may be only a few seconds in length. Typical episodes contain at least one or two segments which last a few minutes each and resemble a "normal" comedy skit.
So last night's episode featured a parody version of an E! True Hollywood Story on The Incredible Hulk. It was pretty funny as it portrayed the Hulk as an actor who had trouble finding work until he ran into Bill Bixby and then they found success together. They were depicted partying hard, throwing up and snorting coke together. Good clean fun so far as I'm concerned.
What pissed me off was when they came to the subject of that terrible Hulk movie directed by Ang Lee. At first, they were making fun of the fact that Ang Lee's movies are overly-sentimental and boring, which I won't argue. But then they start making fun of him racially which is fucked up. He spoke with a heavy Chinese accent and used broken, fortune cookie sentences. To add cultural ignorance to the fire, he even compares the Hulk to a haiku. For the record, Ang Lee is from Taiwan. Yes, he speaks with an accent but he went to college in the U.S. and speaks English very well. He certainly wouldn't feel the need to reference Haiku which is from Japan.
I'm offended here because mocking Ang Lee racially is both hateful and lazy. It's so simple to mock him as a director, why did they have to turn him into a degrading stereotype? Would they have mocked Spike Lee by dressing him in chains or having him speak like Rochester? I doubt it.
And before I get any hate mail let's make something clear: I'm no prude or a censorship junkie. I'm not crying about "protecting children" or "indecency." If they want to make fun of Asian people like that, I will fight for their right to do so. But I think people who use these kinds of stereotypes don't fully consider the ramifications of it. Yeah, sure, it's just supposed to be a "joke" and I'm being too serious. I just think that representation is a very powerful tool.
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