Post
by dae428 » Sun Jul 26, 2015 3:07 am
When I look watch a movie that's adapting a comic book, the only really thing that's important to me and what I think to a lot of other people is how faithful they are to the essence of the character. Everything after that is secondary as a movie has to make changes if it wants to produce a coherent story that works in an allotted 90-120 minute time slot. I would much prefer having a black Goku that liked fighting strong foes, was carefree, and was naive to a fault as opposed to an Asian Goku that was 'dark', 'tortured', and daydreamed about chicks eating strawberries. For instance, I was more annoyed (though not really) that they made Sue Storm the adopted sister of Johnny Storm because it messed with the brother-sister relationship a bit than the whole making Johnny Storm black thing. If they really wanted racial diversity I much would have rather they had Mr. Fantastic black or the Thing black as their race isn't really relevant to their character (I think anyways. I've never really read or watched the Fantastic Four except in bits and pieces)
However, I think I as well as most people if they could would want to see their favorite characters looking as they did in the comic books. Goku has Asian origin influences and has pale-ish skin (for most of his artwork). So it only really makes sense that a lot of people would see him as being Asian or I guess white or some sort of European whatever. That doesn't make them racist by any means it just means that they want their character properly represented. I'm pretty sure the very same people here would be complaining if John Stewart were played by a white guy or an Asian guy. This is personally understand why it can get a touch annoying when I see comic books and comic book movies doing the whole race swapping thing.
But, to play devil's advocate, while I don't like it. It does make some sense in a business sense. As mentioned before People like familiarity and they naturally focus towards it. This can kind of be seen as a double edged sword in which comic book writers and movie makers choose to replace a normally white character with another ethnically different character because they feel that that's the only way for that character to get any attention from readers and watchers in the first place. I feel that this particularly prominent in the comic book industry where people are often reading so many different comic books already that when something new comes out that they've never heard of, they would be hesitant to purchase it unless it were somehow related to a character they already knew.
Then again, if we go back to movies though we can kind of see how introducing new comic book characters can surprisingly work out quite well. Two examples that come to mind are Ant-man and the Guardians of the Galaxy. While these characters are not necessarily new comic book characters, to the movie going audience probably only like 1% have probably heard of these characters before. I personally never knew about the Guardians of the Galaxy when it came out and I only knew Hank Pym who was the first Ant-man and again knew nothing of Scott Lang when it came out. The whole black Goku thing can work in this sense. While the Dragon Ball fanbase is fairly big, it's not nearly as big as some other series out there like Starwars. (I think anyways) so I feel that the case for a black Goku can still technically work for the big screens as there are still many people who don't even know that much about Dragon Ball and most movies (in the past anyways yuk yuk yuk) are generally new stories anyways. And hey, if you're a fan of Dragon Ball, it's Dragon Ball, you're probably still going to watch it anyways (if it looks alright). Sure there are going to be people who won't watch it anyways because of the whole race thing but, unless you're a very pessimistic person, I really doubt they'll make up anything remotely close to a majority let alone a noticeable minority.
In the end, I can say that yes. A black Goku could work. A lot of people at Kanzenshuu as well as myself wouldn't really like it that much because we are protective of the image of Goku, but we, as well as many others, would probably watch the movie anyways because we love Dragon Ball. In a way we are biased a bit because we do really like Goku and generally want Goku to be portrayed by an actor who does resemble him and well. But, I really doubt this means that the majority of Dragon Ball fans or Kanzenshuu goers are prejudiced or racist by any means. If we were to see a great black Goku in a great Dragon Ball movie, we probably wouldn't care too much in the long run as long as they kept true to the character of Goku and portrayed him properly cough cough Screw Attack cough.
Sorry if what I'm saying is really messy... Basically just put me in the no we aren't biased camp. I think...
