I was either a bit too young, or I didn’t have cable and I didn’t get to see those shows. Same with Robotech. I was too old and Power Rangers too cheesy for me to get into it.
That makes some sense, as history from the outside tends to be a little more objective (unless that history butts up against their own).
I still have the original MP Prime, Megatron and Starscream, but then financial issues happened and the line moved on a lot before I had a decent amount of disposable income again. So now my fancy robot budget goes on big Macross figures and I make do with the Generations Transformers for that fix.
I think they have a boxed one of him in my LCS at the moment… the price has risen quite a bit since release…
I find an enthusiasm for the American revolution, and only that one, is a fairly faithful proxy for a fucking fascist outside America. But in general most non-Americans only have the absolute sketchiest idea of official American history. I mean the closest I’ve come to that narrative is reading Howard Zinn. Other than that most people’s idea of (white) American history is: land stealing, genocide, slavery, becoming really wealthy, movies, jazz, stopping the Soviets rolling all the way to the sea in WWII and thereby saving Western Europe from being like Eastern Europe, rock and roll, hip hop.
I have talked to a lot of Chinese kids about their attitude to, say, Mao over the years and found it to be a lot more nuanced and subject of hegemonic propaganda than the Western norm. Where they are hyper nationalistic would be in things like their electric cars which it is a truism among them to say are far better than Western offerings. They tend to be super nationalistic about high tech so I can see them getting easily offended at adaptations of their SF. As you say though, Netflix isn’t in China, so they have no fucks to give about that.
It’s like someone over here getting upset with the schlocky productions intended for internal consumption in China depicting Westerners as entirely devoted to bringing down the peaceful socialist paradise of the CCP.
Cambodian friends say that many young Cambodians are unaware or skeptical of the events of the 1970s, dismissing them as “exaggerated” or “old people stuff”. Some reject stories of atrocities by saying “Khmers would never do that to Khmers” (the idea of the “smiling Khmers”, Cambodians as gentle, peaceful people, was part of the national self-identity long before it became a Western trope).
I don’t know whether this blindness to their own recent history is officially encouraged. Hun Sen was allegedly a minor Khmer Rouge cadre, so maybe he didn’t want people to dwell too much on the events of the past. In the case of China, I’m sure the state’s “authorized version” glossed over the events of the Cultural Revolution, because even if Mao still hovers between revilement and rehabilitation, a colossal clusterfuck like that doesn’t reflect well on China or the CCP.
In the original publication of The Three-Body Problem, the section on the Cultural Revolution was placed later in the story so as to not be as priminent for the state censors, so it was a concern for Liu and his publishers
It is available in the Republic of China, Hong Kong and Macau, and there are large communities of Chinese speakers in Singapore and Malaysia, as well as a whole diaspora worldwide.
The whole idea is supposed to be that Netflix makes programming for global audiences, locally. They wouldn’t make original shows in Sweden (population: 10.5 million) under the assumption that nobody outside of Sweden would watch them.
Nobody mentioned the change to the placing of the segment in the novel earlier in the thread, just that the Tencent TV adaptation changed how Ye Wenjie’s father was treated.
guess youre right; maybe I only read it in one of the linked articles here or over at whatcha watchin.
sorry.
e/ oh yes, I read it at least in the nyt-article, which this thread is actually about;
Mr. Liu, the author, had to move the depiction of the struggle session from the beginning of the first volume to the middle because his editor was worried it couldn’t get past the censors. The English translation opened with the scene, with Mr. Liu’s approval.
Except that the Chinese TV version neutered most of the depiction of the horrors of the Cultural Revolution which is central to the plot of the book (Ye Wenjie wouldn’t have betrayed the human race had not her physicist father been murdered by fanatical Red Guards). For all its Westernizing of most of the characters, the Netflix didn’t shy away from this to its credit.
I enjoyed watching Norsemen on Netflix. It wasn’t actually produced by them, but the unique production model could probably be copied and applied elsewhere.
It was filmed in Norway (which has half the population of Sweden) and every scene was filmed twice, once in English and once in Norwegian.
