“The old man was an old man, the wookie was a wookie, space was space and the rest is bullshit.” GL fictionally channeling a likely apocryphal EH quote.
This isn’t relevant. Casting choices were not being made based on some ideal that “The galaxy far far away” was supposed to be white and male. This is evidenced both by the movies that came later, and by those initially intended for those roles (as @nungesser points out above). The universe wasn’t intended to be white and male, but ended up that way anyway, I’m going to guess mostly because folks went “ah well” at the time.
i.e., it’s a valid point of criticism that has nothing to do with the fiction and everything to do with the choices made during production, which was, IMHO, the point of the review noting it.
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Obviously, that’s good and about time.
Question: Did the shift occur following Disney’s acquisition of Lucasfilm?
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And even then they straightened his hair. Why the f**k why?
People forget that Star Wars was pretty much seen as a joke by most studios at the time, starring a mostly-unknown cast including George Lucas’ carpenter and a guy with a British accent wearing a hairy gorilla suit. They pretty much hired who they could get to get the film made.
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Possible. Disney very much like to burnish it’s diversity image. I suspect it has more to do with the directors. I doubt Disney itself is involved in many of the day to day decisions, like casting, but leaves that up to the division (Lucasfilms) and the directors and producers.
It’s not the only film where he did that… of course, the hair would have been era appropriate in Lady Sings the Blues:
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Or faux feminist maybe.
This is no knock on Carrie Fisher or the character, who many people rightfully love. But have a head strong woman and almost no other women (except those who get killed, like Luke’s Aunt) is hardly “feminist”. This was post second wave! She’s also there to be the love interest as much as she’s there to rescue the men. In fact it becomes much more of her role in later films.
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Which makes it even weirder. Like what’s the parallel evolutionary history that would produce people who look exactly like some subset of current humans?
Oh! Lucas also said that he wouldn’t have been able to make the movie without the popularity of Star Trek in syndication! And guess what that had!
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I admit “Planet Earth’s” feminist society" seemed done to ridicule it. But the written SF from the seventies was real. Elizabeth A Lynn had lesbian and gay characters, and she had been with the Weathermen for a while, and she was a lesbian I think that was out forty years ago when I read her books.
A bit of searching gave me the books I mentioned, Suzy McKee Charnas’ “Walk to the End of the World” (1974) and “Motherlines” (1978), where woman dominate society. That definitely seemed radical feminist when I read it about 1981.
I totally hear you on that (era appropriateness; era photos prove that), but adding Lando to SW was (to my mind) a response to criticisms for not including POC. If one responds to that criticism by adding a male POC, then I’d think a non-tone deaf filmmaker in the 80s would have had their eyes open; 80s black males, by and large (at least in NYC based on what I saw back then; that’s my database), didn’t straighten their hair then. So (again) what gives with the Lando doo? What the heck, I’ve asked the question. May as well throw in my own opinion: To make a black sci-fi good guy appear more palatable to white audiences… or… I could be completely wrong, and GL (who WAS detailed-oriented) felt that black space-goers would have had straight hair. Which is more likely?
That brings up a good point. Was there a third possibility: Did Billy Dee want it that way?
Why wouldn’t it be? Besides that women had been writing sci-fi for decades at that point, often under a pseudonym, and often without much credit. By the 50s there were plenty of women writing more feminist sci-fi.
I don’t know, actually. Natural styles were much more popular in the 1970s.
Totally could be the case, but I suspect that many white audiences were already familiar with more natural styles from TV and films of the era.
This seems like a good convention question for Mr. William, though!
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Miniskirts, and plenty of 'em. So what gives, Star Wars?
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I dunno if I’d read that much into it. Looking back at other photos of Billy Dee Williams from that time period, he seems to often either have wavy/straightened hair or a jheri curl. That may have just been his own hairdo.
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To be fair, that was kind of problematic… I wish Star Trek had been better earlier on with gender as it was with race. The pilot certainly tried, with the great Majel Barrett as no. 1, but it ended up putting most women in mini-skirts and into more traditional “feminine” roles for the most part. that doesn’t really change until later seasons of TNG and DS9. I was always generally disappointed about some of the stories written for both Troi and Crusher. Kira had some great stories and was a resistance fighter!
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As a respectful counterpoint (supporting point? extra point?), I will say that a lot of the “head strong”-ness of Leia came from the first draft treatments of Leigh Brackett, an important and under-valued Sci-Fi writer who also helped write The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye.
Her work on the character was minimised by generations of sexism-blinded fan-boys (and minimised by Lucas himself) but in her early drafts and dialogue, there is a recognisable stronger Leia.
It’s why she sometimes sounds like an “independent modern woman reporter”-type character from The Front Page or the like, because her voice was born from women of the era (including probably some of Fisher’s mom’s influence for what it was).
(And you’re 100% right in what you said, Lucas should have had more women, I wasn’t counterpointing that part)
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Being in the past is important to the issue of race. Because being set in the past makes it a Romantic Epic instead of Science Fiction. It’s about tradition instead of possibilities, and nothing is more traditional than people knowing their place.
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