Back to the Drawing Board: Whitewashing in Current Media

I would never claim to be the biggest Marvel fangirl, but as someone who somehow developed a passing interest in the MCU I found myself, alongside my group of friends, in the theater opening week for Civil War. Watching the previews for the upcoming movies was an experience I could only describe as “tired groaning interspersed with slight approval for Rogue One”, but the thing that stuck with me longest was just how much of a goddamned hot mess Doctor Strange is going to be. Oh sure, I’ve heard all the justified cries of whitewashing, not doubting them for a second, but it wasn’t until I saw the trailer for myself on the big screen that I knew my quip of “ah yes, there he is; the only white man in Nepal” was merely masking my absolute disgust at how far Marvel was willing to go to exclude actual non-Black characters of color from their films.

This, however, wasn’t even what prompted me to write this post. A couple days ago on my Facebook wall, I saw someone drop a link that Little Door Gods was getting an English release. As happy as I was to hear that, the casting seemed to be doing everything in its power to knock the wind out of my sails. Meryl Streep? Nicole Kidman? Mel Brooks? All talented in their own right, but seriously: what the fuck is this shit? (Though according to a recent tweet by fellow reported vocal talent Zendaya, this could be untrue. Not that this excludes the problem.)

We need to do better.

Ace plays Final Fantasy X: The Characterization

Well, now that we’re nearing the end of this miniseries, there aren’t too many things left to cover. I just spent the past five posts analyzing the plot, Yuna as Jesus, the religion of Yevon as a whole, how the game deals with death, and how the summons work. This leads me into the characters as a whole.

Final Fantasy X was a significant development for the franchise, and it has gone down for many as the “last good Final Fantasy game.” Even if you haven’t read my earlier posts or my reviews for some of the other Final Fantasy games, you can probably guess that I don’t agree with that. But I can most assuredly see why people feel the way they do about this installment in the franchise. I may have my issues with it, but this game offered a lot at the time it came out. The graphics are beautiful, and when it was released, they shocked people because of how realistic they looked compared to the other games. Visually, Final Fantasy X is stunning, and even nowadays, the graphics aren’t bad. On top of that, musically, it’s pretty amazing as well. And the visuals and the audios do a decent job of complementing each other.

Just from something like that, this game is very appealing. And it’s very easy to tell that a lot of effort went into its production. I wouldn’t expect anything less from a Final Fantasy game, and this one delivers all that and more. In fact, Square Enix has plans to remaster it for a PS3 release, in order to redeliver the experience of playing such a high quality game. I may have just spent the past five posts more or less bitching and nitpicking everything, and I do have more complaints about how this story is told, but Final Fantasy X has a lot of redeeming qualities to it. And most, if not all, of the bad qualities concerning its gameplay and production will more than likely be fixed if it actually does get remastered.

So let’s talk about the characters.

“There You Go” with Dino Andrade: Part 3

First parts of the interview here and here.

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MadameAce: Now the Scarecrow, he’s a Batman villain that has been re-imagined a lot, over and over again. How did you envision him when you first started playing him? I know you talked about the demon in the human body and whatnot, but I’ve just seen so many different versions of him.

Dino Andrade: Being a long-time Batman fan, the first thing that I did was look back at the first, the original Arkham Asylum graphic novel which then I got the script and discovered that the two had absolutely nothing to do with each other. After that, I started looking at darker versions of the Scarecrow. One of my favorite versions of the Scarecrow, although he’s not in it for very long, is in the series Batman: Vampire where Scarecrow has human fingers sewn into his costume and stuff like that. He’s this terrifying character and I really liked that interpretation.

That was kind of my jump off point from there because I knew that Arkham Asylum was going to be much grittier than anything that had been seen or done before on video games or comics and so on because, of course, Chris Nolan’s Batman, which took a grittier tone, was so successful. I believe that was part of the mandate for Arkham Asylum: to go for darker territory than Paul Dini and company were allowed to do in previous television incarnations. That’s why I purposely studied Batman: Vampire which is probably the darkest Batman story there is.

“There You Go” with Dino Andrade: Part 2

Read the first part of the interview here.

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MadameAce: I know you said that you experienced some disappointment when you did that role, but in the early days what were your thoughts on doing voice overs?

Dino Andrade: At the time most of what I wanted to do in voice over was basically to [have it] work as a stepping stone. I really wanted to get into doing on-camera. I started doing a lot of commercials at the time. I was doing commercials for McDonalds, Delta Airlines, various things like that kind of working my way up. I was also doing a lot of training with The Groundlings comedy / improv. I’m a very physical actor, physical comedian. This was something that I felt might be the future for me, but it was very disappointing: unfortunately it seemed that 90% of what I was being sent out for was one Mexican, cholo gangster after another. It is so not me! That was very discouraging and I decided that, “you know what, if I’m going to get into these projects I might as well make them myself.” So I decided to leave acting for about ten years and spent the 90’s being involved in independent filmmaking, writing screenplays—I sold six screenplays, none of which were produced. [laughter]

Stewi: You still got paid

Dino Andrade: I still got paid. I think it was Kurt Vonnegut who said that the best thing that could ever happen is to sell a screenplay and have it never get actually made so your work isn’t screwed up. [laughter] So my work has not been screwed up six times, but it was kind of cool that I sold them. I also produced one independent film called Bob’s Video that ran the film festival circuit for a year and got me to travel around the country which was really fun. In the end, in the 00’s, I decided to go back to acting and to my original love, which was animation and fantasy, which then meant voice over. Even that was somewhat accidental.

There was a director who was working on an anime show called Vampire Princess and I was being told about that. And I thought, “well maybe I can get in on that as a writer. I’ve never done anime writing, but maybe I could give that a shot.” It turned out that he was also working on another show called Saint Tail and his wife was casting it and when I was contacting him I wound up contacting his wife and his wife thought I was an actor calling in for a scheduled  telephone audition. I said, “…sure! Yes, that’s me,” and so I wound up auditioning completely cold, had no copy at all, so I just had to make up something about, “oh yeah, I didn’t get it. The courier didn’t make it. The fax machine died,” or something. I don’t remember. So they fed me the lines and I auditioned and they said great and I got a small part on Saint Tail. I took that as a sign and said, “okay! I guess this is what I’m supposed to be doing.” I returned to voice over at that point.

“There You Go” with Dino Andrade: Part 1

So today I have a special surprise for everyone. Thanks to my friend Stewi, I had the privilege to interview Dino Andrade, a famous voice actor who did one of my all-time favorite characters, Scarecrow from Batman: Arkham Asylum. He’s been in numerous other things as well, such as Wolf’s Rain, World of Warcraft, so on and so forth. On top of all that, he’s the founder of a geek dating site called Soul Geek, and all of you can check out his own website here. Furthermore, you may notice on his website that he does voice-acting lessons, so if any of you are interested in that, make sure to head on over there.

Additionally, I’d like to thank Dino once again for agreeing to do this interview and I would also like to thank Stewi for helping me with the interview process.

I hope all of you enjoy it. Unfortunately, what I have transcribed as of current is not the full interview, and I will be posting it in numerous installments—so most of my other reviews will be on hold until I get all this up, maybe—and I am also trying to figure out how to edit and post the recording of the interview for everyone, so you can all look forward to that eventually too. There are some things Dino said that are a little hard to transcribe; he did do the Scarecrow voice for us, after all.

Anyways, enjoy!