IMPORTANT: The name of the essay I reference at the end as a massive source for all my information on Fu Manchu is named "One of Us Is Yellow: Doctor Fu Manchu and The Talons of Weng-Chiang" by Kate Orman. The link for the essay (and all my other sources) are in the description. Pure madness that I didn't show that on screen, but I hope you all give it a read.
You titled the video, "Is The Talons of Weng-Chiang racist? Yes" Because English actors played Asian characters. An actor can play ANY role. If you think an actor can only play a role if they ARE whatever type they're playing, (Asian roles must be played by Asian actors, Black, Indian, Chinese - all must be played by those races on stage, etc) Then you are a moron. A snowflake. You do not in any way understand acting itself. Anyone offended by film and TV from the past are emotional weaklings. Temper tantrum kids. You've clearly never had push back to your limp wrist-ed views. So listen up, snowflake, no adult gives a shit if you're offended. You are making videos criticizing the works of people who changed our culture and entertainment landscape. I stand by my earlier comment, you're a piss-ant shaking your fist at giants.
Aight now I know you didn't watch the video because if you did you'd understand that I adore Robert Holmes and Phillip Hinchcliffes vision for the show by in large. You are arguing with me based on a thumbnail you didn't like. Incidentally, since you're having a sook in my comments about how wrong you think I am take a scroll. Find the comments from the older generation of fans who agree with me. This isn't an age thing, darling. It's a basic media literacy thing. Also am i right in understanding that you are suggesting white people be allowed to play black characters there? Are you advocating for blackface? Do you have the slightest idea how stupid that makes you look?
Some of the characters express some of the less savoury attitudes of the period, the 1800s, not the 1970s, I mean. That is natural and preferable to ignoring that racism existed. They even have Li Sen Chang make a witty remark about racism saying "I believe we all look the same to you." Which sgoes that far from being the c8ctim of the casual racism he encounters he is more intelligent than the average person a nd he is able to use his wit to subtly mock them. The serial is loosely based on Sherlock Holmes and the Fu Man Chu (himself played by Christopher Lee) stories, so if you're not familiar with either, you might miss some of the many references. There were Chinese criminals in Victorian time, so that's not racist in and of itself. The main villain isn't Chinese. He's a white fascist dictator, and the main Chinese character realises he's been used by him and on his deathbed helps the Doctor. The only really problematic thing is that the have a Caucasian actor playing a Chinese man. However, remember this was made in a time when that was not deemed as racist. Tom Baker and many other fine actors had played Othello with black face makeup. These were just seen as character parts. Yes, we wouldn't do it now because it is seen as offensive, but when you watch something made over 40 years ago, you need to view it in the context of a historical document. You can't apply modern sensibilities to something that was made when those things were seen as ok. In short, it's a well written, well acted drama, and if you can't enjoy it because one of the actors has makeup, then your loss. As for the Toymaker, when an immensely powerful being from a different dimension who probably doesn't even look human chooses to wear an oriental costume, it's not racist but a costume. He doesn't attempt to portray himself as Chinese.
@@Illvillainy you'd be amazed the number of people I've argued with in the comments who have not watched the video. Some of them have straight up admitted it
the thing is that the decision to use an anti-Chinese slur in the title and have the character dress up in Chinese costume in _The Celestial Toymaker_ is a production choice, what the character thinks is secondary to that when you could tell the same story without those racist choices.
In regards to your point on the Toymaker’s costume, it was reused from the Marco Polo serial because of a lack of budget. His name was probably meant in the context of divinity instead of race, with the robes being an unfortunate coincidence.
accidental racism is still racism, unfortunately. It makes sense that Davies decided to just call him "the Toymaker" as a way of subtly apologizing for the mistakes of the past.
@@tituslafrombois1164 And yet he still worked a reference in to the word "celestial" anyway. I'm dead certain he had nothing but the best of intentions there, but it still made me go "hang on"
33:15 Now that line "I have been told we all look the same" is good. That is a shining moment of pushing back against the racism of the genre by permitting the Chinese character to send it up. This is the Seventies attitude to addressing racism; you get it in The Sweeney too, in which there is no moral compass character at all; but the reactions of minority characters to racism is played authentically. Another is Rising Damp; Rigsby isn't the only racist character in Rising Damp; he is the only one to be cruel and superior about it, but the other characters can be pretty ignorant too, but Philip can always show up the absurdity of their views with a sardonic quip. It doesn't have the moral clarity expected in later eras of entertainment, but I feel the racism is authentically depicted rather than endorsed.
I agree with you about Chang's "I understand we all look the same", I think in its context it's pretty powerful. But as I am sure you will agree, it is baffling that the Doctor himself appears to endorse the casual ignorance on occasion. That more than anything is my gripe with the dialogue surrounding the racism in this serial
I grew up in the 1980/ 90s, that sort of language was used then. Mostly out of ignorance by most. Folk just pretend British society was more progressive than it was back then. It has only been the last few decades that society has a whole has become much more racially sensitive which is why there are millions of angry "anti woke" idiots having a meltdown whenever racisim is discussed. Admittedly the queer bashing language was much more pervasive in British television than out and out racism. The backlash to a more progressive tolerant society is disconserting.
In terms of casting you can bet your bottom dollar they tried their best to cast actual Asian actors but failed. Back in the 70s there wasn't a large body of Asian actors one could pool from. If you cast your mind back to The Mind of Evil Kristopher Kum who played Fu Peng was a last minute addition to the cast who ran an agency specifically for actors of Asian origin. Quite often one would see the same actors playing many nationalities because they were in so much demand. Burt Kwouk would play Japanese characters, Chinese characters sometimes alongside actors in yellow face just because there weren't enough actors of Asian origin to go round locally and flying in actors from Hong Kong would have been prohibitively expensive. As for the Fu Manchu pastiche elements Robert Holmes attempts to subvert this. The Faux Manchu in this story has been conned. By a white fascist from the future no less. Some of the lines written for the character express an awareness of racism. Particularly tropes associated with Asian characters. Is it casually racist... Yes. Is it as offensive as more mainstream fare like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, No.
There was actually a tangent I initially intended to go into about intent vs impact of writing about important topics like racism. I agree that Robert Holmes probably had nothing but the best of intentions with the way he tries to subvert the Fu Manchu tropes as a commentary on racism, but "I meant well" only goes so far when the result is still racist. And for what it's worth, the crew knows today the serial is offensive. Phillip Hinchcliffe himself has said he reckons he wouldn't get away with producing this programme today
and they couldn't just hire any asian person of the street, as you had to have an Equity card for a speaking role and they were not easy to get back then.
Casting a non Asian on this specific occasion is not problematic to me. Purely because it was a different time. Charlie Chan, Mr Moto and the obvious inspiration Fu Manchu. This was the norm for this era . Was there some narrow thinking? Possibly.They were attempting to emulate tropes popular at the time in Hammer Films. I'm sure there were attempts to cast an Asian actor. To be fair in those days UK Casting Directors did not have a lot of choice in 60s & 70s. Burt Kwouk ( Kato) was the go to guy for 99% of Asian Speaking roles then. Maybe he was busy. Most likely though they were clearly seeking a Christopher Lee type. Obviously these days there are endless talented actors of diversity and ethnicity. Different times and thank goodness for that. It should always be about casting the right actor for the role. Frankly I think they got it right with John Bennett.
With all of the Pertwee era/Barry Letts praise I was surprised to see no mention of Planet of the Spiders and the yellow face used there for characters like Cho-je. Letts had contacts for Asian actors like you said here and still resorted to yellow face just a few years after Mind of Evil.
Absolutely fair point. Cho Je was on my mind when i wrote this but I think Spiders ought to get its own video on its brand of orientalism because it's... weird. Like, Letts and Sloman are genuinely excited about Buddhist ideas and treat them with respect, but still manage to get in the way of themselves with the racist stuff. It's interesting
8:45 - you could also have made the point that even at the time HERE IN THE UK the racism looked out of place… the previous serial (Robots of Death) had a mining ship in the future staffed by people of all sorts of colours and creeds. That was just a week before this one started!
Well it isn't "a product of its time" because it is a pastiche of the Fu Manchu stories, so it is really a product of the Edwardian era it is paying homage to. In the same way Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is not a product of its time; it is a product of the 1930s. If the villains were soviet Russians then it would be a product of its time! Spreading russophobia was what was hip in the 80s; not thugee cults. (And Russophobia is back in fashion again; wasn't there a ban on Dostoyevsky in a University in Milan during the beginning of the Ukraine war? What Fyodor Dostoyevsky had to do with modern Russian foreign policy is a mystery). But Indy is a nostalgic throwback; that was the whole point of the series; it was emulating a genre of the past so used tropes of that old fashioned genre. Actually, similarly the Russophobia in season 3 & 4 of Stranger Things is not a "product of its time" because Stranger Things is consciously a pastiche of 80s pop culture cinema, so when they decide to make soviet spies the villains of season 3 and one of the plot threads of season 4 they are consciously pastiching the Eighties rather than reflecting modern bigotries (although coincidentally that was rapidly becoming a modern bigotry with a reboot of McCarthyism in which calling someone a "Russian asset" was considered an effective political smear against opponents to both the left and right of the government). Bearing that in mind raises a question; was the use of a white actor in make up to appear Chinese a conscious creative choice to emulate the depictions of Fu Manchu in classic cinema or was it merely a replication of the same solution to the same problem, i.e. a lack of available British actors in the network who were of East Asian heritage. [In answer to my own question I suspect it's not a creative choice because the make up is actually done quite well.] By the eighties we accepted that Talons could certainly be construed as racist and choices made then would be avoided now. However, also in the Eighties; Gandhi!
@@michaelinlofinot really surprised, just exasperated at how this fandom gets so hostile over things. Btw I enjoyed the video, really goes into the why it’s racist that not a lot of people like myself would really notice at first. While not my favourite classic era serial I do like it, but like Tomb of the Cybermen I acknowledge its content is very dated & offensive. That aspect makes it difficult to recommend but it shouldn’t be erased from history.
@pcb1175 thanks! And Tomb of the Cybermen is one I find easier to recommend. Toberman is still a very offensive stereotype but unlike Talons the whole serial isn't built on the stereotype. However as a Second Doctor Starter Pack I'm way more likely to point to something like The Mind Robber before Tomb of the Cybermen
To be honest, I kind of like that the 4th doctor volunteered to translate, said he was fluent in all dialects and proceeded to say a string of gibberish. It makes the exchange hillarious. I dont think it was intentional at all. It was likely just them being lazy and pretty racist, but the confusion on the guys face as the doctor attempts to communicate is priceless.
Great minds think alike! See I got away with it the first time one year because we were told to write a spooky story for Halloween so I turned in what was pretty much a carbon copy of Blink. Teacher was impressed. But then the Daleks and Cybermen began to get involved and that's when the teacher caught on and asked me to write literally anything else
Happened to me too. To be fair to my teacher, I turned out some real cracker material after that haha But I can’t forgive him for forcing me to hand-write my stories. After typing them. 😖 The 1990s might as well have been the 1890s.
I’m a watcher of Who from the 70s onwards and, by coincidence, I re-watched Weng-Chiang the other day. It is, indeed, stunningly racist. I’m glad you’ve tackled this episode and it’s themes here.
Arguably yes - but only for the casting choice of Li H'sen Chang. Everything else including the use of the "other" c-word, the Chinese Triads and opium dens are in fact historically accurate. Based on these elements alone the episode is not racist. It depicts the social norms for the time period (which were racist) in which the story was set. Context is key. Also, Li H'sen Chang's dialogue , "I understand. We all look the same," was used to diffuse what could have been an awkward conversation. He doesn't know The Dcctor isn't racist and believes he's conversing with a common Londoner. "The bird has flown. One of us is yellow," was used as a somewhat self-deprecating bit of humour to appease his audience after a slightly embarrassing turn of events during one of his tricks.
While I would agree about the accuracy, it's really not necessary to depict racial slurs and stereotypes in historical settings. It's like the people who complain that Red Dead Redemption 2 or Bioshock Infinite don't constantly have characters using the N word. We know that's how it was back then, but using the slurs still would have people continuing to parrot them openly instead of simply removing them from general circulation.
@@Whiteythereaper I understand your point. I'm in the "If we don't show the ugly side once in a while then we might forget how ugly it really is," category... like reading the N-word out loud while reading To Kill A Mockingbird in school. It's uncomfortable to say the least and maybe that's a good thing. When I explain what the Westboro Baptist Church does at military funerals and I'll use "the other F-word" when telling the story. What they do is repugnant and I do my best to make the point. Anyway, Cheers!
I'd say yes, but not deliberately so. It's mostly just guilty of using practices that were outdated even for the time, but otherwise the character's portrayal is sympathic and tragic, and his mannerism's are all but stated to be put on for the benefit of the Victorian era audiance. Whether that justifies their inclusion or if the story would've worked better had an actor of actual Asian decent played the role is anyones guess.
I agree that overall the characterisation of Chang is really strong. Holmes is a clever writer, and the nuance with which he handles how Chang interacts with racism is clever. But his inability to let go of the tropes that surround Chang wind up shooting him in the foot and John Bennett's casting (not to mix metaphors) was the last nail in that coffin
@@michaelinlofi It didn't help, no. Still with the context in mind it'll be up to the individual viewer to decide if that ruins their enjoyment of the story or not.
It MIGHT just be that they chose John Bennett for the role because he'd appeared in Doctor Who before and is a decent actor. It wouldn't happen now, but then now isn't then.
I think it's a mistake to edit or delete history, regardless of whether it bothers people. It isn't just a question of whether a show made in the 1970s was racially insensitive but whether the historical time period it was visiting was racially insensitive. I'd rather see the latter faced head-on. On the former, I'm inclined to ask fans who are Chinese or of Chinese descent. While my sample size is tiny, the two I've asked accepted it for what it is and did not take offense. Coincidentally, the one of those two who was a close friend often reveled in racial humor such as gong strikes that survived well into the 1990s. (He also called me "roundeye" on occasion and I was not offended.) BTW, I am bothered that things like this draw such ire while race-swapping historically white characters is instead celebrated as "progress"...
Not advocating for its censure or removal in the slightest. I agree that our offensive past shouldn't be erased - as I said here I own the season 14 Blu-Rays, which contains this serial. It's why I think BritBox did the most sensible thing - keeping Talons on their platform but sticking a notice at the beginning giving a heads up as to the content of the serial. And you're absolutely right to ask Chinese fans of their views on the serial. The essay I heavily highlight in the comments and at the end references posts made by Chinese fans of Doctor Who who are perturbed by its content. I follow an individual on Twitter who has Chinese heritage who hates this serial. No group of people is a monolith, so some might give it a free pass while many others do not. But some being more comfortable than others with this sort of material isn't really carte blanche to say and do whatever we want
@@michaelinlofi You're right about groups not being monolithic and that should be the answer to racism in general. People are individuals, automatically diverse in their totally unique personal experiences. Racism is reductive and dehumanizing groupthink, whether in the classic form in this serial or in its modern "woke" form.
Very well done video, an important conversation to have and the editing seems like that of a much larger channel. Looking through your other videos this doesn't seem to be your average form of content about DW but I would totally love to see more of this
Thank you! This is actually the hardest I've worked on editing a video (I'm trying to step up my game) so I'm delighted to hear it's paying off. And I absolutely have more plans for WhoTubing. Can't say for sure what exactly, but I definitely want to talk about it more because I love this show so much
7:06 "If Robert Holmes name is on it you know you are in for a treat" Unless it's The Space Pirates. Fortunately The Space Pirates are missing. Holmes probably burned the recordings himself! 😅
@@sambda The Mysterious Planet is more boring than anything else, but even it manages to have flashes of Holmes' trademark wit. Glitz and Dibber are by miles the most entertaining part of that serial just by virtue of Holmes' dialogue style
There was a way to do this that would have been historically accurate and much less problematic. There was a magician at that time who spent his whole career pretending to be Chinese but who was (if memory serves, American). His true identity was only revealed to the world when a trick went wrong and he was fatally shot on stage. If the magician in Talons had been him, the casting would be a lot more reasonable. What I will also say is that UK TV at the time was full of out-and-out, absolutely deliberate and spiteful racism; as opposed to what I’d consider racism driven by ignorance like Talons. Yes, they should have known better, but they didn’t.
Why would Magnus Greel pretend to be an ancient Chinese god to persuade an American to work for him? He would pretend to be the angel Moroni or something. In this version we wind up with a mormon magician! That would be a weird pastiche of Fu Manchu to have a Mormon magician, although it could be instead a pastiche of A Study in Scarlet which does involve a mormon secret society based on the Danites. So Magnus Greel, as a result of a catastrophic time travel experiment arrives in Utah and convinces a community of mormons that he is the angel Moroni, recruits a local farmer (lets call him Lee Henry Carter) and gives him futuristic technology that allows him to pass himself off as a miracle worker and he becomes the head of a Danite secret society called "The Seraphim" or something (as a riff on "the destroying angels") they take their criminal activities to London where Carter passes himself off as a faith healer using the technology Greel/Moroni has given him, whilst his secret society of assassins pose as pine furniture salespeople, whilst collecting victims for Magnus Greel.
@@markpostgate2551 It’d take some minor re-working, but it could be done. The guy pretended to be Chinese off-stage, too. Literally no one seemed to know his real identity. The bigger change is that you’d make the magician more cynically part of the evil plan; he’d be there for what he could gain rather than being a true believer.
@@chrispalmer7893 The beauty of Li H'sen is he isn't evil. He is misguided and gets a redemption arc. You make him as cynical as Greel then you make him a less interesting character. But then a performer pretending to be another race for a stage act isn't evil either. He may be a charlatan or a fantasist but he isn't evil. Grey Owl who was a Scotsman who posed as a native American was an environmentalist campaigner; I think the fictional identity he created for himself was a form of escapism. And he was married to a genuine native American for some time so he certainly wasn't deliberately mocking them. Another lovely touch about the character of Li H'sen is the fact that he sends up his ethnicity on stage becoming more stereotypical. He is played as an authentic chinese character offstage (even though he is played by a white actor he is portrayed respectfully) and yet on stage that character turns himself into a caricature for the music hall audience. You would lose this commentary if you have him not written as a genuine Chinese character.
Yeah I stumbled on some clips of Mind Your Language while poking around for any Pik-sen Lim footage I could find and good grief you can't say any of that. That really did feel like a show meant to make fun of foreigners, as opposed to the more ignorant than malicious approach Talons takes
@pferreira1983 Rosa has its own problems - it seems to forget that Rosa Parks sitting in the white section of the bus was a deliberate and organised protest, and the concept that stopping this one protest would end the civil rights movement is bizarre. But my point about the Doctor's reactions to the world around her still stand because she does at least react in that episode
@@michaelinlofi The thing is Rosa is actually offensive towards the black community because it takes one important point in time and has a white saviour help Rosa to accomplish that. The one time having the Doctor cause a reaction to history ends in being offensive. Talons is just offensive because of the casting and him being a caricature of Fu Manchu.
Now you guys in the West say it's racist. But, yet here in Taiwan or Hong Kong or Singapore. Even today no one sees this episode as racist. They see actors playing characters. Also it isn't a racist, because when this story takes place. Which happens to be the Victorian era. Thats how people spoke. I really love how you guys in the west throw around words like racist and racism, but honestly have no idea what you're talk about. Just like again you guys in the west saying Peter Seller's character Hrundi V Bakshi in The Party is racist, because Sellers is in brown face. But, yet in India, Sri Lanka they just though it's funny and still do today in 2024. The late Indra Ghandi said it was one of her favourite films. Even today there are a number of Indian and Sri Lankan politicians who quote lines from the film. Personally I find it very condescending against us when you white boys say things like you do. How about coming here and finding out for yourself, before you think you need to try and defend us.
Some things are acceptable now that will not be in the future. Also notice, in "The Mind of Evil" the Chinese ambassador is being racist to the Brigadier's country. Not to mention the Doctor is friends with Chairman Mao. Thats more concerning than anything in "The Talons of Weng-Chaing". Think about it, if the Doctor went around being critical about people's attitude, he may have changed history, so went around being subtle rather than breaking the Web of Time. Im sure there are those that defend Russell T Davies when he does things like justifying why Davros isnt in his wheelchair when there are clearly people with disabilities who arent nice people.
Don't think the delegates line is meant to be read that way. The way it's presented the Doctor is the first person to be polite to the delegate, and I think his response is meant to be "finally, someone who isn't being an asshole to me." But the Chairman Mao line is a bit of an eyebrow raiser. Timothy Combe and Barry Letts had a chuckle about it in the commentary I reference a couple of times (Pik-sen Lim found it funny too, from memory). But for my money personally, one bizarre line isn't as bad as something that's cooked from the foundation up like Talons is. And you're absolutely right, times will change and things will be considered unacceptable that we do today. My intent is to go into that future and accept that change. But as that article from a paper in 1980 demonstrated, this was considered unacceptable then
I tried, but I just can't get too worked up about this stuff. Is it racist? Yes, I supposed so. Do I really care? No, I don't. it doesn't affect my enjoyment of the story to any significant degree. Sure, I agree that no one should go out of their way to deliberately offend people, but at the same time, does anyone *really* have a right to not be offended? And just exactly what about it offends people, and how are they offended? When I see a stereotypical "nerd" in a show or movie with taped glasses and a pocket protector, I might cringe a little, but I recognize it's a shortcut to the character and its personality. More a sign of lazy writing than a real attempt to offend. I got tired of the repetitive nature of The Big Bang Theory and its jokes, but I was never *offended* by the show. If I'm watching something for entertainment, then most likely I'm not interested in hyper-realism in either the characters or the plot. Stereotypical presentations aren't just a shortcut for the writers, but also for the viewers, and if you only have a short time to tell a story, then you usually don't want to spend too much time fleshing out a character and background and slowing down the presentation of the situation and conflict of the story. We too often seem to assume that characters are supposed to represent large numbers of real people, entire races or genders. But that's nonsense. One bad character is often just one bad character, not representative of anything beyond how the character is used in the story. And if worse comes to worse, racism and other offensive behavior makes it easier for other people to recognize offensive people and deal with them accordingly, or more likely, avoid dealing with them. After all, you don't want to invest too much in a relationship, business or personal, only to find out that you can't really stand the person but are now stuck having to deal with them on a daily basis. Let the bigots reveal their prejudices up front instead of hiding them.
24:00 It is BECAUSE Litefoot is educated that he is racist because he is educated by and within an empire built on race essentialist beliefs. It makes far more sense that Jago is less racist because he actually knows Chinese people; he meets people of all walks of life; he is not blinkered by an elitist bubble. And I don't think he intends "celestial" as a slur; he is showing off his vocabulary as music hall impressarios do and "Celestial Empire" was the name used by the Chinese empire at the time, so it's just a polysyllabic fancy way of saying "Chinese". This is clear in the context of the words "Machiavellian" and "machinations" used in the same sentence.
Jagos intention is why I was a little less hard on him, in fact to make a point I nearly clipped his "courteous fellows, these Chinese" line before thinking it cluttered the video a bit. And as I said I understand Litefoots rich upbringing after the Opium Wars is why he's like that, and you're right that it should be a reflection of elitism. But I'm not convinced the script does enough work to criticise it. The Doctors large indifference is really jarring
@@michaelinlofi Well I thought you made a good comparison by showing the Doctor's sardonic responses to The Brigadier's jingoism. The Brigadier and the Doctor are such an unlikely alliance. At the end of Invasion of the Dinosaurs the Doctor has a little pop at capitalism and the Brigadier does that little "hmmm" noise that suggests he doesn't quite care to give it much thought! The Doctor is clearly far to the left of the Brigadier. And that "of course the rest were all foreigners" quip is great because it takes a moment for the penny to drop and the Brigadier to realise the Doctor is mocking him. It is a double act though. The Doctor needs to poke. The Brigadier needs to react. I think the opportunity for it is in the script for The Doctor and Litefoot but the opportunity is not taken in the performance. I don't think the director has noticed where the opportunities are.
I think @michaelinlofi is correct here. Yes, Jago and Litefoot being racist as hell makes sense given their place in a racist society, and not fully understanding why certain terms were bad. The real problems come from The Doctor doing so little to confront it, and in some ways even partaking in it. That's the major flaw. Racism (like the transphobia in The Star Beast) does need to be shown, but it ABSOLUTELY has to be confronted within the context of the story to show that it's BAD. Talons completely fails on that point, whereas Star Beast does a mostly good job of handling it (ie: Donna's immediate, unflinchingly supportive rage).
Do you not think that the presentism of the Doctor judging the past by modern standards would bring into question why he doesn't judge the present by future standards. We have no idea what we do that is commonplace now might be considered horrendous by future generations. And bear in mind the Doctor is not from the present day.
It feels like its racism was a product of its time, but by 'its time' I mean 'a really surface-level understanding of the 19th century that maybe shouldn't have been used'.
Absolutely. When I was younger, however, I was far more taken with Tom Baker's riff on Sherlock Holmes. But the serial definitely hasn't aged very well at ALL. You could say it was attempting to make a statement on the racism of the time it was set, but it's not making a statement at all. It just IS racist. And Robert Holmes?! What the hell happened, Robert?!
I honestly believe Holmes' intention was social commentary, given some of the characterisation of Chang and in particular his sarcasm in the face of racism. I genuinely don't think he intended any harm by it. But the intention fails to make it to paper or screen when it's buried in the tropes of the movies he's referencing, and the result is that it's still racist
@kali3665 I disagree I think the serial still stands the test of time and a great serial whats unfortunate is the over sensitives looking at modern eyes instead of context.
@@joshuaverran9443 I think the point is that the context fails to make it not racist. That doesn't mean it can't still be a good story _despite_ its racism. Just that, you know, it's still racist. You just gotta enjoy it despite that now, and it'd make sense that Chinese people or people who might understand how they might feel might well not be able to look past that.
@@klop4228 "I think the point is that the context fails to make it not racist" That was precisely what I was getting at. I fully understand the context and spirit in which Holmes probably wrote it in, but the fact of the matter was whether out of carelessness or just not knowing what the hell he was talking about he still made a racist piece of work. It's unfortunate, but it is what it is
This was an interesting video, I watched it all in one sitting and it didn't drag. It's certainly an interesting topic, and I wouldn't put in such binary shades as "racist"/"not racist". In some ways it's both at the same time... a kind of Schrödinger's Racism. One thing often overlooked in these discussions, as here, is the cultural landscape in which Doctor Who was made. For example, you cite that it was regarded as racist as early as 1980, because Canadian TV rejected it. But that's Canada. In the UK the Doctor was still double-taking at a Chinese man after talking about THAT cricket term in Four To Doomsday or making fun of his name. While until 1978 the BBC was showing blackface with The Black and White Minstrel Show. Am I saying that the whole of the UK was racist, or that makes it right? Not really. But many of the commentators on this are from outside the UK, and outside the time it was made... Kate Orman is from Australia, for example. She wasn't surrounded by the cultural context from which this was a product. But looking at it through a 2024 lens does omit the time. The "time it was made" isn't an excuse or justification, but more an acknowledgement that societal mores and expectations have changed. As one example, the word "q***r" is used today to describe gay cinema... a word that, being from an older generation, I won't even type. If that word had appeared in a 1977 Doctor Who story it would have been homophobic... today it (within context) wouldn't. If someone had the opportunity to make a RUclips video in the 1970s lambasting any modern video that talks about "q***r cinema", would that be legitimate? That's not to say it wasn't dodgy at the time, but I do feel that there's an attempt at satire here. The Doctor lands not in a real Victorian England, but in a fictional pastiche. That may be me "reading in", and lots of the clips you showed were dodgy as anything, but you have to understand that in much of 1970s UK TV, then programmes for adults (and Doctor Who at this point was aiming for an older age range) assumed more on behalf of the audience. Characters were presented without moral compasses - such as Budgie (1971), for one example - but the audience were credited with the intelligence to work out the difference, without having to be told, New Who style, that "this is wrong". The key was that characters spoke how they would, not with the authorial voice, so that while many of the New Who episodes have people talking exactly like the writers, it doesn't mean Holmes was racist because he wrote characters that were. I dunno, it's certainly an interesting topic. Lots to think about.
I don't disagree that it was an attempt at social commentary, in fact I fully believe Robert Holmes' intention was to point out that the Fu Manchu tropes its based on are kinda shitty. But my overall point is there aren't a lot of awards for "you did your best" when the end result doesn't stand up as a commentary. I do not believe for a second Hinchcliffe, Holmes and Maloney were active racists. But they misunderstood the subject matter they were trying in good faith to handle and the results are... well this. It is a complex discussion, but when I say "this serial is objectively racist" that's not necessarily equivalent to "this serial is objectively hateful." It's why I brought up that Beatles movie as an example. It was only meant in good fun, but it's pretty shocking in places
@@michaelinlofi I was shocked with some of the clips when it was from the Doctor, and I guess it's only natural for the mind to try and come up with excuses for it... didn't Holmes try and write a story called "Yellow Peril" in 1985?
@ItsTerryTime it was called "Yellow Fever and How to Cure It". It was going to feature the Autons, and was going to be set in Singapore. I'm very glad that never saw the light of day because I severely doubt it would have been tasteful given those facts
Ugh, I had totally forgotten that. Wow. Okay, much as I also admire and love Robert Holmes, given this title, and the end result of the script of "The Talons of Weng-Chiang", might the most plausible explanation here be that a) Robert Holmes really had a problem with Asian people for whatever reason, consciously or not; b) that at least unconsciously ended up in the script; c) the director and actors just rolled with it because it was 1978 and most of us on first watch didn't catch half the racism ourselves and we weren't born in 1935 (and raised in the 1950s). And I don't know this for a fact, but I have read that Letts and Williams both had budget and time constraints when they got to the big huge six part finale serials at the end of each season, so I wouldn't be surprised if Hinchcliffe was basically tearing his hair out trying to get everything done on time, and trusted Holmes to submit a filmable script. Doesn't excuse any of them, of course, but hey. @@michaelinlofi
but you have got to remember at this time on British tv the black and white minstrel show was still going strong. (btw not saying this story or the black and white minstrel show should have even been airing).
Minor point on the Doctor making up language. It's not the only time he spoke rubbish as a foreign language. McCoy's not speaking Russian half the time in 'Curse of Fenric'.
Talons of Weng-Chiang is a riff off Fu Manchu movies. I don't think it would have worked as well if the casting had been Chinese for the villain. If you want to talk about another potentially racist episode of DW which is genuinely offensive check out Rosa. 😂
i can't disagree with you, but its still one of my favourites, i was seven when this was first shown and i remember thinking that the show highlighted that racism wasn't as good thing. but i was seven lol
I mean at the end of the day the objective of this video wasn't to say "this is bad and it sucks and you're wrong if you like it" because as I said I genuinely understand why people like it. David Maloney is on top form with the location shooting and Holmes is as witty as ever writing Jago and Litefoot. Also it is interesting to hear the perspective of someone who saw it when it went out, so thank you for commenting. Good to know that Holmes' intended anti racist message managed to communicate at the time, even through his less than graceful handling of the topic
I'm the same, I still enjoy it and can't deny it's racist through and through. But that's reality I guess, we can acknowledge something is offensive, and I think it's fine to provide a disclaimer, but I hope we don't get to a point where art is banned, unfortunately it seems in many States in the US, the written word is being banned increasingly, especially in schools.
Considering the crew hire Chinese actors as extras for the story, you think it wouldn't take much to hire someone who is genuinely Chinese for the role of Chang. If they did that, then the story probably wouldn't get as bad of a reputation as it has now.
There were only four British Chinese Men with equity cards working at the time: Robert Lee, David Yip, Burt Kwouk and Robert Ng. Ng and Lee were likely out of the country working in Hong Kong and the US, Yip was 20 years too young for the character and Kwouk had really passed his prime (See Four to Doomsday a few years later), but even in his prime would not have been right for the character. They could hire as many Chinese extras and crew as they liked, but Equity would not let anyone without an Equity Card take a main role.
It's a great story, and I love all the Victorian/gothic tropes of it. But yes...even without the ghastly yellowface makeup, it's still an unbelievably outdated episode in terms of racism. I have a favourite RUclipsr who loves/reacts to classic Who episodes, and when it came to this one, I avoided watching her reaction. But I could just tell from the thumbnail that she wasn't impressed.
Very true, though Stewart's _The Foe from the Future_ apparently only resembles Talons in the vaguest of details - someone from the future crippled by a crappy time machine is sucking the life force of others. The involvement of a Fu Manchu inspiration only appears once Holmes took over writing duties. Therefore it's something that might have been a bit of a tangent in a video as long as this one
@@michaelinlofi oh man, don't get me started on Moffat & representation. 😭😭 I watched a video essay recently titled "Doctor Who vs Women" by verilybitchie which really shows how all his 'strong female characters' are actually quite two dimensional. Definitely worth a watch. 👀
The question should really be: "Was The Talons of Weng-Chiang DELIBERATELY racist?". Anyone watching ANY TV of different eras and applying the standards of the era in which they themselves are viewing from is going to find things that annoy/upset them that didn't annoy/upset people at the time. At the time of its broadcast, this story was seen as simply another one of Robert Holmes' pastiches of elements from classic literature and films (e.g. Pyramids of Mars = Mummy films, Spearhead From Space = Quatermass 2, Planet of Evil = Forbidden Planet). This time, it's largely inspired by Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu stories, Sherlock Holmes, and The Phantom of the Opera. There are racial stereotypes, but I would argue that the production team didn't INTEND to offend Chinese people, or anyone else for that matter. Why would they do that? They're just trying to make watchable TV. The other thing to realise is that people in the future will likely find things to offend them about shows being made and shown now. The impossible task is to guess what those future viewers might find to dislike, based on their world view then, and not include it, since we have no idea what that will be. That is the same problem people always have who create any kind of story in whatever era they do so. From memory, at the time Talons was made, the only two issues people producing TV shows were trying to avoid can be summed up as "unnecessary or excessive violence and sex". It manages to avoid doing that, so it fulfills the requirements of that era. It's unfair to judge past eras of TV, films, books, etc, or indeed attitudes of the public, in any past era, by putting them through a "now filter".
I agree that it wasn't intentionally offensive, and in fact believe it was intended to sort of buck the tropes involved. I don't believe Holmes, Hinchcliffe or Maloney were active racists in the slightest. But many don't believe it to be racist even on an unintentional level, hence this video.
Well argued but, with respect, you weren't born when this series aired, so you are making some assumptions... With regards to the target audience, very few people would have considered it racist, despite the Canadian response you mention. In the late seventies/early eighties, most of us in the UK had grown up on reruns of films from the thirties to the fifties, with their inherent prejudices. We were becoming aware of racism, but it was filtering into society slowly. I'm not saying this is a good thing; it's just the way things were and it is the background against which this was made. I first saw this series on video in 1991, at the behest of a Doctor Who fanatic who was collecting non-fan opinions of the past cannon, with a view to raising a petition to bring back Doctor Who. I remember enjoying the evocation of early films set in that era, including Sherlock Holmes and Fu Man Chu. As I explain above, we grew up on old Hammer and golden age mystery movies, so we sort of expected the racism as a characteristic of the era depicted. I agree that the Doctor could have said more to counteract this. I think some effort was involved with Tom Baker mocking the attitudes of the time through attempts at exaggeration, which is more characteristic of his Doctor than Pertwee's paladin-like righteousness, but this was too subtle and easily misconstrued. I'm not convinced that there were that many Asian actors up to filling main character roles at the time. There were a number who came to the fore in the late eighties/early nineties, but yellow-face was quite common at that time. It was not far from the end of the era when Benny Hill and Dave Allen were portraying Asian characters for comic effect. It seems bad now, but it was just accepted back then. Jasper Carrot was doing Chinese jokes into the late 90s/early 2000s on mainstream TV. I'm not trying to suggest that something like this would be justifiable if made now but, the first time I saw it, I was more bothered why anyone would want to make an immortal, three foot tall, killer homunculus with the brain of a pig, than the depiction of the Asian characters.
I'm not moved to argue with you as a whole, but my overall point is the _general_ fan reaction of loving it does not mean it wasn't seen as offensive by Chinese fans of the show. My point was meant to be that it wasn't suddenly seen as offensive at the turn of the century, Chinese fans of the show have always been perturbed by it. In fact the sort of lack of acknowledgement of it by others was the thesis statement of the video. If I didn't make that point clearly then that's deffo my bad.
@@michaelinlofi I'm not really aiming to argue, and I'm sure it always has been offensive to many Chinese fans. I was more trying to correct the record on changing attitudes. We have become much more aware and sensitive to racism in the last few decades (although, I don't know if the BBC has yet acknowledged how prejudiced they are against the Welsh). The culture that gave rise to series like Fu Man Chu doesn't exist anymore. It probably arose from the tension between Imperial Britain and the Chinese aristocracy. I suspect that there was some degree of hubris on the British side because Chinese civilization is so much more ancient than ours. There was a belief that they must know something that we don't and be pursuing a hidden agenda. I'd be interested to know how modern Chinese people would view it.
Oh i didn't mean to seem annoyed. When I said I'm not moved to argue I meant I didn't necessarily disagree with bits of your statement. Tone not reading over text is the bane of my existence
The wild thing is that Robert Holmes' last serial was going to be called "yellow fever and how to cure it". I don't know what was in it, but there's no way Robert Holmes should have ever used the word yellow ever again.
Ohhhhh yeah. From what I know that was gonna be an Auton story set in Singapore. Mix those facts with that name and there's... no way that would have been tasteful. I am assuming that was a title that was never meant to make it to air, but still. Oof
It's not as racist as Live And Let Die. Live and Let Die is still a great film. Okay there is no one in blackface in Live and Let Die but it makes absolutely no sense that Solitaire is white and when the voodoo cult tries to sacrifice her it would help mitigate ever so slightly the discomfort of the racist imagery. But it's still a good film; like A Merchant of Venice is still a good play. The thing is Talons of Weng Chiang is not bad in terms of quality. It's quality is incredibly good - probably one of the best. It just requires the viewer to exercise their own moral judgement in processing it.
You're not wrong that Talons is exceptionally well paced and directed. It would be foolhardy to deny that. As I said somewhere else in this comments section my intention with this video wasn't to say "this sucks and you suck if you like it." Also I can't say I have the best recollection of Live and Let Die, so I will have to take your word for it. I can't claim to be the biggest Roger Moore fan so I've only seen his Bond movies once each to memory
@@michaelinlofi As a child it was my favourite Bond movie. But you watch it as an adult and it's really apparent how segregated society is and how every black character (bar one who is very short lived) works for Mr Big.
Subscribing because you used the Eighth Doctor theme alone. But the video is also great: this is the sort of thing fans need to be a lot more vocal about.
@@michaelinlofi I always feel like such a hipster saying this but the Eighth Doctor is my favorite. I became a fan during the wilderness years and he has so many great Big Finish stories.
I'm sorry to see so many people in the comments being weirdly angry at you. Talons is an uncomfortable episode, but with so many missing Doctor Who episodes I think ultimately that removing it from public access would be unfortunate and bring down heat from the exact same people who are angry at this video. I thoroughly enjoyed your analysis and hope you have a lovely day.
It is because people fear that (the loss of cultural artefacts) that people get angry at there being discussion at all. When you like something but also think it is a little bit racist, like Arthur Conan Doyle's Lost World, one is reluctant to discuss the racism in it just in case some dogooder with a banhammer is in earshot and takes it upon themselves to have the novel purged of its historical authenticity! I don't want morally pure santitized culture. We know there is a feedback loop and discussing art effects the availability of art.
See at no point in this video did I advocate for its removal. I own the offending serial on Blu Ray. I think it should be publicly available because it's more responsible to display when shows mess up than hide it away
@@michaelinlofi I understand that. I don't see you wielding the ban hammer. The guy who did the documentary about his problem with Apu wasn't calling for the removal of Apu, but it still led to the removal of Apu. When I say there are passages of The Lost World that made me spit my tea at its casual racism, I am not calling for the book burning of The Lost World, but I fear those that are, so I am cautious about whom I share an observation like that with. I don't even like the warnings because I feel it is patronizing. People aren't stupid and can make their own minds up; I don't think we give out fellow man enough credit.
Nah mate you're all right! All for the discussion! Also meant to say, thanks for the compliment and the well wishes. Indeed people have been less than civil here, but I'll be honest I was bracing myself for it. I knew the moment I sat down to write this one what would happen, indeed that's why there's that four minutes of context where I felt it necessary to defend myself as obsessed with the show. At some point it just crosses over to being entertaining
I saw Weng Chiang on first broadcast when I was about eight years old. None of this registered at the time, of course, I just found the story very, very scary. In retrospect, this was clearly a time when Hinchcliffe was mining Universal Horror tropes and incorporating them into Who to good effect. Arguably, this serial was the absolute last gasp of the Saxon Rohmer pulps. Fu Manchu had all but been consigned to the cultural rubbish bin at this point but when you're stealing from the most popular franchises in existence for your 70s sci-fi series, the atmosphere and adventure of the Fu Manchu stories must have seemed like a good fit. I'm certainly not defending some of the choices around that, but inarguably the action/mystery/adventure of Rhohmer made for good drama and it would still have been good drama if the Chinese characters been shown proper respect and given a true voice and representation. Incidentally, when you're making the case against racism, you might want to re-think your use of the word 'Whitey.' You may think you are being ironic or whatever, but you're just falling into the same trap of applying uncritical thought processes to the problem. If you're going to define a racist as someone who uses racist language ( and no excuses ) then...hello!
I'm not overly concerned about my use of "whitey" here to be honest. It was largely inspired by a Bill Burr joke actually - "I love the word whitey, we should bring it back, it's funny." It was definitely supposed to be a bit of levity in what is otherwise an uncharacteristically serious video and I honestly didn't think anyone would think twice about it
Hmmm...and yet I did. Notice it that is. What bugs me about it is that it's the kind of thing that plays into the hands of the current batch of racists who claim they see a double standard in what is seen as now politically correct discourse. Namely that anti-white slurs are somehow tolerated when all other s are not. The problem is, Bill Burr's (humorous?) comments aside, they are correct. And your own use of the word 'Whitey' and then your defence of it, proves this to be the case. But, you know, whatever. As long as you think it's funny, what possible consequence can a word have in a racial context, eh?
@@michaelinlofi Quote: "If someone's telling you that something you love has done something offensive, don't get defensive or dismissive." Oh, the irony.
@Apogee02UK I'm literally white the way I see it I have carte blanche to say what I like about a group of people I belong to. It's when other groups tell me something sucks that I sit up and listen and take note, and I reckon that's the way things should be. We take the mickey out of ourselves, but be mindful of other people's boundaries
Ooh, quotes. Allow me to quote someone too! “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” - George Satayana. I think i said several times in this video I don't believe that Robert Holmes, David Maloney or Phillip Hinchcliffe were actively racist. This is not meant to judge them as such. This simply exists as an analysis of this past mistake supported by research, through which I found a lot of the racist tropes this serial unfortunately pulls from are not so relegated to the past and still very much around in today's media. All this was, was an exercise in my own media understanding. I knew it was racist by today's (and even 1980s, check that newspaper i cited) standards, but I really wanted to know _why_ so, this video exists
Yep. I adore the Hinchcliffe era. But ever since I first watched it in mid-80's it made me uncomfortable. I didn't understand the complexities of the racism behind it at the time. My main reactions (even as a white boy) were "Why did they put putty on this guy's face to make him look Chines? There's other asian actors here, why didn't they just get one of them instead of stupid makeup on a white guy? Where are the asian people in the story that aren't jerks?" That was just the INITIAL impression from a 10-year-old! I always found it unpleasant and tended to skip it in my rewatches as a result, despite the fact that it is an interesting story with some gorgeous costuming and general ambiance. One could probably level some similar criticism at Pyramids of Mars for the only Egyptian characters also being background characters or one absolute jerk, but somehow that skates a bit compared to this. Then of course there's "Toberman" in the otherwise classic Tomb of the Cyberman. A largely great serial with just that one REALLY racist depiction of a Black man that made me genuinely angry. Of course, this story wasn't available to watch until I was an adult, so there was no confusion there. And yes, while at least they actually cast a Black man instead of putting a white man in black face, there was really no need to bring a Black man in as essentially an indentured servant in a story meant to be from the future. Just unpleasant there. Overall a well researched video here, Michael. Well done.
I agree with you about Pyramids of Mars. Casting a white guy in the Egyptian role made me side eye Paddy Russell a little, but she did have the common decency not to put him in face paint for the role so as examples of iffy stuff from Doctor Who's past go it's a lot more mild than Talons or Toberman in Tomb of the Cybermen. Thanks for watching!
Interesting you mention Chung Ling Soo, because his name came up a couple of times in the Kate Orman essay much of my Fu Manchu discussion is sourced from. I can't pretend to be an expert on him though
OMG this is so True!!! The racism in this episode is extremely obvious to me as a Chinese. And I've seen that when racism is discussed, people typically overlook bigotry directed at Asians and Chinese.
To be fair I don't think you needed a 46 minute video to work that one out, but then again when you see the excuses people make these days to do and say racist stuff, I guess yeah you did.
It would be nice to be able to dispose of this story in fifteen minutes, but the racism in it is like the layers of an onion; you start by pointing out the most egregious example (possibly the yellowface?) and peel that away, and then there’s more (the only words of an actual Chinese language that Tom Baker speaks in Part One being Ni hao); peel that away, then there’s all the horrid racial stereotypes, again indulged in casually by the Doctor and Leela; peel that away, then there’s the racist dialogue particularly in the mouth of George Litefoot, which the Doctor almost never criticises or passes judgment on (it seems the actors or the director missed at least one opportunity to contextualise Litefoot’s views as regressive and backward, that was actually implicit in the script). It’s thoroughly baked in. To add to the horribleness of all this endemic racism, there’s the whole rampant denialism that all of this even exists in the story, uttered up to this day (look at so many comments in this comment section for starters, that flatly attempt to argue the case). So yes, because so many flippantly dismiss the subject ("hee haw, Hinchcliffe Maloney and Holmes being casually racist was just being true to the racism of narrative sources such as the Fu Manchu stories and films, which makes it okay"), I can’t foresee a time when such an explanatory video *won't* require a video essay of these dimensions to cover it.
@@Xanthe_Cat the layers of it is what inspired the format of this video actually. I liked the idea of starting with the obvious stuff then slowly digging into the more nuanced levels as it went. Again I only meant this to be a 15 minute quick one but the more layers I found in my research the more digging I had to do. Throw in the many disclaimers I felt I had to do to justify myself as a born and raised Whovian and my discussion at the end and whoops, it's 3/4 of an hour long
They're very good IMHO, and you'll be pleased to know that (as far as I know), they do not go over old Weng-Chiang ground! The first one was (a sort of one-shot "pilot") The Mahogany Murders, then it went on to have several series until Trevor Baxter's (Litefoot) death. Well worth a look. :-)
There is actually at least one further Big Finish audio play in which Tom Baker's Doctor is joined by Jago and Litefoot. It's under the Fourth Doctor Adventures series and not the Jago and Litefoot series, The Justice of Jalxar. :-)
I see the somewhat upsetting material, but it moves the story forward, not the primary focus. The Doctor deals with the malign nature of a villainous character. Every culture and ethnic group has a criminal element that does not apply to the whole of that group. We should not downplay or overhype such issues.
Wow, so many comments didn’t watch the video. Absolutely overrated episode by 1970s fans. As a 1980s fan it was already gross by the time I was seeing repeats 10 years later. I wish people hadn’t got so loudly proud of it for the next 40 years. Great to see Pertwee was elitist wokerati.
I've seen some accuse Pertwees run of being a bit conservative. And I can see why, what with him working with a military organisation. But he spends his whole run telling the British government where to shove themselves and the actual politics of his run are very left leaning for 70s family TV. I have intentions on a video about The Mutants and how that's basically an anti colonialist pamphlet for example. Also, yeah. Lots of people calling me this, that and the other did not watch this video. Maddening, really, but I expected it
@@michaelinlofi It’s Pertwee’s paternalism that creeps out people - but it’s in demeanour, not in actions, funnily enough. A lovely dichotomy. If you want the real conflict of the Pertwee era though - you have to ask the question: Is he for computers or against computers? I guess I can let that one slide because it wasn’t until Microsoft was a household name that “computers” in lay terms meant both the software and the hardware - and that’s where the script can wriggle through.
I love this story, but I can't argue that learning as I grew older that they used yellowface or spoke gibberish did seem pretty bad. A shame, especially as I like Chang so much as a character. It's interesting though - as a kid watching this on vhs, I never thought that the story was saying 'Chinese are bad', just that the bad guys in this particular story happened to be chinese (the bad guy's mooks, anyway). I found your read of Litefoot odd though - I just skimmed through his scenes on iplayer and I thought that most of the time he didn't seem especially unpleasant towards the chinese in particular - the ch*nks line being an obvious exception, but in my naive youth I didn't know what that meant (I actually thought he said "inscrutable jinx"). But most of the time he's annoyed at criminals and ruffians rather than the chinese - if anything, he seems more accepting of the chinese than pretty much any other secondary character in the story, particularly Jago. The 'Celestial' term is interesting - I always got the impression that although it was used as a word for Chinese, it was more of a way of describing them as mysterious and exotic rather than just a slur. But I will fully admit that is probably just my reading of the term and have no reason to doubt others who say otherwise!
Happy to explain where I'm coming from with Litefoot, because it's sort of my problem with the serial in a nutshell - almost getting it, but not quite. Litefoot's collection of Chinese artifacts isn't really an accepting thing, it's more like how the British take stuff from countries they invade. He dismisses Chinese culture as weird, but keeps a collection of treasures from the "Punitive Expeditions" as trophies. It's a very colonialist mindset, for lack of better words. That's why his racism feels more dark to me than Jago's, who says insane things but at the end of the day seems to see everyone the same - a bit like an older person who is mostly with the times but still says wild outdated stuff. If that makes sense. But again, my trouble is both Jago and Litefoot go completely unchallenged, save for the show generally laughing at Jago for being dumb and stupid.
@@michaelinlofi Thanks for the reply - some good points, although I would say that I think he said that at least one of the items (was it the box?) he has was a gift from the Emperor to his family! But yes, he's definitely got the colonial mindset. Although I don't think he's necessarily dismissing their culture - I always thought he sounded fond of it when he talked about the fireworks, even if he did think it was odd. I think part of the issue people may have with the story is that it shows, probably fairly honestly, what the mindset of the British was like in that time without calling it out. I actually like it when otherwise heroic characters are shown warts and all, but I suppose the show was still officially meant for children so you're probably right that the doctor should at least have talked about it to Leela, if maybe not the natives. It wouldn't be the first time he's picked his battles though - didn't he basically give human sacrifice a pass back in the Aztecs? Plus, Baker's doctor could be fairly callous about things as I recall.
'I am very white.' What's so white about not knowing the Chinese have more than one language? Whoopi Goldberg played Elizabeth I, or what she jokingly called 'the African Queen,' in white makeup at the 1999 Oscars. Edit: As a middle Eastern, I do not care for Peter Mayock playing an Egyptian, if the tweak of an accent is enough to cause criticism, then we may also have to criticise the Cate Blanchett Elizabeth films for casting English actors as Spanish Ambassadors.
If you made a documentary of the era that Talons is set in you’d expect all of the behaviours you see people doing. You wouldn’t meet someone like Li H’sen Chang so John Bennett is not representing anyone just as Michael Spice’s Weng-Chiang (Magnus Greel) is not representative either. One actor plays the part of a Chinese peasant come magician, one plays the part of a war criminal masquerading as a Chinese Deity. You can choose to be offended if you like or you can enjoy what is for me the greatest Doctor Who story ever.
If acting is about anybody dressing up as anyone else and pretending to be that character, then why is is bad for an actor of one race to pretend to be a character of another? I don't buy that argument. I recently saw an interview with Russell T Davies saying that straight people shouldn't play gay characters; that's far more bigoted a view than having an English actor play a Chinese-man. The whole point of acting is to inhabit the character of someone who is not like yourself, aided by costume, voice and make-up. What's the difference between adding scars to someone's face or adding make-up to change the tone of their skin? Really, we're just far too sensitive and should get over ourselves.
I agree with you about RTD missing the mark on only gay actors playing gay characters. I don't think it's a bigoted notion per se, but definitely a silly one. I'm not straight myself, and I couldn't give less of a fuck if a straight person played an ace character on TV for example. As for why race swapping makeup... well, the history behind that being used to mock and degrade is out there, from minstrel shows to the Fu Manchu stuff I described here. It's inherently a crappy thing to do just based on that, especially when people are fighting to have their cultures represented properly. I don't think saying that yellowface sucks is overly sensitive, and even if it was I'd much rather be accused of being overly sensitive than callous any day.
@Gzeebo a completely decent thing to say. Again my own personal opinion is that being a queer person myself I'm not fussed over straight actors playing queer roles (if they can play the part, then great!), but queer actors absolutely deserve to play those roles and should be first in consideration at least. No matter how it's sliced though, suggesting RTD is a bigot for saying that is a disastrously silly thing to say, which I hope I made clear there
@@Gzeebo I don't buy this argument... it really shouldn't matter what your personal attributes are... can you act is all that matters. The fact that you are gay in real life bears no relation to whether you're playing a gay or straight character. If it does, then you can't be that great an actor if you HAVE to be gay to play a gay character or HAVE to be straight to play a straight character. It's as bad as saying that you HAVE to be a millionaire to be able to play Bruce Wayne. If you're a decent actor, then you inhabit that role. Should we only give acting roles for royalty to aristocratic actors? Or working class roles to just working class people. Which is why RTD is a bigot in my opinion as that's exactly what he was suggesting. Also - I don't think gay men in the acting world have been under-represented over the years; granted, there used to be discrimination and we all accept that (it was illegal for example so had to be kept quiet in the 60s etc.).. but looking at the last 20-30 years, I would argue precious little discrimination for being gay in the acting world. At least in this country. If you're talking Saudi, well that's a different argument, of course. I do think you need some of the basic, obvious attributes of a character to play that role. Swapping gender, unless that's part of the style, seems silly. So having a black woman play Henry VIII is just ridiculous. But if the attribute is invisible to the legitimacy of the character (as being gay is, or not being good at maths), then it's game on. I think we should acknowledge that if anyone picks an attribute of someone and uses that as an argument to put them to the top (or bottom) of the list, that as of itself is bigotry, regardless of whether the intentions were good, bad or otherwise. You only need to reverse it to see that. Only straight people should play straight people because gay people have no idea what that feels like... how would that come across? There would be outrage and quite right.
I have yet to watch this episode specifically because it looked racially insensitive. I must do so now just to come back to this video when I get a chance.
The strange thing about this conversation is that I've seen fans of the show, of around my own age, become less and less able to acknowledge the racism as time has gone on. Around the 90s, the consensus seemed to be that it could be acknowledged, but mostly waved away by thinking of it as 'of its time'. Once a younger generation matured who weren't so willing to accept this as a get-out - in particular when this was expressed via DWM's 'Time Team' - many older fans who'd settled comfortably into the 'of it's time' defence, seemed to dig their heels in and suddenly refuse to see that there was any issue at all. From what I saw of this backlash on Twitter, they seemed to want to paint the Time Team reaction as shrill, humorless and overly earnest - but as it was self-evidently nothing of the sort, I suspect what they really resented was how casually the new generation recognised what they saw, and how willing they were to make fun of it without making excuses. I think the most striking example of this tin-eared regression on the part of some of the older fandom came in a fairly recent Doctor Who magazine review of the Season 14 Blu-Ray set. The review noted that you can't discuss Talons of Weng Chiang without acknowledging the elephant in the room ... before going on to talk about the poorly realised giant rat ...
Thanks for your perspective on this. I think the take away is that a lot of the "of its time" crowd never really believed it was offensive, but said something to that effect to cover their bases. When people come along saying "no it's still pretty bad even for its time", the mask comes off and they push back. Not necessarily all, mind you - I think I mentioned in this video I subscribed to the "of its time" mentality for some years before taking a more critical eye to Talons. Incidentally, I believe I saw the season 14 review you speak of. Naming the giant rat as the elephant in the Talons room screams of being deliberately obtuse and provocative to me
Any series that runs this long, is gonna have moments like this. In Star Trek it’s Code of Honor. The only difference is that Code of Honor is a shitty first season TNG episode and this episode is otherwise great. It’s borne out of dumb choices and unexamined biases rather then any conscious hatred. This is how you get a show as openly progressive as Star Trek with a racist episode. This is how you get Doctor Who having an episode that’s racist towards Chinese people and another one that isn’t. I can completely understand why someone would throw the baby out with the bath water here. (the episode not the whole show that would be absurd) But you also shouldn’t be mad at people who still like it while acknowledging that it’s racist. We just have to acknowledge that this was a bad idea and move on.
First of all, love the Odo pfp. Iconic, honestly. I didn't say I was mad at people who do like it, in fact I explicitly outlined that my intention was not to brow beat those who do enjoy this serial. It's why I brought up the fact that I like Help!, to emphasize that to look down at people who do like it would be immensely hypocritical of me. And you are right, shows that have existed for this long will have skeletons in the cupboard. I like your example of Star Trek - Code of Honor is an astonishingly offensive piece of work. The early characterisation of the Klingons also dances into dodgy territory on occasion - not actively racist per se, but definitely iffy at times in the first couple of TNG seasons. I agree that most of what went wrong in Talons was unconscious bias rather than active hatred. It's why my specific phrasing was "I do not think they were racists, but they did make racist decisions". It's all shades of grey, innit. I do have to side eye Holmes a little bit though, as he was allegedly in the process of writing an Auton serial set in Singapore named "Yellow Fever and How to Cure It" in 1986, but I don't think he was a bigot. Way more likely just ignorant.
@@michaelinlofi I did watch the whole video so I know you’re not browbeating I’m just saying. Also thank you, I got the idea because of the pun in my username and I found it funny that Odo just so happens to fit the color scheme of my pride flag. It’s just so damn silly to have a male pile of goo that categorically cannot be a lesbian be my image.
You're all good, guv. And I hope I didn't come across as too defensive - I've been in comment wars with people who have straight up admitted to not watching the video so it's been a lot. Still, expected that sort of thing when I pressed publish so, cest la vie I spose
Yes, fully agree, quite racist. I will say that Jago is a bright spot, in that he appears to be somewhat cosmopolitan for his time. So happy to see that the actor was in New Who in 'The Unicorn and the Wasp'. The Doctor's lack of any commentary on the bigotry is odd. As someone commented, the Doctor went a little too native for Victorian London. Also insulting to find out that the 'chinese' spoken by Tom Baker is nonsense, especially considering that the third Doctor's Jon Pertwee spoke accurately with the Chinese ambassador.
I have been a fan of Doctor Who since about 1978. I am old as hell, LOL. My first Doctor was actually Tom. I was isolated in rural Arizona and didn't even know that regeneration was a thing. You can imagine the mind-numbing shock eleven year old me had watching "Logopolis" when Baker regenerated into Davison. I loved loved loved "The Talons of Weng-Chiang" when I first watched it. I loved it the tenth time I watched it. But it's unwatchable now. Once that switch got flipped in my head around 2005 or so I can't but cringe at how awful the racism is and how pervasive it is. There is SO much racism that Whovians have argued that Holmes intended the whole thing as satire and the director didn't get it and just filmed it and directed it without the intended sarcasm and everything. But of course, that STILL doesn't work as an explanation and it's still fundamentally racist and unwatchable. And I think I may agree with almost everything you said. My only possible quibble is that the "celestial" quote from Tennant in "The Giggle" was an attempt to reference the original introductory episode of the Toymaker, which was "The Celestial Toymaker". I personally wouldn't have included that but I get the idea Davies was going for. I was very happy to see trans inclusion in "The Star Beast" and subsequent episodes, of course. I didn't find anything problematic in there (and I've taken courses on trans awareness) but you did, and after your excellent commentary on "The Talons of Weng-Chiang" and found examples I still didn't see (like the fake Chinese language that Baker engages in - that went right past me), I think you are pretty damn good at this. I'm super-impressed. Not that you care from a rando old guy on the Internet. But good job, sir. Have a Subscribe as well. / Pertwee's reaction to the Brigadier's Hokkien confusion is *chef's kiss*
Thank you for the comments! Always happy to hear from anyone if my work has had an effect. I definitely believe Holmes meant it as commentary, but the fact of the matter is he had no idea what the hell he was talking about. The reference to "celestial" in The Giggle, I do agree RTD probably meant nothing but the best there. But he also displayed understanding of the undertones the original had in behind the scenes material, which was why I had that "hang on" moment. Otherwise I don't think I'd have thought twice about it in all honesty. And I can't take credit for the points on The Star Beast, most of that was based on discussion from trans Whovians I took notice of on Twitter following broadcast. It seems to me that the overall reaction was that it was a net positive (which it is) and that again RTD had nothing but the best of intentions, but that there were some question marks in execution. Invaluable conversation really, it only means Doctor Who will continue to get better at this.
When I watched this serial, I always felt that the Chinese had been meant to be the victims of Magnus Greel, who was NOT Chinese. He had tricked the people who saw him arrive into thinking he was a god. He then capitalized on that to cause them to follow him, believing that their god excused any actions they might have made, no matter how evil. Having said this, it does not excuse the "yellowface" Li H'sen Chang portrayal, or the portrayal of Chinese in general in this serial. Any of the Chinese actors cast could have been cast as Chang. This point of view did, however, delay my realization of that the inherent racism in this serial for many years. i had to "grow up" in order to see it. It also may have had to do with my being about 10 years old at the time. In reflection, there was actually very little story requirement for the "bad guys" to be Chinese at all. It could fairly easily have been re-written as some cult recruited from the criminal classes of London (although that might be just as stereotypical as the Chinese turned out to be)
I agree with you. It's why I outlined that a lot of the malice behind the Fu Manchu character is placed on Greel rather than Chang. But unfortunately it fails to subvert most of the tropes in any meaningful sense
I always find it funny and ironic that the people who insist on defending the story and deny any racism are not surprisingly white lol. Like I don’t think the story should be banned or anything but to deny it’s racist and judge people who refuse to watch it is to me pure insanity
Er sorry as someone learning Mandarin myself I have to correct you about Tom Baker, ni hao ma which is what he begins with IS genuine Mandarin, ma is effectively a question mark at the end of a sentence and is the Doctor asking literally "You good?" As in how are you. Im not going to pretend I can catch the rest of what he says after that but unless you know all the dialects of Chinese neither can you say none of that is Chinese. Thats you deciding because it sounds like gibberish it must automatically be so despite admitting yourself you havent looked into it fully, which ironically is you yourself being racist....as for actors, actors are trained to pretend, that often includes pretending to be nationalities (including made up ones like aliens in doctor who) you arent, and it doesnt necessarily involve make up to do that, but if we only got actors to play things they actually were then it wouldnt be acting. The definition of racism is fear of another race, not featuring another race, your generation really need to get straight the difference between racism which is actively hating a race and what you consider an insensitive depiction of a race that youre only highlighting because they look so different from you that you can identify them as different. Which in itself under your terminology is kinda racist. So I Claudius must be racist cos its English actors portraying Italians but cos they dont need make up nobody cares. The whole analysis is kinda farcical. Everything offends someone doesnt make you right and everyone else wrong. They may well have been able to get a genuine Chinese actor for that role but they may have wanted the guy they got, thats got nothing to do racism, thats about acting. These productions have their personal contacts and actors they may want to use, and thats all it wouldve been about. The fact society today has now switched to deciding it finds it unacceptable doesnt change that, societies views on the morality if one thing or another constantly change. Thered be plenty of stuff now considered totally offensive by people from yesteryear (like you swearing in this very video which wouldnt have been acceptable 60 years ago) that you wouldnt bat an eyelid over, that doesnt make you right and them wrong. Its all perspective and that really is all it is. Oh and the word scum is not racist, that word can be applied to anyone. Again you dont use racism correctly.
OK I will address the genuine mistake you point to first, my glib "without looking into it deeply" comment. As a matter of fact, I did. *"In Talons, the Fourth Doctor shows off his knowledge of Chinese, boasting that he knows “all the dialects”, then - with no Pik-Sen Lim on set to coach Tom Baker in his lines - speaks gibberish."* This is from Kate Orman's essay on _The Talons of Weng-Chiang_ which I came across in my research. She notes in a footnote that her source is a Chinese Australian friend of hers, whose family was reduced to hysterical laughter by Baker's "Chinese". I suspected it to be the case, as a lot of shows of the time did the same thing (and in fact apparently the Russian spoken in The Curse of Fenric is also largely rubbish), but I did double check before I wrote that into the video. I did however note that the "ni hao" at the beginning is real Chinese, but I'm not gonna give Holmes much credit for knowing "hi how are you" in Mandarin as I suspect that's _all_ the Mandarin he spoke. As for the rest of everything you said, it relies entirely on the premise of "racism is only when you hate people of other races". That's just not true, and you kind of disprove that point yourself in your own comment when you suggest I'd have been racist for not looking into Baker's Chinese properly and assuming it's rubbish he made up. You're right! If that had been what I did, that would be me doing something racist. Racism is not just hatred, it is ignorance as well. That ignorance is well on display in this serial - it is based on tropes that were popularised through the works of Fu Manchu - a novel series written by a man who knew nothing of Chinese culture (which I did discuss in this video!) Those ignorant tropes caused genuine harm to Chinese English people, and perpetuating them sucks. So yes, this serial is racist. It's not maliciously so, but it is through ignorance. Again, I researched this point before I opened my mouth. I invite you to look through my sources, I linked them all. :)
@@michaelinlofi you haven't researched the definition of racism actually, racism is active antoganism and hatred of a race, not just depicting a caricature which literally nobody takes seriously, either the Chinese or anyone else, this whole serial as you well know is simply a pastiche or parody even of the Fu Man Chu films of the 50s. That's got nothing to do with any Chinese prejudice or else they wouldn't have hired any Chinese actors within the show. Nor do you address any of my other points that if this is offensive then so is the serial I Claudius or any film or TV show where people are pretending to be things they're not and that's a ridiculous argument. A good majority of Shakespeare is depicted by actors who aren't the things they're portraying and you or others being offended doesn't mean everyone has to be offended that's kinda just your problem not everyone's. Youre going to have a hard time enjoying old TV and film then, again, your problem not everyone's. You best not watch 55 Days in Peking or Around the World in 80 Days, both films featuring white actors playing other nationalities. Is it on the nose, sure, I aggree would be nice if they just got those races to play those roles but not racism. Racism is not just a buzz word for people to use everytime they're a bit uncomfortable about one nationality playing another. Also I find your use of swearing offensive, see? We can all find something to be offended by. If I said your use of swearing was offensive and unacceptable would you stop swearing or would you say because it's the norm to swear now that there's nothing wrong with it? Again, sensibilities change. There is no right and wrong. Only perspective.
I didn't speak to your other points because I assumed you were being facetious. Apparently you aren't. There is a world of difference between representing a period of history (I Claudius) and employing stereotypes that have in the past caused active harm. I feel like that's obvious? And sure, Talons is a pastiche of Fu Manchu. But it does nothing to criticise the racist tropes it's based on. It fails as commentary. If there's a point of comparison in my mind, it would be John Carpenter's Big Trouble in Little China. Carpenter wanted to direct a love letter to Wuxia kung fu films and the like, but was also extremely conscious of tropes in how Asian people were presented in cinema at the time. So, he hired heaps of Asian actors and consulted with them frequently to ensure his film was a loving tribute to Wuxia films and not a mockery. The result is a deeply hilarious movie where the Asian lead gets to be the kickass hero and Kurt Russell is the glorified comic relief sidekick. All the actors such as James Hong, Dennis Dun and Carter Wong speak highly of the film and the opportunities it provided them. By comparison, Talons is frankly embarrassing. Also when did it become controversial to say blackface/yellowface sucks? It just. Does. And for the record, lots of shoes I love have, unfortunately, done that. I mentioned The War Games did it. I love that serial. I had that whole disclaimer about how much I love that Beatles film in spite of its highly dodgy representation of Indian people. I can like something and still acknowledge it did something dodgy. It just so happens that I think Talons is much worse on those fronts. Incidentally I did actually go back and forth about whether coarse language was appropriate for this video. In the end I went in favour of being faithful to my usual writing style. If that's not for you, then fair do's, can't argue that i spose
@@michaelinlofi why would they be criticising something they're essentially paying homage to by replicating it and that's all that's going on here. Dr Who does parodies or homages or whichever word you want to use to pieces of art that the writers are influenced by, cos as a long running series it constantly needs new food to chew on, in this case you get two for one cos it's Sherlock crossed with the Fu Man Chu plotline of the old films the writers no doubt watched growing up and remember fondly. That's like me saying you should criticise something you watched that you remember fondly when you've got no problem with it because I might have a problem with it. And again we come back to sensibilities, just cos you might have a problem with something doesn't mean everybody has to, the world isn't black and white mate and the writers of Dr who were not Nazis, they wrote a piece of fiction for entertainment purposes they couldn't have known fifty years later new sensibilities would suddenly decide they didnt like it. Again, perspective. And plenty of Chinese have zero issue with the story so you being outraged on behalf of Chinese people is kind of "cringe" (the adjective is cringeworthy by the way, cringe is the verb) in itself cos most people couldn't care less. Nobody is using this old now piece of art to judge Asians by. Literally no one. And they wouldn't have in the late 70s either. And no I'm not being facetious I'm calling out this social justice warrior crap that people like you go on with. Okay so you're uncomfortable with the story or elements, well sucks to be you then doesn't it, the rest of us watch it, forget about it and go and talk to real Chinese people, as I said I'm learning Mandarin, not for one second do I think anything in this episode of Dr Who depicts real Chinese culture. Everything in art is stereotypes, there's a stereotype of pompous English gentlemen there's a stereotype of an Irishman, it's not just the Chinese stereotyped here, TV IS stereotypes. You're just focusing on Chinese cos they're an eastern culture and no sorry there's no difference between this and I Claudius which surely shouldve been done with Italian actors if we follow your philosophy, but racist only applying to eastern or black people cos you happen to notice them more than other European cultures is descriminatory in itself. I'm making points here, I'm in my 40s and you're clearly still in your 20s or 30s earliest, you could actually learn something here. Think about it instead of racing into the social justice warrior rott.
No Talons is not racist. Firstly: The accusation that Talons unfairly stereotypes Chinese people as villains. That's utter nonsense. Yes, these particular Chinese are villains. But how about Ghost Light? Isn't the line 'White kids firebombed it' stereotyping white kids? The Time Meddler goes pretty large on stereotyping Vikings, the Android Invasion has incredibly offensive stereotypes of little English Villages and I'm pretty sure that The Web Planet was incredibly hurtful towards ants. Doctor Who needed a villain of the week. It would have been pretty impossible to run 26 years vetoing all possible villains just in case it hurt someone's feelings. No one thinks Ramon Salamander from Enemy of the World is equivalent to and therefore offensive to all South Americans, let alone South American Dictators even though South America was full of Dictators at the time.. Magnus Greel isn't even Chinese for heaven's sake, he's an alien who takes on Chinese trappings and as for the stereotypes, you can find those in plenty of old Chinese movies too, stereotypes exist for a reason but no one thinks stereotypes are reality. The point is, if you accuse Weng Chiang of racism, you have to accuse at least 60% of the canon as racist as well. The Aztecs - racist, or is it ok for John Ringham to play a MesoAmerican? Why didn't the BBC ship half a dozen MesoAmerican actors out of Mexico for the purposes of non racist authenticity? Enemy of the World - racist. Android Invasion - racist. Day of the Daleks - racist, or are you really telling me the Ogrons aren't in blackface? Is the Giant Rat that attacks Leela an example of Rattism? The fact that it was a large stuffed toy and not a real rat, is that discrimination against all the talented acting rats out there? But you're not doing that. You're not enforcing the rules equally, you're singling this serial out because it's low hanging fruit and you get to make yourself look good by pointing and shouting 'racism'. Secondly: The Yellowface. At the time Weng Chiang was made, there were just 5 Asian male actors working in Britain. These were: Robert Lee, Burt Kwouk, Richard Ng, David Yip and Vincent Wong. None of them were available to play Li H'sen Chang. Vincent Wong was in Weng Chiang, but up until then his career was only as an extra meaning he clearly did not have an equity card and therefore was not allowed to take a speaking role under Equity rules - and that goes for a few others like Dennis Chin. Although unlike Chin, Wong did later become a full actor and has had a good career. David Yip was only 26 in 1977 so far too young to play the late middle aged Chang. Richard Ng spent 1977 making movies in Hong Kong where he spent much of his career and so was out of the country. Robert Lee had an episode of Hawaii Five-0 in 1977 and while I obviously cannot confirm the exact dates, it's entirely possible he was also out of the country at the time. Burt Kwouk had 4 tv appearances in 1977 and may or may not have been available, but at the same time, as much as I love Kwouk who is one of my favourite actors, I personally would not have cast him in the role of Chang. Kwouk was an amazing actor as a young man, but by the time he hit his forties, he had really slowed down. He is slow and terrible in Four To Doomsday compared to how he would bounce all over the screen in The Sentimental Agent or as Cato in the Pink Panther movies. So what you have here is a story that utilises a Chinese character as a major role and not one of the four Chinese men who are legally allowed to work in the UK as an actor at that time are available to take the role or are the right casting to play the role. Chang isn't in Yellowface because of racism, there are plenty of Chinese extras in the serial and many of the actors I mention have roles in Doctor Who at other times. David Yip in Destiny of the Daleks (1979). Burt Kwouk in Four To Doomsday (1982). Therefore there was little to no choice but to cast a white person in the role or scrap the entire story - which could not have happened because it was integral to the development of Leela. You assume that yellowface and/or blackface is only and purely down to racism, but that's because you simply don't look for any other reasons. The fact is that the numbers of Asian and Black actors required to cover all these roles simply didn't exist in Britain at the time. If you look at the CVs of actors like Kwouk or Rudolph Walker, they have literally never been out of work because they were so in demand to cover Asian and Black roles respectively. A racist tv industry would have meant that Kwouk and Walker never worked. Instead they are two of the most successful actors Britain ever produced. Kwouk has more entries on his IMDB CV than Ian McKellen for goodness sake. But your entire video simply jumps to the assumption that the people who made Weng Chiang were just racist and therefore acted out of hate of Chinese people. That's simply wrong and is nothing more than your opinion which ignores all of the evidence against it that you haven't bothered to look for.
Nice argument, unfortunately: - I qualify my statements by pointing to other occasions where Doctor Who did something dodgy (including Enemy of the World and The War Games, the latter of which I multiple times call a work of borderline genius in general) - I state multiple times I do not believe Holmes and Maloney woke up in the morning with a hatred for Chinese people - I demonstrate ways that elements of the serial seem to intend to subvert the Fu Manchu trope its based on - racism isn't just blind hatred, it's more complex than that - your examples at the beginning are astonishingly facetious, and I think you know that (the Android Invasion one is particularly silly, come on man) - your argument seems to rely entirely on the concept that I think its racist that a Chinese man is a villain, which is not remotely what I said. - Magnus Greel is not an alien. The serial itself states this. - I honestly do consider the Ogrons to be on mildly shakey ground in terms of make-up, but I will again state I severely doubt any actual ill intent was meant in their design. I am unconvinced that you watched the video through and through.
@@michaelinlofi You're right. I didn't watch the video. You jumped to your opinion in the first five seconds, I honestly I couldn't get past the cringe and I certainly wasn't going to waste an entire hour on it. I gave you ten minutes which I thought was more than fair but it just got totally unwatchable. Fair enough that you mention other serials being 'dodgy', but the fact is that Talons does nothing that Aztecs also does, if not worse as no Aztecs were involved with the making of that serial at all, so why single out Talons? No I'm not being facetious about Android Invasion. Why are stereotypes only bad if they are about a foreign culture? The argument you are making could easily apply to the Brigadier - a very, very English stereotype - and therefore according to you he must be of racist origin - the stuffy old mustachioed military man who is so stereotyped he can be seen in everything from The Navy Lark to Colonel Blimp. What exactly separates the Brig from Clive Candy or Captain Povey? And why don't we see this stereotypical English officer portrayed in any other Nationality? The reason you say this is facetious is because it holes your argument below the waterline. No it's a perfectly good argument. You can choose to ignore it if you wish, but it doesn't make it go away. That said. No, racism is not complex. Racism is hatred of a person due to their skin colour. Do you know why that is the only acceptable definition of racism? Because it is the only provable aspect of racism, usually because racists have no problem admitting that they are racist. They are proud of it. It doesn't matter how many sociologists or whoever have written however many books about it, or claims about privilege plus power, any other definitions of racism or 'complexities' about racism cannot be proven in any way. They require assumptions to be made about a person's state of mind and therefore do not constitute provable evidence in any form. You can make all the assertions you like about Holmes and Maloney, but you were not there and you do not have access to their thoughts or opinions or processes and neither does Kate Orman. What you have is a lot of assumptions that you take to give you the right to be judge, jury and executioner. As I replied to another of your comments, Mens Rea matters in everything. If you kill someone, the intention is the difference between murder and manslaughter. If I wrongly enter your house there's a big difference between if I do it because I was drunk and forgot where I live and if I do it sober, tooled up ready to burgle you. You cannot throw that important legal distinction away simply because it doesn't suit you. Is Talons an act of hatred against a group of people because of their skin colour? Obviously not. Is Griffith's The Birth of a Nation an act of hatred against a group of people because of their skin colour. Obviously yes. Parts of that movie are written and filmed specifically to demonise black people, in the same way that some modern Hollywood films are written and filmed specifically to demonise white people. It is very easy to spot a racist film. Once again, actual racists are proud of their racism because they think it is a virtue, therefore they don't hide it. They proclaim it loudly. Racism is extremely easy to spot. If you have to hunt for it, you're hunting to have your own prejudices confirmed and nothing says hunting like a 45 minute video. Now you can say that there are problems with Talons, because there are. You can even hold an opinion that it is racist. But you cannot state for a fact that it is racist, because you do not have that fact. If you did, your video would have been 30 seconds long and it would have gone: Yes Talons is racist because Robert Holmes hated Chinese people and said so in multiple interviews how much he hated them. If you don't have that then everything you have is circumstantial.
Again if you'd watched the video before charging in, you'd have seen the bit where I do bring up the Brigadier. I explain how he's a beloved character, but he's also not perfect and occasionally the Doctor has a go at him when he says something like "only Great Britain could be trusted with the launch codes". And on the topic of racism being more complex than just active hatred, I'd much rather listen to the people who've experienced the blind hate and the casual ignorance of racism because I reckon those who experience it have a clearer idea on what it is.
@@thedirectorschair1054 "Do you know why that is the only acceptable definition of racism? Because it is the only provable aspect of racism, usually because racists have no problem admitting that they are racist. They are proud of it." - Just as you dismissed this whole video in 10 minutes, I dismissed your entire argument after reading that. Because it's just an outright lie, as is most of what you said, but that was the most blatant one. I hope to god you're not in a legal profession in any capacity, because you'd let off the majority of criminals on the basis that you can't 'prove' they did the crime because they didn't confess to it.
I remember my first time watching through Classic Who and seeing people talk about how “amazing” this serial was. But upon watching I couldn’t get past how horrifically racist it is. Also it was pretty boring.
Even putting aside the racist asian representation in the Serial, another big problem is that it's too long at 6 Parts. If it was shortened down to 4 parts, a lot of the more casually racist lines could have been cutout, in addition to some of the padding (like the pointless sequence where Jago and Litefoot escape only to be captured a minute later). It's frustrating because I do like a lot of Robert Holmes' DW serials (especially 'The Time Warrior, 'The Deadly Assassin' and 'The Caves of Androzani') and I wish that he had lived to write for the 7th Doctor.
I disagree. It was never intended or even remotely racist we should not fault things of the time it was made it was a different time their was no social media or any of that rubbish. It was just an actor playing a chinese character it was very common practice in those days no one even thought of it as racist and if they have that's a small minority i have mates and cousins who are asian that are Dr. Who fans and watched this story they weren't even remotely bothered about the yellowface all they did was enjoy the story for what it was this over sensitivity and political correctness is getting so over the top it's ridiculous what's unfortunate is not the so called racism in this but the fact that that's the main focus of the story rather than what a great story it is.
I disagree that it's modern people applying today's standards to old media. As I said in this video, even in 1980 it was being called out for its racist content. I agree Robert Holmes didn't intend it to be racist. But intent and impact are very different things. The essay by Kate Orman I sourced a lot of the discussion on Fu Manchu from contains quotes from Chinese Doctor Who fans who hate this serial and couldn't finish it. When it comes down to the impact the serial has, intention becomes immaterial
@@michaelinlofi No intention is not immaterial. Mens Rea is a thing. I have no doubt that Kate Orman found some Chinese people who hate this serial, but there are over a billion Chinese people, I guarantee that I can find a Chinese person who hates milk. I can find a Chinese person who hates Goats and will attack them on sight. I can find a Chinese person who hates Ang Lee for selling out to Hollywood and refuses to watch any of his movies. The fact that some people hate some thing is of no consequence whatsoever. On a planet of 8 billion people, it is literally impossible to say a word or make an action that someone, somewhere is not going to hate you for. You would be left locked in a padded cell, doing nothing, going nowhere, saying nothing if you paid any attention whatsoever to such tripe. But at least no one would be offended at your existence, except for the poor taxpayer paying for your upkeep. If you have any values at all, you are going to cause offence to others. Apologising for that is a fool's game.
@@thedirectorschair1054 You could probably find a lot of Chinese people who hate milk; China has the highest incidence of lactose intolerance in the world and dairy products are largely absent from their cuisine (which comes first; the absence or the intolerance? Probably both in a cycle.)
Kate Orman isn't the only source I could find on Asian fans being uncomfortable with this serial. That newspaper clipping from 1980 where the Chinese Canadian council asked TVOntario not to broadcast Talons for decency reasons proves this has always been a concern with these six episodes.
@@michaelinlofi Yea - I did see that. But I ignored it because it's worthless. It's Canada for goodness sake. Canadians are offended by literally everything. It took me five seconds to find this for example: "Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing” The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council has ruled that “Money for Nothing,” the band’s hit, is too offensive for Canadian airwaves. The song is being singled out for using an anti-gay slur (“that little faggot”) three times in its second verse. According to the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council chair, “This is a word that has no place today on the airwaves.” " I look forward to your next 45 minute video explaining how Mark Knopfler is a raging homophobe because he offended a Canadian as opposed to having literally transcribed the words he heard from a real person in order to tell a story. "The lead character in "Money for Nothing" is a guy who works in the hardware department in a television/custom kitchen/refrigerator/microwave appliance store. He's singing the song. I wrote the song when I was actually in the store. I borrowed a bit of paper and started to write the song down in the store. I wanted to use a lot of the language that the real guy actually used when I heard him, because it was more real...." Your arguments do not hold water. It's that simple. They depend on your interpretation and other people's interpretations rather than anything you can actually prove. As I already said, it is literally impossible to live without offending someone, somewhere. The fact that we are speaking in English right now is going to be offensive to someone. Finding people who take offence is neither difficult, nor evidence of wrongdoing. You're offending me right now with your cringe arguments. Stop making videos you evil man. Kow Tow to my feelings! Oh wait - do you get to pick and choose who are the right people to offend or not offend? Cos I'm gonna guess you don't care about offending me with your crap arguments? If you haven't offended other people during your life, then you haven't had a life, you either died at three months old or you've just enslaved yourself to the feelings and whims of other people and never had an opinion or taken an action worthy of the name. Offence is taken, not given. And sure, you're young, you've grown up in a world where the legal system now chooses to recognise offence as some kind of legally actionable idea, so it's something you've grown up accepting. But if you spent five minutes actually thinking about it, you would realise that it's firstly completely unsustainable, that it is necessarily partisan - because again, you're not gonna care that you're offending me, only if you offend someone that matters to you like the Chinese, (therefore 'giving offence' is not the problem - 'who you offend' is the problem and that's just power politics, you're choosing who you are willing to be enslaved to, whose feelings you are going to respect above all else), that it has no basis in legality and that it is cultural suicide. Let's also not forget the irony of the Chinese Canadians moaning about being offended by a clumsy stereotype when the Chinese are some of the most actually racist people, in one of the most actually racist countries on the planet up to the point of committing genocide against the Uighurs. www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/16/chinese-social-media-filled-with-anti-black-racist-content-says-watchdog www.linkedin.com/pulse/qa-why-chinese-people-so-racist-towards-black-eric-olander-%E6%AC%A7%E7%91%9E%E5%85%8B en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_China If anything we should be defending Talons and saying - look, if China can get their racism down to just portraying clumsy stereotypes on old TV and having a laugh together at how silly it all is, instead of wiping out entire ethnic nationalities out of pure hate, then they are probably moving in the right direction.
From a Chinese view ,it is definitely very strange to see a white actor played a Chinese god who actually represent for culture & education as a evil. the toy maker is new to me ,i am totally fine with that since it's just the costume.but this is a "surprise" .It is called racism and shows disrespect to Chinese .Some comments make me laugh,why is our culture get offended and it is totally ok? someone please explain me about that😂
Is it responsible to pretend it never happened? If it is simply erased and forgotten, would anything really be learned from it? All this was pretty heavily discussed when BritBox added those content warnings. I personally think that's the best option: upfront honesty about the content of the serial. It's not having it out there with no label warning what it is, and it's not deleting it and sweeping it under the rug
I do have to admit a lot of dialogue from this one sticks in the mind. "I have not harmed her, Doctor." "Take my advice. Don't." Holmes is just... really good
They say the past is a foreign country. Here we have another white, middle class boy, not even born when the series aired but who understands it all oh-so-well. I could explain why you are wrong but it would take too long and I would not like to deprive 'people of colour' everywhere their champion, their hero, their voice and their liberator. Instead I shall leave this Poundland William Wilberforce to his messaniac pretensions and watch something a little more informed and, dare I say it, adult
Oh darling, you could show a movie in IMAX with that level of projection. This was meant to be an informative investigation, not an act of heroism. At no point did i consider myself a "liberator" or whatever the fuck you said, I'd have to have some screws loose to even approach that idea. It's a research essay in video form, not a manifesto. Settle down, babes.
_“and [I will] watch something a little more informed and, dare I say it, adult”_ What, the Black and White Minstrel Show? I heard that one’s popular amongst the ‘Don’t-judge-the-past’ and ‘anti-woke’ crowd. F*ck off.
So being a snowflake is pointing out when something racist is racist? I'll remember that the next time I point out something racist, snowflake and proud.
IMPORTANT: The name of the essay I reference at the end as a massive source for all my information on Fu Manchu is named "One of Us Is Yellow: Doctor Fu Manchu and The Talons of Weng-Chiang" by Kate Orman. The link for the essay (and all my other sources) are in the description. Pure madness that I didn't show that on screen, but I hope you all give it a read.
You titled the video, "Is The Talons of Weng-Chiang racist? Yes" Because English actors played Asian characters. An actor can play ANY role. If you think an actor can only play a role if they ARE whatever type they're playing, (Asian roles must be played by Asian actors, Black, Indian, Chinese - all must be played by those races on stage, etc) Then you are a moron. A snowflake. You do not in any way understand acting itself.
Anyone offended by film and TV from the past are emotional weaklings. Temper tantrum kids. You've clearly never had push back to your limp wrist-ed views. So listen up, snowflake, no adult gives a shit if you're offended. You are making videos criticizing the works of people who changed our culture and entertainment landscape. I stand by my earlier comment, you're a piss-ant shaking your fist at giants.
Aight now I know you didn't watch the video because if you did you'd understand that I adore Robert Holmes and Phillip Hinchcliffes vision for the show by in large. You are arguing with me based on a thumbnail you didn't like.
Incidentally, since you're having a sook in my comments about how wrong you think I am take a scroll. Find the comments from the older generation of fans who agree with me. This isn't an age thing, darling. It's a basic media literacy thing.
Also am i right in understanding that you are suggesting white people be allowed to play black characters there? Are you advocating for blackface? Do you have the slightest idea how stupid that makes you look?
Regarding when your light turned off.
"It's atmospheric." - The Twelfth Doctor.
Some of the characters express some of the less savoury attitudes of the period, the 1800s, not the 1970s, I mean. That is natural and preferable to ignoring that racism existed.
They even have Li Sen Chang make a witty remark about racism saying "I believe we all look the same to you." Which sgoes that far from being the c8ctim of the casual racism he encounters he is more intelligent than the average person a nd he is able to use his wit to subtly mock them.
The serial is loosely based on Sherlock Holmes and the Fu Man Chu (himself played by Christopher Lee) stories, so if you're not familiar with either, you might miss some of the many references.
There were Chinese criminals in Victorian time, so that's not racist in and of itself.
The main villain isn't Chinese. He's a white fascist dictator, and the main Chinese character realises he's been used by him and on his deathbed helps the Doctor.
The only really problematic thing is that the have a Caucasian actor playing a Chinese man.
However, remember this was made in a time when that was not deemed as racist.
Tom Baker and many other fine actors had played Othello with black face makeup. These were just seen as character parts. Yes, we wouldn't do it now because it is seen as offensive, but when you watch something made over 40 years ago, you need to view it in the context of a historical document. You can't apply modern sensibilities to something that was made when those things were seen as ok.
In short, it's a well written, well acted drama, and if you can't enjoy it because one of the actors has makeup, then your loss.
As for the Toymaker, when an immensely powerful being from a different dimension who probably doesn't even look human chooses to wear an oriental costume, it's not racist but a costume. He doesn't attempt to portray himself as Chinese.
You did a better job of pointing out how this video essay fails than I did. Thank you.
@@pferreira1983the whole video literally refutes every point they made, so no, they did not do a good job
@@Illvillainy you'd be amazed the number of people I've argued with in the comments who have not watched the video. Some of them have straight up admitted it
the thing is that the decision to use an anti-Chinese slur in the title and have the character dress up in Chinese costume in _The Celestial Toymaker_ is a production choice, what the character thinks is secondary to that when you could tell the same story without those racist choices.
@@Illvillainy The OP's post still stands and explains it all better. A video like this doesn't need to exist really.
In regards to your point on the Toymaker’s costume, it was reused from the Marco Polo serial because of a lack of budget. His name was probably meant in the context of divinity instead of race, with the robes being an unfortunate coincidence.
Yeah as I said my point there was simplified to keep the pace going. I know that there the unfortunate undertones were far less deliberate
accidental racism is still racism, unfortunately. It makes sense that Davies decided to just call him "the Toymaker" as a way of subtly apologizing for the mistakes of the past.
@@tituslafrombois1164 And yet he still worked a reference in to the word "celestial" anyway. I'm dead certain he had nothing but the best of intentions there, but it still made me go "hang on"
@@tituslafrombois1164 ... as he was called in the original story.
33:15
Now that line "I have been told we all look the same" is good. That is a shining moment of pushing back against the racism of the genre by permitting the Chinese character to send it up. This is the Seventies attitude to addressing racism; you get it in The Sweeney too, in which there is no moral compass character at all; but the reactions of minority characters to racism is played authentically. Another is Rising Damp; Rigsby isn't the only racist character in Rising Damp; he is the only one to be cruel and superior about it, but the other characters can be pretty ignorant too, but Philip can always show up the absurdity of their views with a sardonic quip. It doesn't have the moral clarity expected in later eras of entertainment, but I feel the racism is authentically depicted rather than endorsed.
I agree with you about Chang's "I understand we all look the same", I think in its context it's pretty powerful.
But as I am sure you will agree, it is baffling that the Doctor himself appears to endorse the casual ignorance on occasion. That more than anything is my gripe with the dialogue surrounding the racism in this serial
@@michaelinlofi
He does go a bit native!
I grew up in the 1980/ 90s, that sort of language was used then. Mostly out of ignorance by most. Folk just pretend British society was more progressive than it was back then. It has only been the last few decades that society has a whole has become much more racially sensitive which is why there are millions of angry "anti woke" idiots having a meltdown whenever racisim is discussed. Admittedly the queer bashing language was much more pervasive in British television than out and out racism. The backlash to a more progressive tolerant society is disconserting.
In terms of casting you can bet your bottom dollar they tried their best to cast actual Asian actors but failed. Back in the 70s there wasn't a large body of Asian actors one could pool from. If you cast your mind back to The Mind of Evil Kristopher Kum who played Fu Peng was a last minute addition to the cast who ran an agency specifically for actors of Asian origin. Quite often one would see the same actors playing many nationalities because they were in so much demand. Burt Kwouk would play Japanese characters, Chinese characters sometimes alongside actors in yellow face just because there weren't enough actors of Asian origin to go round locally and flying in actors from Hong Kong would have been prohibitively expensive. As for the Fu Manchu pastiche elements Robert Holmes attempts to subvert this. The Faux Manchu in this story has been conned. By a white fascist from the future no less. Some of the lines written for the character express an awareness of racism. Particularly tropes associated with Asian characters. Is it casually racist... Yes. Is it as offensive as more mainstream fare like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, No.
It’s still racist as hell
There was actually a tangent I initially intended to go into about intent vs impact of writing about important topics like racism. I agree that Robert Holmes probably had nothing but the best of intentions with the way he tries to subvert the Fu Manchu tropes as a commentary on racism, but "I meant well" only goes so far when the result is still racist.
And for what it's worth, the crew knows today the serial is offensive. Phillip Hinchcliffe himself has said he reckons he wouldn't get away with producing this programme today
and they couldn't just hire any asian person of the street, as you had to have an Equity card for a speaking role and they were not easy to get back then.
@@somthingbrutal they still aren't. That's why I'm with Bectu.
Casting a non Asian on this specific occasion is not problematic to me. Purely because it was a different time. Charlie Chan, Mr Moto and the obvious inspiration Fu Manchu.
This was the norm for this era . Was there some narrow thinking? Possibly.They were attempting to emulate tropes popular at the time in Hammer Films. I'm sure there were attempts to cast an Asian actor.
To be fair in those days UK Casting Directors did not have a lot of choice in 60s & 70s. Burt Kwouk ( Kato) was the go to guy for 99% of Asian Speaking roles then. Maybe he was busy. Most likely though they were clearly seeking a Christopher Lee type.
Obviously these days there are endless talented actors of diversity and ethnicity. Different times and thank goodness for that. It should always be about casting the right actor for the role. Frankly I think they got it right with John Bennett.
With all of the Pertwee era/Barry Letts praise I was surprised to see no mention of Planet of the Spiders and the yellow face used there for characters like Cho-je. Letts had contacts for Asian actors like you said here and still resorted to yellow face just a few years after Mind of Evil.
Absolutely fair point. Cho Je was on my mind when i wrote this but I think Spiders ought to get its own video on its brand of orientalism because it's... weird. Like, Letts and Sloman are genuinely excited about Buddhist ideas and treat them with respect, but still manage to get in the way of themselves with the racist stuff. It's interesting
8:45 - you could also have made the point that even at the time HERE IN THE UK the racism looked out of place… the previous serial (Robots of Death) had a mining ship in the future staffed by people of all sorts of colours and creeds. That was just a week before this one started!
You're right, actually. The cast of The Robots of Death is pretty fantastic actually
Well it isn't "a product of its time" because it is a pastiche of the Fu Manchu stories, so it is really a product of the Edwardian era it is paying homage to. In the same way Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is not a product of its time; it is a product of the 1930s. If the villains were soviet Russians then it would be a product of its time! Spreading russophobia was what was hip in the 80s; not thugee cults. (And Russophobia is back in fashion again; wasn't there a ban on Dostoyevsky in a University in Milan during the beginning of the Ukraine war? What Fyodor Dostoyevsky had to do with modern Russian foreign policy is a mystery). But Indy is a nostalgic throwback; that was the whole point of the series; it was emulating a genre of the past so used tropes of that old fashioned genre. Actually, similarly the Russophobia in season 3 & 4 of Stranger Things is not a "product of its time" because Stranger Things is consciously a pastiche of 80s pop culture cinema, so when they decide to make soviet spies the villains of season 3 and one of the plot threads of season 4 they are consciously pastiching the Eighties rather than reflecting modern bigotries (although coincidentally that was rapidly becoming a modern bigotry with a reboot of McCarthyism in which calling someone a "Russian asset" was considered an effective political smear against opponents to both the left and right of the government).
Bearing that in mind raises a question; was the use of a white actor in make up to appear Chinese a conscious creative choice to emulate the depictions of Fu Manchu in classic cinema or was it merely a replication of the same solution to the same problem, i.e. a lack of available British actors in the network who were of East Asian heritage. [In answer to my own question I suspect it's not a creative choice because the make up is actually done quite well.]
By the eighties we accepted that Talons could certainly be construed as racist and choices made then would be avoided now. However, also in the Eighties; Gandhi!
1:03 - 1:21 so even though britbox did possibly the most sensible thing here the fandom still went into massive arguments over it? Jesus Christ
You seem surprised
@@michaelinlofinot really surprised, just exasperated at how this fandom gets so hostile over things.
Btw I enjoyed the video, really goes into the why it’s racist that not a lot of people like myself would really notice at first. While not my favourite classic era serial I do like it, but like Tomb of the Cybermen I acknowledge its content is very dated & offensive. That aspect makes it difficult to recommend but it shouldn’t be erased from history.
@pcb1175 thanks!
And Tomb of the Cybermen is one I find easier to recommend. Toberman is still a very offensive stereotype but unlike Talons the whole serial isn't built on the stereotype. However as a Second Doctor Starter Pack I'm way more likely to point to something like The Mind Robber before Tomb of the Cybermen
To be honest, I kind of like that the 4th doctor volunteered to translate, said he was fluent in all dialects and proceeded to say a string of gibberish. It makes the exchange hillarious. I dont think it was intentional at all. It was likely just them being lazy and pretty racist, but the confusion on the guys face as the doctor attempts to communicate is priceless.
4:33 Literally same!! I was told to stop writing Doctor Who stories 😭
Great minds think alike!
See I got away with it the first time one year because we were told to write a spooky story for Halloween so I turned in what was pretty much a carbon copy of Blink. Teacher was impressed. But then the Daleks and Cybermen began to get involved and that's when the teacher caught on and asked me to write literally anything else
Happened to me too. To be fair to my teacher, I turned out some real cracker material after that haha
But I can’t forgive him for forcing me to hand-write my stories. After typing them. 😖 The 1990s might as well have been the 1890s.
I’m a watcher of Who from the 70s onwards and, by coincidence, I re-watched Weng-Chiang the other day. It is, indeed, stunningly racist. I’m glad you’ve tackled this episode and it’s themes here.
Arguably yes - but only for the casting choice of Li H'sen Chang. Everything else including the use of the "other" c-word, the Chinese Triads and opium dens are in fact historically accurate. Based on these elements alone the episode is not racist. It depicts the social norms for the time period (which were racist) in which the story was set. Context is key. Also, Li H'sen Chang's dialogue , "I understand. We all look the same," was used to diffuse what could have been an awkward conversation. He doesn't know The Dcctor isn't racist and believes he's conversing with a common Londoner. "The bird has flown. One of us is yellow," was used as a somewhat self-deprecating bit of humour to appease his audience after a slightly embarrassing turn of events during one of his tricks.
While I would agree about the accuracy, it's really not necessary to depict racial slurs and stereotypes in historical settings. It's like the people who complain that Red Dead Redemption 2 or Bioshock Infinite don't constantly have characters using the N word. We know that's how it was back then, but using the slurs still would have people continuing to parrot them openly instead of simply removing them from general circulation.
@@Whiteythereaper I understand your point. I'm in the "If we don't show the ugly side once in a while then we might forget how ugly it really is," category... like reading the N-word out loud while reading To Kill A Mockingbird in school. It's uncomfortable to say the least and maybe that's a good thing. When I explain what the Westboro Baptist Church does at military funerals and I'll use "the other F-word" when telling the story. What they do is repugnant and I do my best to make the point. Anyway, Cheers!
I'd say yes, but not deliberately so. It's mostly just guilty of using practices that were outdated even for the time, but otherwise the character's portrayal is sympathic and tragic, and his mannerism's are all but stated to be put on for the benefit of the Victorian era audiance. Whether that justifies their inclusion or if the story would've worked better had an actor of actual Asian decent played the role is anyones guess.
I agree that overall the characterisation of Chang is really strong. Holmes is a clever writer, and the nuance with which he handles how Chang interacts with racism is clever. But his inability to let go of the tropes that surround Chang wind up shooting him in the foot and John Bennett's casting (not to mix metaphors) was the last nail in that coffin
@@michaelinlofi It didn't help, no. Still with the context in mind it'll be up to the individual viewer to decide if that ruins their enjoyment of the story or not.
It MIGHT just be that they chose John Bennett for the role because he'd appeared in Doctor Who before and is a decent actor. It wouldn't happen now, but then now isn't then.
I think it's a mistake to edit or delete history, regardless of whether it bothers people. It isn't just a question of whether a show made in the 1970s was racially insensitive but whether the historical time period it was visiting was racially insensitive. I'd rather see the latter faced head-on. On the former, I'm inclined to ask fans who are Chinese or of Chinese descent. While my sample size is tiny, the two I've asked accepted it for what it is and did not take offense. Coincidentally, the one of those two who was a close friend often reveled in racial humor such as gong strikes that survived well into the 1990s. (He also called me "roundeye" on occasion and I was not offended.) BTW, I am bothered that things like this draw such ire while race-swapping historically white characters is instead celebrated as "progress"...
Not advocating for its censure or removal in the slightest. I agree that our offensive past shouldn't be erased - as I said here I own the season 14 Blu-Rays, which contains this serial. It's why I think BritBox did the most sensible thing - keeping Talons on their platform but sticking a notice at the beginning giving a heads up as to the content of the serial.
And you're absolutely right to ask Chinese fans of their views on the serial. The essay I heavily highlight in the comments and at the end references posts made by Chinese fans of Doctor Who who are perturbed by its content. I follow an individual on Twitter who has Chinese heritage who hates this serial. No group of people is a monolith, so some might give it a free pass while many others do not. But some being more comfortable than others with this sort of material isn't really carte blanche to say and do whatever we want
@@michaelinlofi You're right about groups not being monolithic and that should be the answer to racism in general. People are individuals, automatically diverse in their totally unique personal experiences. Racism is reductive and dehumanizing groupthink, whether in the classic form in this serial or in its modern "woke" form.
Very well done video, an important conversation to have and the editing seems like that of a much larger channel. Looking through your other videos this doesn't seem to be your average form of content about DW but I would totally love to see more of this
Thank you! This is actually the hardest I've worked on editing a video (I'm trying to step up my game) so I'm delighted to hear it's paying off.
And I absolutely have more plans for WhoTubing. Can't say for sure what exactly, but I definitely want to talk about it more because I love this show so much
7:06 "If Robert Holmes name is on it you know you are in for a treat" Unless it's The Space Pirates. Fortunately The Space Pirates are missing. Holmes probably burned the recordings himself! 😅
Funnily enough, episode 2 of The Space Pirates still exists because that whole episode was shot on 35mm film - a rarity for Classic Who
The Mysterious Planet is a load of cack.
@@sambda
Tbf, that may not have been his final draft if it hadn't have been his final draft, if you get my meaning.
@@sambda The Mysterious Planet is more boring than anything else, but even it manages to have flashes of Holmes' trademark wit. Glitz and Dibber are by miles the most entertaining part of that serial just by virtue of Holmes' dialogue style
All I see is 70s has-beens like Joan Sims and Tony Selby hamming it up dreadfully.
There was a way to do this that would have been historically accurate and much less problematic. There was a magician at that time who spent his whole career pretending to be Chinese but who was (if memory serves, American). His true identity was only revealed to the world when a trick went wrong and he was fatally shot on stage. If the magician in Talons had been him, the casting would be a lot more reasonable. What I will also say is that UK TV at the time was full of out-and-out, absolutely deliberate and spiteful racism; as opposed to what I’d consider racism driven by ignorance like Talons. Yes, they should have known better, but they didn’t.
Why would Magnus Greel pretend to be an ancient Chinese god to persuade an American to work for him? He would pretend to be the angel Moroni or something. In this version we wind up with a mormon magician! That would be a weird pastiche of Fu Manchu to have a Mormon magician, although it could be instead a pastiche of A Study in Scarlet which does involve a mormon secret society based on the Danites. So Magnus Greel, as a result of a catastrophic time travel experiment arrives in Utah and convinces a community of mormons that he is the angel Moroni, recruits a local farmer (lets call him Lee Henry Carter) and gives him futuristic technology that allows him to pass himself off as a miracle worker and he becomes the head of a Danite secret society called "The Seraphim" or something (as a riff on "the destroying angels") they take their criminal activities to London where Carter passes himself off as a faith healer using the technology Greel/Moroni has given him, whilst his secret society of assassins pose as pine furniture salespeople, whilst collecting victims for Magnus Greel.
@@markpostgate2551 It’d take some minor re-working, but it could be done. The guy pretended to be Chinese off-stage, too. Literally no one seemed to know his real identity. The bigger change is that you’d make the magician more cynically part of the evil plan; he’d be there for what he could gain rather than being a true believer.
@@chrispalmer7893
The beauty of Li H'sen is he isn't evil. He is misguided and gets a redemption arc. You make him as cynical as Greel then you make him a less interesting character.
But then a performer pretending to be another race for a stage act isn't evil either. He may be a charlatan or a fantasist but he isn't evil. Grey Owl who was a Scotsman who posed as a native American was an environmentalist campaigner; I think the fictional identity he created for himself was a form of escapism. And he was married to a genuine native American for some time so he certainly wasn't deliberately mocking them.
Another lovely touch about the character of Li H'sen is the fact that he sends up his ethnicity on stage becoming more stereotypical. He is played as an authentic chinese character offstage (even though he is played by a white actor he is portrayed respectfully) and yet on stage that character turns himself into a caricature for the music hall audience. You would lose this commentary if you have him not written as a genuine Chinese character.
Yeah I stumbled on some clips of Mind Your Language while poking around for any Pik-sen Lim footage I could find and good grief you can't say any of that. That really did feel like a show meant to make fun of foreigners, as opposed to the more ignorant than malicious approach Talons takes
the dialogue is accurate for the time much like the 13th doctor and the rosa parks episode
Oh I know, that's not my problem with it functionally. My issue is the Doctors complete indifference to it. Even in Rosa she objected
@@michaelinlofi a fair point
@@michaelinlofi That was a terrible episode though.
@pferreira1983 Rosa has its own problems - it seems to forget that Rosa Parks sitting in the white section of the bus was a deliberate and organised protest, and the concept that stopping this one protest would end the civil rights movement is bizarre. But my point about the Doctor's reactions to the world around her still stand because she does at least react in that episode
@@michaelinlofi The thing is Rosa is actually offensive towards the black community because it takes one important point in time and has a white saviour help Rosa to accomplish that. The one time having the Doctor cause a reaction to history ends in being offensive. Talons is just offensive because of the casting and him being a caricature of Fu Manchu.
Now you guys in the West say it's racist. But, yet here in Taiwan or Hong Kong or Singapore. Even today no one sees this episode as racist. They see actors playing characters. Also it isn't a racist, because when this story takes place. Which happens to be the Victorian era. Thats how people spoke.
I really love how you guys in the west throw around words like racist and racism, but honestly have no idea what you're talk about. Just like again you guys in the west saying Peter Seller's character Hrundi V Bakshi in The Party is racist, because Sellers is in brown face. But, yet in India, Sri Lanka they just though it's funny and still do today in 2024. The late Indra Ghandi said it was one of her favourite films. Even today there are a number of Indian and Sri Lankan politicians who quote lines from the film.
Personally I find it very condescending against us when you white boys say things like you do. How about coming here and finding out for yourself, before you think you need to try and defend us.
Some things are acceptable now that will not be in the future.
Also notice, in "The Mind of Evil" the Chinese ambassador is being racist to the Brigadier's country.
Not to mention the Doctor is friends with Chairman Mao. Thats more concerning than anything in "The Talons of Weng-Chaing".
Think about it, if the Doctor went around being critical about people's attitude, he may have changed history, so went around being subtle rather than breaking the Web of Time.
Im sure there are those that defend Russell T Davies when he does things like justifying why Davros isnt in his wheelchair when there are clearly people with disabilities who arent nice people.
Don't think the delegates line is meant to be read that way. The way it's presented the Doctor is the first person to be polite to the delegate, and I think his response is meant to be "finally, someone who isn't being an asshole to me."
But the Chairman Mao line is a bit of an eyebrow raiser. Timothy Combe and Barry Letts had a chuckle about it in the commentary I reference a couple of times (Pik-sen Lim found it funny too, from memory). But for my money personally, one bizarre line isn't as bad as something that's cooked from the foundation up like Talons is.
And you're absolutely right, times will change and things will be considered unacceptable that we do today. My intent is to go into that future and accept that change. But as that article from a paper in 1980 demonstrated, this was considered unacceptable then
I tried, but I just can't get too worked up about this stuff. Is it racist? Yes, I supposed so. Do I really care? No, I don't. it doesn't affect my enjoyment of the story to any significant degree.
Sure, I agree that no one should go out of their way to deliberately offend people, but at the same time, does anyone *really* have a right to not be offended? And just exactly what about it offends people, and how are they offended?
When I see a stereotypical "nerd" in a show or movie with taped glasses and a pocket protector, I might cringe a little, but I recognize it's a shortcut to the character and its personality. More a sign of lazy writing than a real attempt to offend. I got tired of the repetitive nature of The Big Bang Theory and its jokes, but I was never *offended* by the show.
If I'm watching something for entertainment, then most likely I'm not interested in hyper-realism in either the characters or the plot. Stereotypical presentations aren't just a shortcut for the writers, but also for the viewers, and if you only have a short time to tell a story, then you usually don't want to spend too much time fleshing out a character and background and slowing down the presentation of the situation and conflict of the story. We too often seem to assume that characters are supposed to represent large numbers of real people, entire races or genders. But that's nonsense. One bad character is often just one bad character, not representative of anything beyond how the character is used in the story.
And if worse comes to worse, racism and other offensive behavior makes it easier for other people to recognize offensive people and deal with them accordingly, or more likely, avoid dealing with them. After all, you don't want to invest too much in a relationship, business or personal, only to find out that you can't really stand the person but are now stuck having to deal with them on a daily basis. Let the bigots reveal their prejudices up front instead of hiding them.
24:00 It is BECAUSE Litefoot is educated that he is racist because he is educated by and within an empire built on race essentialist beliefs. It makes far more sense that Jago is less racist because he actually knows Chinese people; he meets people of all walks of life; he is not blinkered by an elitist bubble. And I don't think he intends "celestial" as a slur; he is showing off his vocabulary as music hall impressarios do and "Celestial Empire" was the name used by the Chinese empire at the time, so it's just a polysyllabic fancy way of saying "Chinese". This is clear in the context of the words "Machiavellian" and "machinations" used in the same sentence.
Jagos intention is why I was a little less hard on him, in fact to make a point I nearly clipped his "courteous fellows, these Chinese" line before thinking it cluttered the video a bit.
And as I said I understand Litefoots rich upbringing after the Opium Wars is why he's like that, and you're right that it should be a reflection of elitism. But I'm not convinced the script does enough work to criticise it. The Doctors large indifference is really jarring
@@michaelinlofi
Well I thought you made a good comparison by showing the Doctor's sardonic responses to The Brigadier's jingoism. The Brigadier and the Doctor are such an unlikely alliance. At the end of Invasion of the Dinosaurs the Doctor has a little pop at capitalism and the Brigadier does that little "hmmm" noise that suggests he doesn't quite care to give it much thought! The Doctor is clearly far to the left of the Brigadier. And that "of course the rest were all foreigners" quip is great because it takes a moment for the penny to drop and the Brigadier to realise the Doctor is mocking him. It is a double act though. The Doctor needs to poke. The Brigadier needs to react. I think the opportunity for it is in the script for The Doctor and Litefoot but the opportunity is not taken in the performance. I don't think the director has noticed where the opportunities are.
I think @michaelinlofi is correct here. Yes, Jago and Litefoot being racist as hell makes sense given their place in a racist society, and not fully understanding why certain terms were bad. The real problems come from The Doctor doing so little to confront it, and in some ways even partaking in it. That's the major flaw. Racism (like the transphobia in The Star Beast) does need to be shown, but it ABSOLUTELY has to be confronted within the context of the story to show that it's BAD. Talons completely fails on that point, whereas Star Beast does a mostly good job of handling it (ie: Donna's immediate, unflinchingly supportive rage).
Do you not think that the presentism of the Doctor judging the past by modern standards would bring into question why he doesn't judge the present by future standards. We have no idea what we do that is commonplace now might be considered horrendous by future generations. And bear in mind the Doctor is not from the present day.
He does on occasion though. Think Planet of the Ood.
"Don't look at me, I don't have slaves!"
"Who do you think made your clothes?"
I swear some of the fandom likes complaining about being doctor who being woke more than the show.
It feels like its racism was a product of its time, but by 'its time' I mean 'a really surface-level understanding of the 19th century that maybe shouldn't have been used'.
Absolutely. When I was younger, however, I was far more taken with Tom Baker's riff on Sherlock Holmes.
But the serial definitely hasn't aged very well at ALL. You could say it was attempting to make a statement on the racism of the time it was set, but it's not making a statement at all. It just IS racist.
And Robert Holmes?! What the hell happened, Robert?!
I honestly believe Holmes' intention was social commentary, given some of the characterisation of Chang and in particular his sarcasm in the face of racism. I genuinely don't think he intended any harm by it. But the intention fails to make it to paper or screen when it's buried in the tropes of the movies he's referencing, and the result is that it's still racist
@kali3665 I disagree I think the serial still stands the test of time and a great serial whats unfortunate is the over sensitives looking at modern eyes instead of context.
@@joshuaverran9443 I think the point is that the context fails to make it not racist.
That doesn't mean it can't still be a good story _despite_ its racism. Just that, you know, it's still racist. You just gotta enjoy it despite that now, and it'd make sense that Chinese people or people who might understand how they might feel might well not be able to look past that.
@@klop4228 "I think the point is that the context fails to make it not racist"
That was precisely what I was getting at. I fully understand the context and spirit in which Holmes probably wrote it in, but the fact of the matter was whether out of carelessness or just not knowing what the hell he was talking about he still made a racist piece of work. It's unfortunate, but it is what it is
This was an interesting video, I watched it all in one sitting and it didn't drag. It's certainly an interesting topic, and I wouldn't put in such binary shades as "racist"/"not racist". In some ways it's both at the same time... a kind of Schrödinger's Racism.
One thing often overlooked in these discussions, as here, is the cultural landscape in which Doctor Who was made. For example, you cite that it was regarded as racist as early as 1980, because Canadian TV rejected it. But that's Canada. In the UK the Doctor was still double-taking at a Chinese man after talking about THAT cricket term in Four To Doomsday or making fun of his name. While until 1978 the BBC was showing blackface with The Black and White Minstrel Show. Am I saying that the whole of the UK was racist, or that makes it right? Not really. But many of the commentators on this are from outside the UK, and outside the time it was made... Kate Orman is from Australia, for example. She wasn't surrounded by the cultural context from which this was a product.
But looking at it through a 2024 lens does omit the time. The "time it was made" isn't an excuse or justification, but more an acknowledgement that societal mores and expectations have changed. As one example, the word "q***r" is used today to describe gay cinema... a word that, being from an older generation, I won't even type. If that word had appeared in a 1977 Doctor Who story it would have been homophobic... today it (within context) wouldn't. If someone had the opportunity to make a RUclips video in the 1970s lambasting any modern video that talks about "q***r cinema", would that be legitimate?
That's not to say it wasn't dodgy at the time, but I do feel that there's an attempt at satire here. The Doctor lands not in a real Victorian England, but in a fictional pastiche. That may be me "reading in", and lots of the clips you showed were dodgy as anything, but you have to understand that in much of 1970s UK TV, then programmes for adults (and Doctor Who at this point was aiming for an older age range) assumed more on behalf of the audience. Characters were presented without moral compasses - such as Budgie (1971), for one example - but the audience were credited with the intelligence to work out the difference, without having to be told, New Who style, that "this is wrong". The key was that characters spoke how they would, not with the authorial voice, so that while many of the New Who episodes have people talking exactly like the writers, it doesn't mean Holmes was racist because he wrote characters that were.
I dunno, it's certainly an interesting topic. Lots to think about.
I don't disagree that it was an attempt at social commentary, in fact I fully believe Robert Holmes' intention was to point out that the Fu Manchu tropes its based on are kinda shitty. But my overall point is there aren't a lot of awards for "you did your best" when the end result doesn't stand up as a commentary. I do not believe for a second Hinchcliffe, Holmes and Maloney were active racists. But they misunderstood the subject matter they were trying in good faith to handle and the results are... well this.
It is a complex discussion, but when I say "this serial is objectively racist" that's not necessarily equivalent to "this serial is objectively hateful." It's why I brought up that Beatles movie as an example. It was only meant in good fun, but it's pretty shocking in places
@@michaelinlofi I was shocked with some of the clips when it was from the Doctor, and I guess it's only natural for the mind to try and come up with excuses for it... didn't Holmes try and write a story called "Yellow Peril" in 1985?
@ItsTerryTime it was called "Yellow Fever and How to Cure It". It was going to feature the Autons, and was going to be set in Singapore. I'm very glad that never saw the light of day because I severely doubt it would have been tasteful given those facts
@@michaelinlofi Yeah, it might sound odd, but I'd find something like that much more problematic if it was made in the mid 80s than late 70s.
Ugh, I had totally forgotten that. Wow. Okay, much as I also admire and love Robert Holmes, given this title, and the end result of the script of "The Talons of Weng-Chiang", might the most plausible explanation here be that a) Robert Holmes really had a problem with Asian people for whatever reason, consciously or not; b) that at least unconsciously ended up in the script; c) the director and actors just rolled with it because it was 1978 and most of us on first watch didn't catch half the racism ourselves and we weren't born in 1935 (and raised in the 1950s). And I don't know this for a fact, but I have read that Letts and Williams both had budget and time constraints when they got to the big huge six part finale serials at the end of each season, so I wouldn't be surprised if Hinchcliffe was basically tearing his hair out trying to get everything done on time, and trusted Holmes to submit a filmable script. Doesn't excuse any of them, of course, but hey. @@michaelinlofi
but you have got to remember at this time on British tv the black and white minstrel show was still going strong.
(btw not saying this story or the black and white minstrel show should have even been airing).
Minor point on the Doctor making up language. It's not the only time he spoke rubbish as a foreign language. McCoy's not speaking Russian half the time in 'Curse of Fenric'.
Oh, that's annoying to hear! Good to know though
Great essay
Talons of Weng-Chiang is a riff off Fu Manchu movies. I don't think it would have worked as well if the casting had been Chinese for the villain. If you want to talk about another potentially racist episode of DW which is genuinely offensive check out Rosa. 😂
i can't disagree with you, but its still one of my favourites, i was seven when this was first shown and i remember thinking that the show highlighted that racism wasn't as good thing. but i was seven lol
I mean at the end of the day the objective of this video wasn't to say "this is bad and it sucks and you're wrong if you like it" because as I said I genuinely understand why people like it. David Maloney is on top form with the location shooting and Holmes is as witty as ever writing Jago and Litefoot.
Also it is interesting to hear the perspective of someone who saw it when it went out, so thank you for commenting. Good to know that Holmes' intended anti racist message managed to communicate at the time, even through his less than graceful handling of the topic
I'm the same, I still enjoy it and can't deny it's racist through and through. But that's reality I guess, we can acknowledge something is offensive, and I think it's fine to provide a disclaimer, but I hope we don't get to a point where art is banned, unfortunately it seems in many States in the US, the written word is being banned increasingly, especially in schools.
Considering the crew hire Chinese actors as extras for the story, you think it wouldn't take much to hire someone who is genuinely Chinese for the role of Chang. If they did that, then the story probably wouldn't get as bad of a reputation as it has now.
There were only four British Chinese Men with equity cards working at the time: Robert Lee, David Yip, Burt Kwouk and Robert Ng. Ng and Lee were likely out of the country working in Hong Kong and the US, Yip was 20 years too young for the character and Kwouk had really passed his prime (See Four to Doomsday a few years later), but even in his prime would not have been right for the character. They could hire as many Chinese extras and crew as they liked, but Equity would not let anyone without an Equity Card take a main role.
@@thedirectorschair1054 Wow! I never knew that! That definitely adds some new context to the whole situation.
It's a great story, and I love all the Victorian/gothic tropes of it. But yes...even without the ghastly yellowface makeup, it's still an unbelievably outdated episode in terms of racism. I have a favourite RUclipsr who loves/reacts to classic Who episodes, and when it came to this one, I avoided watching her reaction. But I could just tell from the thumbnail that she wasn't impressed.
You referring to Jess (sesskasays)? Because if so a) also adore her and b) her precise words were "I am uncomfortable" I believe
One major thing you forgot to say is that this story was initially the work of Robert Banks Stuart.
Very true, though Stewart's _The Foe from the Future_ apparently only resembles Talons in the vaguest of details - someone from the future crippled by a crappy time machine is sucking the life force of others. The involvement of a Fu Manchu inspiration only appears once Holmes took over writing duties. Therefore it's something that might have been a bit of a tangent in a video as long as this one
Spent loads of this video thinking "this reminds me a lot of that one Sherlock episode" 🤣😂
Moffat was insane for letting that one get broadcast
@@michaelinlofi oh man, don't get me started on Moffat & representation. 😭😭 I watched a video essay recently titled "Doctor Who vs Women" by verilybitchie which really shows how all his 'strong female characters' are actually quite two dimensional. Definitely worth a watch. 👀
The question should really be: "Was The Talons of Weng-Chiang DELIBERATELY racist?". Anyone watching ANY TV of different eras and applying the standards of the era in which they themselves are viewing from is going to find things that annoy/upset them that didn't annoy/upset people at the time. At the time of its broadcast, this story was seen as simply another one of Robert Holmes' pastiches of elements from classic literature and films (e.g. Pyramids of Mars = Mummy films, Spearhead From Space = Quatermass 2, Planet of Evil = Forbidden Planet). This time, it's largely inspired by Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu stories, Sherlock Holmes, and The Phantom of the Opera. There are racial stereotypes, but I would argue that the production team didn't INTEND to offend Chinese people, or anyone else for that matter. Why would they do that? They're just trying to make watchable TV. The other thing to realise is that people in the future will likely find things to offend them about shows being made and shown now. The impossible task is to guess what those future viewers might find to dislike, based on their world view then, and not include it, since we have no idea what that will be. That is the same problem people always have who create any kind of story in whatever era they do so. From memory, at the time Talons was made, the only two issues people producing TV shows were trying to avoid can be summed up as "unnecessary or excessive violence and sex". It manages to avoid doing that, so it fulfills the requirements of that era. It's unfair to judge past eras of TV, films, books, etc, or indeed attitudes of the public, in any past era, by putting them through a "now filter".
I agree that it wasn't intentionally offensive, and in fact believe it was intended to sort of buck the tropes involved. I don't believe Holmes, Hinchcliffe or Maloney were active racists in the slightest. But many don't believe it to be racist even on an unintentional level, hence this video.
Well argued but, with respect, you weren't born when this series aired, so you are making some assumptions...
With regards to the target audience, very few people would have considered it racist, despite the Canadian response you mention. In the late seventies/early eighties, most of us in the UK had grown up on reruns of films from the thirties to the fifties, with their inherent prejudices. We were becoming aware of racism, but it was filtering into society slowly. I'm not saying this is a good thing; it's just the way things were and it is the background against which this was made.
I first saw this series on video in 1991, at the behest of a Doctor Who fanatic who was collecting non-fan opinions of the past cannon, with a view to raising a petition to bring back Doctor Who. I remember enjoying the evocation of early films set in that era, including Sherlock Holmes and Fu Man Chu. As I explain above, we grew up on old Hammer and golden age mystery movies, so we sort of expected the racism as a characteristic of the era depicted. I agree that the Doctor could have said more to counteract this. I think some effort was involved with Tom Baker mocking the attitudes of the time through attempts at exaggeration, which is more characteristic of his Doctor than Pertwee's paladin-like righteousness, but this was too subtle and easily misconstrued.
I'm not convinced that there were that many Asian actors up to filling main character roles at the time. There were a number who came to the fore in the late eighties/early nineties, but yellow-face was quite common at that time. It was not far from the end of the era when Benny Hill and Dave Allen were portraying Asian characters for comic effect. It seems bad now, but it was just accepted back then. Jasper Carrot was doing Chinese jokes into the late 90s/early 2000s on mainstream TV.
I'm not trying to suggest that something like this would be justifiable if made now but, the first time I saw it, I was more bothered why anyone would want to make an immortal, three foot tall, killer homunculus with the brain of a pig, than the depiction of the Asian characters.
I'm not moved to argue with you as a whole, but my overall point is the _general_ fan reaction of loving it does not mean it wasn't seen as offensive by Chinese fans of the show. My point was meant to be that it wasn't suddenly seen as offensive at the turn of the century, Chinese fans of the show have always been perturbed by it. In fact the sort of lack of acknowledgement of it by others was the thesis statement of the video. If I didn't make that point clearly then that's deffo my bad.
@@michaelinlofi I'm not really aiming to argue, and I'm sure it always has been offensive to many Chinese fans. I was more trying to correct the record on changing attitudes. We have become much more aware and sensitive to racism in the last few decades (although, I don't know if the BBC has yet acknowledged how prejudiced they are against the Welsh).
The culture that gave rise to series like Fu Man Chu doesn't exist anymore. It probably arose from the tension between Imperial Britain and the Chinese aristocracy. I suspect that there was some degree of hubris on the British side because Chinese civilization is so much more ancient than ours. There was a belief that they must know something that we don't and be pursuing a hidden agenda. I'd be interested to know how modern Chinese people would view it.
Oh i didn't mean to seem annoyed. When I said I'm not moved to argue I meant I didn't necessarily disagree with bits of your statement. Tone not reading over text is the bane of my existence
The wild thing is that Robert Holmes' last serial was going to be called "yellow fever and how to cure it". I don't know what was in it, but there's no way Robert Holmes should have ever used the word yellow ever again.
Ohhhhh yeah. From what I know that was gonna be an Auton story set in Singapore. Mix those facts with that name and there's... no way that would have been tasteful.
I am assuming that was a title that was never meant to make it to air, but still. Oof
It's not as racist as Live And Let Die.
Live and Let Die is still a great film. Okay there is no one in blackface in Live and Let Die but it makes absolutely no sense that Solitaire is white and when the voodoo cult tries to sacrifice her it would help mitigate ever so slightly the discomfort of the racist imagery.
But it's still a good film; like A Merchant of Venice is still a good play. The thing is Talons of Weng Chiang is not bad in terms of quality. It's quality is incredibly good - probably one of the best. It just requires the viewer to exercise their own moral judgement in processing it.
You're not wrong that Talons is exceptionally well paced and directed. It would be foolhardy to deny that. As I said somewhere else in this comments section my intention with this video wasn't to say "this sucks and you suck if you like it."
Also I can't say I have the best recollection of Live and Let Die, so I will have to take your word for it. I can't claim to be the biggest Roger Moore fan so I've only seen his Bond movies once each to memory
@@michaelinlofi
As a child it was my favourite Bond movie. But you watch it as an adult and it's really apparent how segregated society is and how every black character (bar one who is very short lived) works for Mr Big.
21:10 maybe she calls him yellow because he actually looks yellow
Yeah, because of the exaggerated yellowed makeup, done specifically because that’s a racist exaggeration of an ethnic trait.
Subscribing because you used the Eighth Doctor theme alone. But the video is also great: this is the sort of thing fans need to be a lot more vocal about.
I had a massive Big Finish phase through the end of 2023 and now Eight is my main man
@@michaelinlofi I always feel like such a hipster saying this but the Eighth Doctor is my favorite. I became a fan during the wilderness years and he has so many great Big Finish stories.
I'm sorry to see so many people in the comments being weirdly angry at you. Talons is an uncomfortable episode, but with so many missing Doctor Who episodes I think ultimately that removing it from public access would be unfortunate and bring down heat from the exact same people who are angry at this video. I thoroughly enjoyed your analysis and hope you have a lovely day.
It is because people fear that (the loss of cultural artefacts) that people get angry at there being discussion at all. When you like something but also think it is a little bit racist, like Arthur Conan Doyle's Lost World, one is reluctant to discuss the racism in it just in case some dogooder with a banhammer is in earshot and takes it upon themselves to have the novel purged of its historical authenticity! I don't want morally pure santitized culture. We know there is a feedback loop and discussing art effects the availability of art.
See at no point in this video did I advocate for its removal. I own the offending serial on Blu Ray. I think it should be publicly available because it's more responsible to display when shows mess up than hide it away
@@michaelinlofi
I understand that. I don't see you wielding the ban hammer. The guy who did the documentary about his problem with Apu wasn't calling for the removal of Apu, but it still led to the removal of Apu. When I say there are passages of The Lost World that made me spit my tea at its casual racism, I am not calling for the book burning of The Lost World, but I fear those that are, so I am cautious about whom I share an observation like that with. I don't even like the warnings because I feel it is patronizing. People aren't stupid and can make their own minds up; I don't think we give out fellow man enough credit.
@@michaelinlofi Oh no no, and I wasn't suggesting you did! Genuinely just trying to offer some discussion.
Nah mate you're all right! All for the discussion!
Also meant to say, thanks for the compliment and the well wishes. Indeed people have been less than civil here, but I'll be honest I was bracing myself for it. I knew the moment I sat down to write this one what would happen, indeed that's why there's that four minutes of context where I felt it necessary to defend myself as obsessed with the show. At some point it just crosses over to being entertaining
I thought Dr Who wasn't meant to be human?..
So in having a 'human' acting as a dufferent species must be 'species-ist' ??
I saw Weng Chiang on first broadcast when I was about eight years old. None of this registered at the time, of course, I just found the story very, very scary. In retrospect, this was clearly a time when Hinchcliffe was mining Universal Horror tropes and incorporating them into Who to good effect. Arguably, this serial was the absolute last gasp of the Saxon Rohmer pulps. Fu Manchu had all but been consigned to the cultural rubbish bin at this point but when you're stealing from the most popular franchises in existence for your 70s sci-fi series, the atmosphere and adventure of the Fu Manchu stories must have seemed like a good fit. I'm certainly not defending some of the choices around that, but inarguably the action/mystery/adventure of Rhohmer made for good drama and it would still have been good drama if the Chinese characters been shown proper respect and given a true voice and representation. Incidentally, when you're making the case against racism, you might want to re-think your use of the word 'Whitey.' You may think you are being ironic or whatever, but you're just falling into the same trap of applying uncritical thought processes to the problem. If you're going to define a racist as someone who uses racist language ( and no excuses ) then...hello!
Other than that, good video!
I'm not overly concerned about my use of "whitey" here to be honest. It was largely inspired by a Bill Burr joke actually - "I love the word whitey, we should bring it back, it's funny." It was definitely supposed to be a bit of levity in what is otherwise an uncharacteristically serious video and I honestly didn't think anyone would think twice about it
Hmmm...and yet I did. Notice it that is. What bugs me about it is that it's the kind of thing that plays into the hands of the current batch of racists who claim they see a double standard in what is seen as now politically correct discourse. Namely that anti-white slurs are somehow tolerated when all other s
are not. The problem is, Bill Burr's (humorous?) comments aside, they are correct. And your own use of the word 'Whitey' and then your defence of it, proves this to be the case. But, you know, whatever. As long as you think it's funny, what possible consequence can a word have in a racial context, eh?
@@michaelinlofi Quote: "If someone's telling you that something you love has done something offensive, don't get defensive or dismissive." Oh, the irony.
@Apogee02UK I'm literally white the way I see it I have carte blanche to say what I like about a group of people I belong to. It's when other groups tell me something sucks that I sit up and listen and take note, and I reckon that's the way things should be. We take the mickey out of ourselves, but be mindful of other people's boundaries
Sigh….again judging something 50 years ago with today’s standard. “Man who looks into past is like Cricket who stare at fortune cookie.”
Ooh, quotes. Allow me to quote someone too!
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” - George Satayana.
I think i said several times in this video I don't believe that Robert Holmes, David Maloney or Phillip Hinchcliffe were actively racist. This is not meant to judge them as such. This simply exists as an analysis of this past mistake supported by research, through which I found a lot of the racist tropes this serial unfortunately pulls from are not so relegated to the past and still very much around in today's media. All this was, was an exercise in my own media understanding. I knew it was racist by today's (and even 1980s, check that newspaper i cited) standards, but I really wanted to know _why_ so, this video exists
Yep. I adore the Hinchcliffe era. But ever since I first watched it in mid-80's it made me uncomfortable. I didn't understand the complexities of the racism behind it at the time. My main reactions (even as a white boy) were "Why did they put putty on this guy's face to make him look Chines? There's other asian actors here, why didn't they just get one of them instead of stupid makeup on a white guy? Where are the asian people in the story that aren't jerks?" That was just the INITIAL impression from a 10-year-old! I always found it unpleasant and tended to skip it in my rewatches as a result, despite the fact that it is an interesting story with some gorgeous costuming and general ambiance.
One could probably level some similar criticism at Pyramids of Mars for the only Egyptian characters also being background characters or one absolute jerk, but somehow that skates a bit compared to this.
Then of course there's "Toberman" in the otherwise classic Tomb of the Cyberman. A largely great serial with just that one REALLY racist depiction of a Black man that made me genuinely angry. Of course, this story wasn't available to watch until I was an adult, so there was no confusion there. And yes, while at least they actually cast a Black man instead of putting a white man in black face, there was really no need to bring a Black man in as essentially an indentured servant in a story meant to be from the future. Just unpleasant there.
Overall a well researched video here, Michael. Well done.
I agree with you about Pyramids of Mars. Casting a white guy in the Egyptian role made me side eye Paddy Russell a little, but she did have the common decency not to put him in face paint for the role so as examples of iffy stuff from Doctor Who's past go it's a lot more mild than Talons or Toberman in Tomb of the Cybermen.
Thanks for watching!
a little reading for context of illusionist of the period.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chung_Ling_Soo
Interesting you mention Chung Ling Soo, because his name came up a couple of times in the Kate Orman essay much of my Fu Manchu discussion is sourced from. I can't pretend to be an expert on him though
Chung Ling Soo (a white American passing himself off as Chinese) was imitating Ching Ling Foo who actually was Chinese.
OMG this is so True!!! The racism in this episode is extremely obvious to me as a Chinese. And I've seen that when racism is discussed, people typically overlook bigotry directed at Asians and Chinese.
Yes it is mildly racist. But so what?
To be fair I don't think you needed a 46 minute video to work that one out, but then again when you see the excuses people make these days to do and say racist stuff, I guess yeah you did.
Would you believe me if I told you this was not meant to be 46 minutes long? Originally I was shooting for 15
It would be nice to be able to dispose of this story in fifteen minutes, but the racism in it is like the layers of an onion; you start by pointing out the most egregious example (possibly the yellowface?) and peel that away, and then there’s more (the only words of an actual Chinese language that Tom Baker speaks in Part One being Ni hao); peel that away, then there’s all the horrid racial stereotypes, again indulged in casually by the Doctor and Leela; peel that away, then there’s the racist dialogue particularly in the mouth of George Litefoot, which the Doctor almost never criticises or passes judgment on (it seems the actors or the director missed at least one opportunity to contextualise Litefoot’s views as regressive and backward, that was actually implicit in the script). It’s thoroughly baked in.
To add to the horribleness of all this endemic racism, there’s the whole rampant denialism that all of this even exists in the story, uttered up to this day (look at so many comments in this comment section for starters, that flatly attempt to argue the case). So yes, because so many flippantly dismiss the subject ("hee haw, Hinchcliffe Maloney and Holmes being casually racist was just being true to the racism of narrative sources such as the Fu Manchu stories and films, which makes it okay"), I can’t foresee a time when such an explanatory video *won't* require a video essay of these dimensions to cover it.
@@Xanthe_Cat the layers of it is what inspired the format of this video actually. I liked the idea of starting with the obvious stuff then slowly digging into the more nuanced levels as it went. Again I only meant this to be a 15 minute quick one but the more layers I found in my research the more digging I had to do. Throw in the many disclaimers I felt I had to do to justify myself as a born and raised Whovian and my discussion at the end and whoops, it's 3/4 of an hour long
Nice video
Damn that's alot of comments
I would say "too bad I'm not readin em" but unfortunately I have been reading them and getting into arguments. I should probably log off tbh
Makes me more curious to hear the BF audios with Jago and Lightfoot.
Same here
They're very good IMHO, and you'll be pleased to know that (as far as I know), they do not go over old Weng-Chiang ground! The first one was (a sort of one-shot "pilot") The Mahogany Murders, then it went on to have several series until Trevor Baxter's (Litefoot) death. Well worth a look. :-)
There is actually at least one further Big Finish audio play in which Tom Baker's Doctor is joined by Jago and Litefoot. It's under the Fourth Doctor Adventures series and not the Jago and Litefoot series, The Justice of Jalxar. :-)
I see the somewhat upsetting material, but it moves the story forward, not the primary focus. The Doctor deals with the malign nature of a villainous character. Every culture and ethnic group has a criminal element that does not apply to the whole of that group. We should not downplay or overhype such issues.
I wonder which interview it is in around 15:08🤔🤔
It's the DVD commentary for The Mind of Evil
Wow, so many comments didn’t watch the video.
Absolutely overrated episode by 1970s fans. As a 1980s fan it was already gross by the time I was seeing repeats 10 years later. I wish people hadn’t got so loudly proud of it for the next 40 years.
Great to see Pertwee was elitist wokerati.
I've seen some accuse Pertwees run of being a bit conservative. And I can see why, what with him working with a military organisation. But he spends his whole run telling the British government where to shove themselves and the actual politics of his run are very left leaning for 70s family TV. I have intentions on a video about The Mutants and how that's basically an anti colonialist pamphlet for example.
Also, yeah. Lots of people calling me this, that and the other did not watch this video. Maddening, really, but I expected it
@@michaelinlofi It’s Pertwee’s paternalism that creeps out people - but it’s in demeanour, not in actions, funnily enough. A lovely dichotomy.
If you want the real conflict of the Pertwee era though - you have to ask the question: Is he for computers or against computers? I guess I can let that one slide because it wasn’t until Microsoft was a household name that “computers” in lay terms meant both the software and the hardware - and that’s where the script can wriggle through.
I love this story, but I can't argue that learning as I grew older that they used yellowface or spoke gibberish did seem pretty bad. A shame, especially as I like Chang so much as a character. It's interesting though - as a kid watching this on vhs, I never thought that the story was saying 'Chinese are bad', just that the bad guys in this particular story happened to be chinese (the bad guy's mooks, anyway).
I found your read of Litefoot odd though - I just skimmed through his scenes on iplayer and I thought that most of the time he didn't seem especially unpleasant towards the chinese in particular - the ch*nks line being an obvious exception, but in my naive youth I didn't know what that meant (I actually thought he said "inscrutable jinx"). But most of the time he's annoyed at criminals and ruffians rather than the chinese - if anything, he seems more accepting of the chinese than pretty much any other secondary character in the story, particularly Jago.
The 'Celestial' term is interesting - I always got the impression that although it was used as a word for Chinese, it was more of a way of describing them as mysterious and exotic rather than just a slur. But I will fully admit that is probably just my reading of the term and have no reason to doubt others who say otherwise!
Happy to explain where I'm coming from with Litefoot, because it's sort of my problem with the serial in a nutshell - almost getting it, but not quite.
Litefoot's collection of Chinese artifacts isn't really an accepting thing, it's more like how the British take stuff from countries they invade. He dismisses Chinese culture as weird, but keeps a collection of treasures from the "Punitive Expeditions" as trophies. It's a very colonialist mindset, for lack of better words. That's why his racism feels more dark to me than Jago's, who says insane things but at the end of the day seems to see everyone the same - a bit like an older person who is mostly with the times but still says wild outdated stuff. If that makes sense.
But again, my trouble is both Jago and Litefoot go completely unchallenged, save for the show generally laughing at Jago for being dumb and stupid.
@@michaelinlofi Thanks for the reply - some good points, although I would say that I think he said that at least one of the items (was it the box?) he has was a gift from the Emperor to his family! But yes, he's definitely got the colonial mindset. Although I don't think he's necessarily dismissing their culture - I always thought he sounded fond of it when he talked about the fireworks, even if he did think it was odd.
I think part of the issue people may have with the story is that it shows, probably fairly honestly, what the mindset of the British was like in that time without calling it out. I actually like it when otherwise heroic characters are shown warts and all, but I suppose the show was still officially meant for children so you're probably right that the doctor should at least have talked about it to Leela, if maybe not the natives. It wouldn't be the first time he's picked his battles though - didn't he basically give human sacrifice a pass back in the Aztecs? Plus, Baker's doctor could be fairly callous about things as I recall.
'I am very white.' What's so white about not knowing the Chinese have more than one language? Whoopi Goldberg played Elizabeth I, or what she jokingly called 'the African Queen,' in white makeup at the 1999 Oscars. Edit: As a middle Eastern, I do not care for Peter Mayock playing an Egyptian, if the tweak of an accent is enough to cause criticism, then we may also have to criticise the Cate Blanchett Elizabeth films for casting English actors as Spanish Ambassadors.
If you made a documentary of the era that Talons is set in you’d expect all of the behaviours you see people doing. You wouldn’t meet someone like Li H’sen Chang so John Bennett is not representing anyone just as Michael Spice’s Weng-Chiang (Magnus Greel) is not representative either. One actor plays the part of a Chinese peasant come magician, one plays the part of a war criminal masquerading as a Chinese Deity.
You can choose to be offended if you like or you can enjoy what is for me the greatest Doctor Who story ever.
If acting is about anybody dressing up as anyone else and pretending to be that character, then why is is bad for an actor of one race to pretend to be a character of another? I don't buy that argument. I recently saw an interview with Russell T Davies saying that straight people shouldn't play gay characters; that's far more bigoted a view than having an English actor play a Chinese-man. The whole point of acting is to inhabit the character of someone who is not like yourself, aided by costume, voice and make-up. What's the difference between adding scars to someone's face or adding make-up to change the tone of their skin? Really, we're just far too sensitive and should get over ourselves.
I agree with you about RTD missing the mark on only gay actors playing gay characters. I don't think it's a bigoted notion per se, but definitely a silly one. I'm not straight myself, and I couldn't give less of a fuck if a straight person played an ace character on TV for example.
As for why race swapping makeup... well, the history behind that being used to mock and degrade is out there, from minstrel shows to the Fu Manchu stuff I described here. It's inherently a crappy thing to do just based on that, especially when people are fighting to have their cultures represented properly. I don't think saying that yellowface sucks is overly sensitive, and even if it was I'd much rather be accused of being overly sensitive than callous any day.
@Gzeebo a completely decent thing to say. Again my own personal opinion is that being a queer person myself I'm not fussed over straight actors playing queer roles (if they can play the part, then great!), but queer actors absolutely deserve to play those roles and should be first in consideration at least. No matter how it's sliced though, suggesting RTD is a bigot for saying that is a disastrously silly thing to say, which I hope I made clear there
@@Gzeebo I don't buy this argument... it really shouldn't matter what your personal attributes are... can you act is all that matters. The fact that you are gay in real life bears no relation to whether you're playing a gay or straight character. If it does, then you can't be that great an actor if you HAVE to be gay to play a gay character or HAVE to be straight to play a straight character. It's as bad as saying that you HAVE to be a millionaire to be able to play Bruce Wayne. If you're a decent actor, then you inhabit that role. Should we only give acting roles for royalty to aristocratic actors? Or working class roles to just working class people. Which is why RTD is a bigot in my opinion as that's exactly what he was suggesting. Also - I don't think gay men in the acting world have been under-represented over the years; granted, there used to be discrimination and we all accept that (it was illegal for example so had to be kept quiet in the 60s etc.).. but looking at the last 20-30 years, I would argue precious little discrimination for being gay in the acting world. At least in this country. If you're talking Saudi, well that's a different argument, of course. I do think you need some of the basic, obvious attributes of a character to play that role. Swapping gender, unless that's part of the style, seems silly. So having a black woman play Henry VIII is just ridiculous. But if the attribute is invisible to the legitimacy of the character (as being gay is, or not being good at maths), then it's game on. I think we should acknowledge that if anyone picks an attribute of someone and uses that as an argument to put them to the top (or bottom) of the list, that as of itself is bigotry, regardless of whether the intentions were good, bad or otherwise. You only need to reverse it to see that. Only straight people should play straight people because gay people have no idea what that feels like... how would that come across? There would be outrage and quite right.
I have yet to watch this episode specifically because it looked racially insensitive. I must do so now just to come back to this video when I get a chance.
The strange thing about this conversation is that I've seen fans of the show, of around my own age, become less and less able to acknowledge the racism as time has gone on. Around the 90s, the consensus seemed to be that it could be acknowledged, but mostly waved away by thinking of it as 'of its time'. Once a younger generation matured who weren't so willing to accept this as a get-out - in particular when this was expressed via DWM's 'Time Team' - many older fans who'd settled comfortably into the 'of it's time' defence, seemed to dig their heels in and suddenly refuse to see that there was any issue at all. From what I saw of this backlash on Twitter, they seemed to want to paint the Time Team reaction as shrill, humorless and overly earnest - but as it was self-evidently nothing of the sort, I suspect what they really resented was how casually the new generation recognised what they saw, and how willing they were to make fun of it without making excuses. I think the most striking example of this tin-eared regression on the part of some of the older fandom came in a fairly recent Doctor Who magazine review of the Season 14 Blu-Ray set. The review noted that you can't discuss Talons of Weng Chiang without acknowledging the elephant in the room ... before going on to talk about the poorly realised giant rat ...
Thanks for your perspective on this. I think the take away is that a lot of the "of its time" crowd never really believed it was offensive, but said something to that effect to cover their bases. When people come along saying "no it's still pretty bad even for its time", the mask comes off and they push back. Not necessarily all, mind you - I think I mentioned in this video I subscribed to the "of its time" mentality for some years before taking a more critical eye to Talons.
Incidentally, I believe I saw the season 14 review you speak of. Naming the giant rat as the elephant in the Talons room screams of being deliberately obtuse and provocative to me
Any series that runs this long, is gonna have moments like this. In Star Trek it’s Code of Honor. The only difference is that Code of Honor is a shitty first season TNG episode and this episode is otherwise great. It’s borne out of dumb choices and unexamined biases rather then any conscious hatred. This is how you get a show as openly progressive as Star Trek with a racist episode. This is how you get Doctor Who having an episode that’s racist towards Chinese people and another one that isn’t. I can completely understand why someone would throw the baby out with the bath water here. (the episode not the whole show that would be absurd) But you also shouldn’t be mad at people who still like it while acknowledging that it’s racist. We just have to acknowledge that this was a bad idea and move on.
First of all, love the Odo pfp. Iconic, honestly.
I didn't say I was mad at people who do like it, in fact I explicitly outlined that my intention was not to brow beat those who do enjoy this serial. It's why I brought up the fact that I like Help!, to emphasize that to look down at people who do like it would be immensely hypocritical of me.
And you are right, shows that have existed for this long will have skeletons in the cupboard. I like your example of Star Trek - Code of Honor is an astonishingly offensive piece of work. The early characterisation of the Klingons also dances into dodgy territory on occasion - not actively racist per se, but definitely iffy at times in the first couple of TNG seasons.
I agree that most of what went wrong in Talons was unconscious bias rather than active hatred. It's why my specific phrasing was "I do not think they were racists, but they did make racist decisions". It's all shades of grey, innit.
I do have to side eye Holmes a little bit though, as he was allegedly in the process of writing an Auton serial set in Singapore named "Yellow Fever and How to Cure It" in 1986, but I don't think he was a bigot. Way more likely just ignorant.
@@michaelinlofi I did watch the whole video so I know you’re not browbeating I’m just saying. Also thank you, I got the idea because of the pun in my username and I found it funny that Odo just so happens to fit the color scheme of my pride flag. It’s just so damn silly to have a male pile of goo that categorically cannot be a lesbian be my image.
You're all good, guv. And I hope I didn't come across as too defensive - I've been in comment wars with people who have straight up admitted to not watching the video so it's been a lot. Still, expected that sort of thing when I pressed publish so, cest la vie I spose
Yes, fully agree, quite racist. I will say that Jago is a bright spot, in that he appears to be somewhat cosmopolitan for his time. So happy to see that the actor was in New Who in 'The Unicorn and the Wasp'. The Doctor's lack of any commentary on the bigotry is odd. As someone commented, the Doctor went a little too native for Victorian London. Also insulting to find out that the 'chinese' spoken by Tom Baker is nonsense, especially considering that the third Doctor's Jon Pertwee spoke accurately with the Chinese ambassador.
I have been a fan of Doctor Who since about 1978. I am old as hell, LOL. My first Doctor was actually Tom. I was isolated in rural Arizona and didn't even know that regeneration was a thing. You can imagine the mind-numbing shock eleven year old me had watching "Logopolis" when Baker regenerated into Davison.
I loved loved loved "The Talons of Weng-Chiang" when I first watched it. I loved it the tenth time I watched it.
But it's unwatchable now. Once that switch got flipped in my head around 2005 or so I can't but cringe at how awful the racism is and how pervasive it is. There is SO much racism that Whovians have argued that Holmes intended the whole thing as satire and the director didn't get it and just filmed it and directed it without the intended sarcasm and everything. But of course, that STILL doesn't work as an explanation and it's still fundamentally racist and unwatchable.
And I think I may agree with almost everything you said. My only possible quibble is that the "celestial" quote from Tennant in "The Giggle" was an attempt to reference the original introductory episode of the Toymaker, which was "The Celestial Toymaker". I personally wouldn't have included that but I get the idea Davies was going for.
I was very happy to see trans inclusion in "The Star Beast" and subsequent episodes, of course. I didn't find anything problematic in there (and I've taken courses on trans awareness) but you did, and after your excellent commentary on "The Talons of Weng-Chiang" and found examples I still didn't see (like the fake Chinese language that Baker engages in - that went right past me), I think you are pretty damn good at this.
I'm super-impressed. Not that you care from a rando old guy on the Internet. But good job, sir. Have a Subscribe as well.
/ Pertwee's reaction to the Brigadier's Hokkien confusion is *chef's kiss*
Thank you for the comments! Always happy to hear from anyone if my work has had an effect. I definitely believe Holmes meant it as commentary, but the fact of the matter is he had no idea what the hell he was talking about.
The reference to "celestial" in The Giggle, I do agree RTD probably meant nothing but the best there. But he also displayed understanding of the undertones the original had in behind the scenes material, which was why I had that "hang on" moment. Otherwise I don't think I'd have thought twice about it in all honesty.
And I can't take credit for the points on The Star Beast, most of that was based on discussion from trans Whovians I took notice of on Twitter following broadcast. It seems to me that the overall reaction was that it was a net positive (which it is) and that again RTD had nothing but the best of intentions, but that there were some question marks in execution. Invaluable conversation really, it only means Doctor Who will continue to get better at this.
When I watched this serial, I always felt that the Chinese had been meant to be the victims of Magnus Greel, who was NOT Chinese. He had tricked the people who saw him arrive into thinking he was a god. He then capitalized on that to cause them to follow him, believing that their god excused any actions they might have made, no matter how evil.
Having said this, it does not excuse the "yellowface" Li H'sen Chang portrayal, or the portrayal of Chinese in general in this serial. Any of the Chinese actors cast could have been cast as Chang.
This point of view did, however, delay my realization of that the inherent racism in this serial for many years. i had to "grow up" in order to see it. It also may have had to do with my being about 10 years old at the time.
In reflection, there was actually very little story requirement for the "bad guys" to be Chinese at all. It could fairly easily have been re-written as some cult recruited from the criminal classes of London (although that might be just as stereotypical as the Chinese turned out to be)
I agree with you. It's why I outlined that a lot of the malice behind the Fu Manchu character is placed on Greel rather than Chang. But unfortunately it fails to subvert most of the tropes in any meaningful sense
I always find it funny and ironic that the people who insist on defending the story and deny any racism are not surprisingly white lol. Like I don’t think the story should be banned or anything but to deny it’s racist and judge people who refuse to watch it is to me pure insanity
Er sorry as someone learning Mandarin myself I have to correct you about Tom Baker, ni hao ma which is what he begins with IS genuine Mandarin, ma is effectively a question mark at the end of a sentence and is the Doctor asking literally "You good?" As in how are you. Im not going to pretend I can catch the rest of what he says after that but unless you know all the dialects of Chinese neither can you say none of that is Chinese. Thats you deciding because it sounds like gibberish it must automatically be so despite admitting yourself you havent looked into it fully, which ironically is you yourself being racist....as for actors, actors are trained to pretend, that often includes pretending to be nationalities (including made up ones like aliens in doctor who) you arent, and it doesnt necessarily involve make up to do that, but if we only got actors to play things they actually were then it wouldnt be acting. The definition of racism is fear of another race, not featuring another race, your generation really need to get straight the difference between racism which is actively hating a race and what you consider an insensitive depiction of a race that youre only highlighting because they look so different from you that you can identify them as different. Which in itself under your terminology is kinda racist. So I Claudius must be racist cos its English actors portraying Italians but cos they dont need make up nobody cares. The whole analysis is kinda farcical. Everything offends someone doesnt make you right and everyone else wrong. They may well have been able to get a genuine Chinese actor for that role but they may have wanted the guy they got, thats got nothing to do racism, thats about acting. These productions have their personal contacts and actors they may want to use, and thats all it wouldve been about. The fact society today has now switched to deciding it finds it unacceptable doesnt change that, societies views on the morality if one thing or another constantly change. Thered be plenty of stuff now considered totally offensive by people from yesteryear (like you swearing in this very video which wouldnt have been acceptable 60 years ago) that you wouldnt bat an eyelid over, that doesnt make you right and them wrong. Its all perspective and that really is all it is. Oh and the word scum is not racist, that word can be applied to anyone. Again you dont use racism correctly.
OK I will address the genuine mistake you point to first, my glib "without looking into it deeply" comment. As a matter of fact, I did.
*"In Talons, the Fourth Doctor shows off his knowledge of Chinese, boasting that he knows “all the dialects”, then - with no Pik-Sen Lim on set to coach Tom Baker in his lines - speaks gibberish."*
This is from Kate Orman's essay on _The Talons of Weng-Chiang_ which I came across in my research. She notes in a footnote that her source is a Chinese Australian friend of hers, whose family was reduced to hysterical laughter by Baker's "Chinese". I suspected it to be the case, as a lot of shows of the time did the same thing (and in fact apparently the Russian spoken in The Curse of Fenric is also largely rubbish), but I did double check before I wrote that into the video. I did however note that the "ni hao" at the beginning is real Chinese, but I'm not gonna give Holmes much credit for knowing "hi how are you" in Mandarin as I suspect that's _all_ the Mandarin he spoke.
As for the rest of everything you said, it relies entirely on the premise of "racism is only when you hate people of other races". That's just not true, and you kind of disprove that point yourself in your own comment when you suggest I'd have been racist for not looking into Baker's Chinese properly and assuming it's rubbish he made up. You're right! If that had been what I did, that would be me doing something racist. Racism is not just hatred, it is ignorance as well. That ignorance is well on display in this serial - it is based on tropes that were popularised through the works of Fu Manchu - a novel series written by a man who knew nothing of Chinese culture (which I did discuss in this video!) Those ignorant tropes caused genuine harm to Chinese English people, and perpetuating them sucks. So yes, this serial is racist. It's not maliciously so, but it is through ignorance. Again, I researched this point before I opened my mouth. I invite you to look through my sources, I linked them all. :)
@@michaelinlofi you haven't researched the definition of racism actually, racism is active antoganism and hatred of a race, not just depicting a caricature which literally nobody takes seriously, either the Chinese or anyone else, this whole serial as you well know is simply a pastiche or parody even of the Fu Man Chu films of the 50s. That's got nothing to do with any Chinese prejudice or else they wouldn't have hired any Chinese actors within the show. Nor do you address any of my other points that if this is offensive then so is the serial I Claudius or any film or TV show where people are pretending to be things they're not and that's a ridiculous argument. A good majority of Shakespeare is depicted by actors who aren't the things they're portraying and you or others being offended doesn't mean everyone has to be offended that's kinda just your problem not everyone's. Youre going to have a hard time enjoying old TV and film then, again, your problem not everyone's. You best not watch 55 Days in Peking or Around the World in 80 Days, both films featuring white actors playing other nationalities. Is it on the nose, sure, I aggree would be nice if they just got those races to play those roles but not racism. Racism is not just a buzz word for people to use everytime they're a bit uncomfortable about one nationality playing another. Also I find your use of swearing offensive, see? We can all find something to be offended by. If I said your use of swearing was offensive and unacceptable would you stop swearing or would you say because it's the norm to swear now that there's nothing wrong with it? Again, sensibilities change. There is no right and wrong. Only perspective.
I didn't speak to your other points because I assumed you were being facetious. Apparently you aren't.
There is a world of difference between representing a period of history (I Claudius) and employing stereotypes that have in the past caused active harm. I feel like that's obvious?
And sure, Talons is a pastiche of Fu Manchu. But it does nothing to criticise the racist tropes it's based on. It fails as commentary. If there's a point of comparison in my mind, it would be John Carpenter's Big Trouble in Little China. Carpenter wanted to direct a love letter to Wuxia kung fu films and the like, but was also extremely conscious of tropes in how Asian people were presented in cinema at the time. So, he hired heaps of Asian actors and consulted with them frequently to ensure his film was a loving tribute to Wuxia films and not a mockery. The result is a deeply hilarious movie where the Asian lead gets to be the kickass hero and Kurt Russell is the glorified comic relief sidekick. All the actors such as James Hong, Dennis Dun and Carter Wong speak highly of the film and the opportunities it provided them. By comparison, Talons is frankly embarrassing.
Also when did it become controversial to say blackface/yellowface sucks? It just. Does. And for the record, lots of shoes I love have, unfortunately, done that. I mentioned The War Games did it. I love that serial. I had that whole disclaimer about how much I love that Beatles film in spite of its highly dodgy representation of Indian people. I can like something and still acknowledge it did something dodgy. It just so happens that I think Talons is much worse on those fronts.
Incidentally I did actually go back and forth about whether coarse language was appropriate for this video. In the end I went in favour of being faithful to my usual writing style. If that's not for you, then fair do's, can't argue that i spose
@@michaelinlofi why would they be criticising something they're essentially paying homage to by replicating it and that's all that's going on here. Dr Who does parodies or homages or whichever word you want to use to pieces of art that the writers are influenced by, cos as a long running series it constantly needs new food to chew on, in this case you get two for one cos it's Sherlock crossed with the Fu Man Chu plotline of the old films the writers no doubt watched growing up and remember fondly. That's like me saying you should criticise something you watched that you remember fondly when you've got no problem with it because I might have a problem with it. And again we come back to sensibilities, just cos you might have a problem with something doesn't mean everybody has to, the world isn't black and white mate and the writers of Dr who were not Nazis, they wrote a piece of fiction for entertainment purposes they couldn't have known fifty years later new sensibilities would suddenly decide they didnt like it. Again, perspective. And plenty of Chinese have zero issue with the story so you being outraged on behalf of Chinese people is kind of "cringe" (the adjective is cringeworthy by the way, cringe is the verb) in itself cos most people couldn't care less. Nobody is using this old now piece of art to judge Asians by. Literally no one. And they wouldn't have in the late 70s either. And no I'm not being facetious I'm calling out this social justice warrior crap that people like you go on with. Okay so you're uncomfortable with the story or elements, well sucks to be you then doesn't it, the rest of us watch it, forget about it and go and talk to real Chinese people, as I said I'm learning Mandarin, not for one second do I think anything in this episode of Dr Who depicts real Chinese culture. Everything in art is stereotypes, there's a stereotype of pompous English gentlemen there's a stereotype of an Irishman, it's not just the Chinese stereotyped here, TV IS stereotypes. You're just focusing on Chinese cos they're an eastern culture and no sorry there's no difference between this and I Claudius which surely shouldve been done with Italian actors if we follow your philosophy, but racist only applying to eastern or black people cos you happen to notice them more than other European cultures is descriminatory in itself. I'm making points here, I'm in my 40s and you're clearly still in your 20s or 30s earliest, you could actually learn something here. Think about it instead of racing into the social justice warrior rott.
No Talons is not racist.
Firstly: The accusation that Talons unfairly stereotypes Chinese people as villains. That's utter nonsense. Yes, these particular Chinese are villains. But how about Ghost Light? Isn't the line 'White kids firebombed it' stereotyping white kids? The Time Meddler goes pretty large on stereotyping Vikings, the Android Invasion has incredibly offensive stereotypes of little English Villages and I'm pretty sure that The Web Planet was incredibly hurtful towards ants. Doctor Who needed a villain of the week. It would have been pretty impossible to run 26 years vetoing all possible villains just in case it hurt someone's feelings. No one thinks Ramon Salamander from Enemy of the World is equivalent to and therefore offensive to all South Americans, let alone South American Dictators even though South America was full of Dictators at the time.. Magnus Greel isn't even Chinese for heaven's sake, he's an alien who takes on Chinese trappings and as for the stereotypes, you can find those in plenty of old Chinese movies too, stereotypes exist for a reason but no one thinks stereotypes are reality. The point is, if you accuse Weng Chiang of racism, you have to accuse at least 60% of the canon as racist as well. The Aztecs - racist, or is it ok for John Ringham to play a MesoAmerican? Why didn't the BBC ship half a dozen MesoAmerican actors out of Mexico for the purposes of non racist authenticity? Enemy of the World - racist. Android Invasion - racist. Day of the Daleks - racist, or are you really telling me the Ogrons aren't in blackface? Is the Giant Rat that attacks Leela an example of Rattism? The fact that it was a large stuffed toy and not a real rat, is that discrimination against all the talented acting rats out there?
But you're not doing that. You're not enforcing the rules equally, you're singling this serial out because it's low hanging fruit and you get to make yourself look good by pointing and shouting 'racism'.
Secondly: The Yellowface. At the time Weng Chiang was made, there were just 5 Asian male actors working in Britain. These were: Robert Lee, Burt Kwouk, Richard Ng, David Yip and Vincent Wong. None of them were available to play Li H'sen Chang. Vincent Wong was in Weng Chiang, but up until then his career was only as an extra meaning he clearly did not have an equity card and therefore was not allowed to take a speaking role under Equity rules - and that goes for a few others like Dennis Chin. Although unlike Chin, Wong did later become a full actor and has had a good career. David Yip was only 26 in 1977 so far too young to play the late middle aged Chang. Richard Ng spent 1977 making movies in Hong Kong where he spent much of his career and so was out of the country. Robert Lee had an episode of Hawaii Five-0 in 1977 and while I obviously cannot confirm the exact dates, it's entirely possible he was also out of the country at the time. Burt Kwouk had 4 tv appearances in 1977 and may or may not have been available, but at the same time, as much as I love Kwouk who is one of my favourite actors, I personally would not have cast him in the role of Chang. Kwouk was an amazing actor as a young man, but by the time he hit his forties, he had really slowed down. He is slow and terrible in Four To Doomsday compared to how he would bounce all over the screen in The Sentimental Agent or as Cato in the Pink Panther movies.
So what you have here is a story that utilises a Chinese character as a major role and not one of the four Chinese men who are legally allowed to work in the UK as an actor at that time are available to take the role or are the right casting to play the role. Chang isn't in Yellowface because of racism, there are plenty of Chinese extras in the serial and many of the actors I mention have roles in Doctor Who at other times. David Yip in Destiny of the Daleks (1979). Burt Kwouk in Four To Doomsday (1982). Therefore there was little to no choice but to cast a white person in the role or scrap the entire story - which could not have happened because it was integral to the development of Leela. You assume that yellowface and/or blackface is only and purely down to racism, but that's because you simply don't look for any other reasons. The fact is that the numbers of Asian and Black actors required to cover all these roles simply didn't exist in Britain at the time. If you look at the CVs of actors like Kwouk or Rudolph Walker, they have literally never been out of work because they were so in demand to cover Asian and Black roles respectively. A racist tv industry would have meant that Kwouk and Walker never worked. Instead they are two of the most successful actors Britain ever produced. Kwouk has more entries on his IMDB CV than Ian McKellen for goodness sake. But your entire video simply jumps to the assumption that the people who made Weng Chiang were just racist and therefore acted out of hate of Chinese people.
That's simply wrong and is nothing more than your opinion which ignores all of the evidence against it that you haven't bothered to look for.
Nice argument, unfortunately:
- I qualify my statements by pointing to other occasions where Doctor Who did something dodgy (including Enemy of the World and The War Games, the latter of which I multiple times call a work of borderline genius in general)
- I state multiple times I do not believe Holmes and Maloney woke up in the morning with a hatred for Chinese people
- I demonstrate ways that elements of the serial seem to intend to subvert the Fu Manchu trope its based on
- racism isn't just blind hatred, it's more complex than that
- your examples at the beginning are astonishingly facetious, and I think you know that (the Android Invasion one is particularly silly, come on man)
- your argument seems to rely entirely on the concept that I think its racist that a Chinese man is a villain, which is not remotely what I said.
- Magnus Greel is not an alien. The serial itself states this.
- I honestly do consider the Ogrons to be on mildly shakey ground in terms of make-up, but I will again state I severely doubt any actual ill intent was meant in their design.
I am unconvinced that you watched the video through and through.
@@michaelinlofi You're right. I didn't watch the video. You jumped to your opinion in the first five seconds, I honestly I couldn't get past the cringe and I certainly wasn't going to waste an entire hour on it. I gave you ten minutes which I thought was more than fair but it just got totally unwatchable.
Fair enough that you mention other serials being 'dodgy', but the fact is that Talons does nothing that Aztecs also does, if not worse as no Aztecs were involved with the making of that serial at all, so why single out Talons?
No I'm not being facetious about Android Invasion. Why are stereotypes only bad if they are about a foreign culture? The argument you are making could easily apply to the Brigadier - a very, very English stereotype - and therefore according to you he must be of racist origin - the stuffy old mustachioed military man who is so stereotyped he can be seen in everything from The Navy Lark to Colonel Blimp. What exactly separates the Brig from Clive Candy or Captain Povey? And why don't we see this stereotypical English officer portrayed in any other Nationality? The reason you say this is facetious is because it holes your argument below the waterline. No it's a perfectly good argument. You can choose to ignore it if you wish, but it doesn't make it go away.
That said. No, racism is not complex. Racism is hatred of a person due to their skin colour. Do you know why that is the only acceptable definition of racism? Because it is the only provable aspect of racism, usually because racists have no problem admitting that they are racist. They are proud of it. It doesn't matter how many sociologists or whoever have written however many books about it, or claims about privilege plus power, any other definitions of racism or 'complexities' about racism cannot be proven in any way. They require assumptions to be made about a person's state of mind and therefore do not constitute provable evidence in any form.
You can make all the assertions you like about Holmes and Maloney, but you were not there and you do not have access to their thoughts or opinions or processes and neither does Kate Orman. What you have is a lot of assumptions that you take to give you the right to be judge, jury and executioner. As I replied to another of your comments, Mens Rea matters in everything. If you kill someone, the intention is the difference between murder and manslaughter. If I wrongly enter your house there's a big difference between if I do it because I was drunk and forgot where I live and if I do it sober, tooled up ready to burgle you. You cannot throw that important legal distinction away simply because it doesn't suit you.
Is Talons an act of hatred against a group of people because of their skin colour? Obviously not. Is Griffith's The Birth of a Nation an act of hatred against a group of people because of their skin colour. Obviously yes. Parts of that movie are written and filmed specifically to demonise black people, in the same way that some modern Hollywood films are written and filmed specifically to demonise white people. It is very easy to spot a racist film. Once again, actual racists are proud of their racism because they think it is a virtue, therefore they don't hide it. They proclaim it loudly. Racism is extremely easy to spot. If you have to hunt for it, you're hunting to have your own prejudices confirmed and nothing says hunting like a 45 minute video.
Now you can say that there are problems with Talons, because there are. You can even hold an opinion that it is racist. But you cannot state for a fact that it is racist, because you do not have that fact. If you did, your video would have been 30 seconds long and it would have gone: Yes Talons is racist because Robert Holmes hated Chinese people and said so in multiple interviews how much he hated them. If you don't have that then everything you have is circumstantial.
Hahahahaha
Again if you'd watched the video before charging in, you'd have seen the bit where I do bring up the Brigadier. I explain how he's a beloved character, but he's also not perfect and occasionally the Doctor has a go at him when he says something like "only Great Britain could be trusted with the launch codes".
And on the topic of racism being more complex than just active hatred, I'd much rather listen to the people who've experienced the blind hate and the casual ignorance of racism because I reckon those who experience it have a clearer idea on what it is.
@@thedirectorschair1054 "Do you know why that is the only acceptable definition of racism? Because it is the only provable aspect of racism, usually because racists have no problem admitting that they are racist. They are proud of it." - Just as you dismissed this whole video in 10 minutes, I dismissed your entire argument after reading that. Because it's just an outright lie, as is most of what you said, but that was the most blatant one.
I hope to god you're not in a legal profession in any capacity, because you'd let off the majority of criminals on the basis that you can't 'prove' they did the crime because they didn't confess to it.
This was a great video!
Thank you!
I remember my first time watching through Classic Who and seeing people talk about how “amazing” this serial was. But upon watching I couldn’t get past how horrifically racist it is. Also it was pretty boring.
Even putting aside the racist asian representation in the Serial, another big problem is that it's too long at 6 Parts.
If it was shortened down to 4 parts, a lot of the more casually racist lines could have been cutout, in addition to some of the padding (like the pointless sequence where Jago and Litefoot escape only to be captured a minute later).
It's frustrating because I do like a lot of Robert Holmes' DW serials (especially 'The Time Warrior, 'The Deadly Assassin' and 'The Caves of Androzani') and I wish that he had lived to write for the 7th Doctor.
A Robert Holmes 7th Doctor script would have been the darkest shit Doctor Who ever broadcast and I'm fascinated by what that could have been
I disagree. It was never intended or even remotely racist we should not fault things of the time it was made it was a different time their was no social media or any of that rubbish. It was just an actor playing a chinese character it was very common practice in those days no one even thought of it as racist and if they have that's a small minority i have mates and cousins who are asian that are Dr. Who fans and watched this story they weren't even remotely bothered about the yellowface all they did was enjoy the story for what it was this over sensitivity and political correctness is getting so over the top it's ridiculous what's unfortunate is not the so called racism in this but the fact that that's the main focus of the story rather than what a great story it is.
I disagree that it's modern people applying today's standards to old media. As I said in this video, even in 1980 it was being called out for its racist content.
I agree Robert Holmes didn't intend it to be racist. But intent and impact are very different things. The essay by Kate Orman I sourced a lot of the discussion on Fu Manchu from contains quotes from Chinese Doctor Who fans who hate this serial and couldn't finish it. When it comes down to the impact the serial has, intention becomes immaterial
@@michaelinlofi No intention is not immaterial. Mens Rea is a thing. I have no doubt that Kate Orman found some Chinese people who hate this serial, but there are over a billion Chinese people, I guarantee that I can find a Chinese person who hates milk. I can find a Chinese person who hates Goats and will attack them on sight. I can find a Chinese person who hates Ang Lee for selling out to Hollywood and refuses to watch any of his movies.
The fact that some people hate some thing is of no consequence whatsoever. On a planet of 8 billion people, it is literally impossible to say a word or make an action that someone, somewhere is not going to hate you for. You would be left locked in a padded cell, doing nothing, going nowhere, saying nothing if you paid any attention whatsoever to such tripe. But at least no one would be offended at your existence, except for the poor taxpayer paying for your upkeep.
If you have any values at all, you are going to cause offence to others. Apologising for that is a fool's game.
@@thedirectorschair1054
You could probably find a lot of Chinese people who hate milk; China has the highest incidence of lactose intolerance in the world and dairy products are largely absent from their cuisine (which comes first; the absence or the intolerance? Probably both in a cycle.)
Kate Orman isn't the only source I could find on Asian fans being uncomfortable with this serial. That newspaper clipping from 1980 where the Chinese Canadian council asked TVOntario not to broadcast Talons for decency reasons proves this has always been a concern with these six episodes.
@@michaelinlofi Yea - I did see that. But I ignored it because it's worthless. It's Canada for goodness sake. Canadians are offended by literally everything. It took me five seconds to find this for example:
"Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing”
The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council has ruled that “Money for Nothing,” the band’s hit, is too offensive for Canadian airwaves. The song is being singled out for using an anti-gay slur (“that little faggot”) three times in its second verse. According to the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council chair, “This is a word that has no place today on the airwaves.” "
I look forward to your next 45 minute video explaining how Mark Knopfler is a raging homophobe because he offended a Canadian as opposed to having literally transcribed the words he heard from a real person in order to tell a story.
"The lead character in "Money for Nothing" is a guy who works in the hardware department in a television/custom kitchen/refrigerator/microwave appliance store. He's singing the song. I wrote the song when I was actually in the store. I borrowed a bit of paper and started to write the song down in the store. I wanted to use a lot of the language that the real guy actually used when I heard him, because it was more real...."
Your arguments do not hold water. It's that simple. They depend on your interpretation and other people's interpretations rather than anything you can actually prove.
As I already said, it is literally impossible to live without offending someone, somewhere. The fact that we are speaking in English right now is going to be offensive to someone. Finding people who take offence is neither difficult, nor evidence of wrongdoing. You're offending me right now with your cringe arguments. Stop making videos you evil man. Kow Tow to my feelings!
Oh wait - do you get to pick and choose who are the right people to offend or not offend? Cos I'm gonna guess you don't care about offending me with your crap arguments?
If you haven't offended other people during your life, then you haven't had a life, you either died at three months old or you've just enslaved yourself to the feelings and whims of other people and never had an opinion or taken an action worthy of the name. Offence is taken, not given. And sure, you're young, you've grown up in a world where the legal system now chooses to recognise offence as some kind of legally actionable idea, so it's something you've grown up accepting. But if you spent five minutes actually thinking about it, you would realise that it's firstly completely unsustainable, that it is necessarily partisan - because again, you're not gonna care that you're offending me, only if you offend someone that matters to you like the Chinese, (therefore 'giving offence' is not the problem - 'who you offend' is the problem and that's just power politics, you're choosing who you are willing to be enslaved to, whose feelings you are going to respect above all else), that it has no basis in legality and that it is cultural suicide.
Let's also not forget the irony of the Chinese Canadians moaning about being offended by a clumsy stereotype when the Chinese are some of the most actually racist people, in one of the most actually racist countries on the planet up to the point of committing genocide against the Uighurs.
www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/16/chinese-social-media-filled-with-anti-black-racist-content-says-watchdog
www.linkedin.com/pulse/qa-why-chinese-people-so-racist-towards-black-eric-olander-%E6%AC%A7%E7%91%9E%E5%85%8B
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_China
If anything we should be defending Talons and saying - look, if China can get their racism down to just portraying clumsy stereotypes on old TV and having a laugh together at how silly it all is, instead of wiping out entire ethnic nationalities out of pure hate, then they are probably moving in the right direction.
From a Chinese view ,it is definitely very strange to see a white actor played a Chinese god who actually represent for culture & education as a evil. the toy maker is new to me ,i am totally fine with that since it's just the costume.but this is a "surprise" .It is called racism and shows disrespect to Chinese .Some comments make me laugh,why is our culture get offended and it is totally ok? someone please explain me about that😂
Surely, wouldn’t this be cause for banning the serial from streaming altogether? Its racism cannot be excused, so why is it still publicly available?
Is it responsible to pretend it never happened? If it is simply erased and forgotten, would anything really be learned from it?
All this was pretty heavily discussed when BritBox added those content warnings. I personally think that's the best option: upfront honesty about the content of the serial. It's not having it out there with no label warning what it is, and it's not deleting it and sweeping it under the rug
It is so racist it is a burlesque of racism, so I forgive it.
It is massively racist and cringey to watch… but GOD DAMN is it a fucking banger
I do have to admit a lot of dialogue from this one sticks in the mind.
"I have not harmed her, Doctor."
"Take my advice. Don't."
Holmes is just... really good
They say the past is a foreign country. Here we have another white, middle class boy, not even born when the series aired but who understands it all oh-so-well. I could explain why you are wrong but it would take too long and I would not like to deprive 'people of colour' everywhere their champion, their hero, their voice and their liberator. Instead I shall leave this Poundland William Wilberforce to his messaniac pretensions and watch something a little more informed and, dare I say it, adult
Oh darling, you could show a movie in IMAX with that level of projection.
This was meant to be an informative investigation, not an act of heroism. At no point did i consider myself a "liberator" or whatever the fuck you said, I'd have to have some screws loose to even approach that idea. It's a research essay in video form, not a manifesto.
Settle down, babes.
_“and [I will] watch something a little more informed and, dare I say it, adult”_
What, the Black and White Minstrel Show? I heard that one’s popular amongst the ‘Don’t-judge-the-past’ and ‘anti-woke’ crowd. F*ck off.
No.
This is dumb.
Snowflakes
Well, snowflakes are pretty.
Are you saying I'm pretty? Are we about to kiss??
So being a snowflake is pointing out when something racist is racist? I'll remember that the next time I point out something racist, snowflake and proud.