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Post by Philip Ayres on Jan 17, 2020 11:41:46 GMT
This Jazz toy was the one which prompted complaints from Scatman Crothers as the shell was Caucasian. Myth. Crothers died two and a bit years before the Pretender toy came out en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scatman_CrothersI've seen fans arguing that Jazz should have a black humanoid Pretender shell, but as far as I can see the argument is based on the actor playing him in the cartoon being black. Please enlighten me if there's more to it than that and I've missed something. |
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Post by Jaymz on Jan 17, 2020 13:21:53 GMT
I've seen fans arguing that Jazz should have a black humanoid Pretender shell, but as far as I can see the argument is based on the actor playing him in the cartoon being black. Please enlighten me if there's more to it than that and I've missed something. The original toy is black. But seriously, why shouldn't he be black? Why are they all white? I think Metalhawk is the only one who isn't, and I assume that's because of the market he was sold in. Representation matters. The cartoon VA reminds me of some arguments against Destro being a white guy as the VA was a black man. When it was pointed out that Destro walks around in the cartoon with his chest out, the response was that he's wearing a peach jumper. |
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Post by Philip Ayres on Jan 17, 2020 14:04:45 GMT
No, there's no reason he shouldn't Jazz's shell shouldn't be black and yes the humanoid Pretenders are not as ethnically diverse as they should be.
Somewhere between the 13 Humanoid Western Pretenders, one should have been non white. Certainly if it was done no I imagine one would be. GI Joe managed better than that in 1982
Wouldn't even have remotely complained if Jazz's shell had been black but I'm not sure I see him having a white Pretender shell as being the problem I've seen in made out to be.... which is why I thought I might be missing something. I can get that some fans somehow see Jazz as black, which I'm guessing is down to the G1 actor and his portrayal, but he isn't to me, he's just Jazz.
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Post by Philip Ayres on Jan 17, 2020 14:06:21 GMT
The cartoon VA reminds me of some arguments against Destro being a white guy as the VA was a black man. When it was pointed out that Destro walks around in the cartoon with his chest out, the response was that he's wearing a peach jumper. That's mad. |
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Post by tomwe on Jan 17, 2020 14:18:33 GMT
This Jazz toy was the one which prompted complaints from Scatman Crothers as the shell was Caucasian. Myth. Crothers died two and a bit years before the Pretender toy came out en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scatman_CrothersI thought I'd seen him interviewed somewhere where he said that. Urban legend as you say I guess. |
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Post by Benn on Jan 17, 2020 16:32:23 GMT
On the subject of Jazz, it looks to me like the toy on the catalogue has darker skin anyway. It’s hard to tell (basically just his jaw) but it looks a lot darker than Grimlock’s.
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Post by Llama God on Jan 18, 2020 10:34:29 GMT
No, there's no reason he shouldn't Jazz's shell shouldn't be black and yes the humanoid Pretenders are not as ethnically diverse as they should be. Somewhere between the 13 Humanoid Western Pretenders, one should have been non white. Certainly if it was done no I imagine one would be. GI Joe managed better than that in 1982 Wouldn't even have remotely complained if Jazz's shell had been black but I'm not sure I see him having a white Pretender shell as being the problem I've seen in made out to be.... which is why I thought I might be missing something. I can get that some fans somehow see Jazz as black, which I'm guessing is down to the G1 actor and his portrayal, but he isn't to me, he's just Jazz. There is indeed no real reason why any of the characters from an alien race should be black or white, or why any of them should be male, female, non-binary, transgender, or whatever, because those things wouldn't necessarily apply to an alien race. BUT the media is consumed by a species (us) that does indeed possess all of those characteristics, and so to allow people to fully engage with it then representation of all diverse types of person is important, because people respond when they see themselves reflected in a thing. I didn't notice this sort of thing when I was growing up, but then I went to an all-white school and had no friends or family of non-white background, so it never even occurred to me that any of the characters would not be white. And I was so used to seeing casts of mostly white characters in things that it never felt important. But non-white kids would have immediately noticed that Jazz was portrayed by a non-white voice actor, and that would have been important to them. To see his Pretender shell being given white skin would have seemed to have been a message saying that this was not for them. You could make the point that Pretender shells were just that - things they hid inside to pretend to be something else; but if you go that route what it says is that for a black person to succeed in the Transformers' world they have to pretend to be white, and that's probably not the message anyone would want... So yeah, to you and me this wouldn't have mattered, but we're white and we see people like ourselves everywhere; but to non-white people it would've been quite different. (Indeed, you would have thought that to maximise their customer base that Hasbro would have also considered similar factors in attracting consumers - diverse character representation means more attraction to a wider range of buyers which means more money. You'd have thought. But given that the company was, I assume, run by white men at the time it probably would not have occurred to them either.) But to the question of the poll..! I do indeed love that Bumblebee, and he's the first one I bought. He was also the first Bumblebee I owned, having failed to acquire his original toy. But Grimlock is a much more interesting design. Sure, the robot is slightly lacking compared to the original, but given it has to fit in a Pretender shell it can be forgiven. I also really like Starscream's shell, too, although he's the one Classics Pretender that I've yet to acquire. And robot T-Rex will always beat almost anything else, so Grimlock it is. |
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Post by Fortmax2020 on Jan 18, 2020 13:08:50 GMT
I do take your point and largely agree with it but just as gender had been massively enforced in Transformers thinking in recent years I worry other human characteristics will be too.
I think a fictional representation that specifically excludes these things (as they are machine lifeforms) and ultimately goes "hey, these characteristics don't matter to good characterisation and story telling" would produce a much more equal and representative story ultimately.
But I'm also the kind of person who finds Transformers down the pub and dancing bewildering too. It takes me right out of story whenever I see it.
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Post by The Doctor on Jan 20, 2020 15:44:27 GMT
As a child I had no idea Jazz was voiced by a black person (or of any colour) because it was just their voice. I generally can't tell from voices (especially in audio dramas) what someone looks like unless I already know the actor. I just thought Jazz was an alien robot.
I don't tend to assign racial characteristics to robots. Optimus Prime etc could be voiced by anyone of any background. I don't care. Just do a good performance. Actually, a female voice actor could do it. No reason why not. It's an alien robot.
On a tangent, I've never felt the need to see 'me' in fiction, nor have I ever seen a 'representation' of myself in fiction. I just care about being engaged by stories as my interest in fiction has always been massively more about the stories than the characters. But I do understand I am in the minority when it comes to contemporary views on storytelling. Personally I couldn't care less if a cartoon is voiced by all-white people or all-black people or indeed any mixture of any kinds of people. I just want a good story and personally think anyone should be able to participate in the Arts anyway.
-Ralph
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Post by Grand Moff Muffin on Jan 20, 2020 16:22:22 GMT
On a tangent, I've never felt the need to see 'me' in fiction, nor have I ever seen a 'representation' of myself in fiction. I just care about being engaged by stories as my interest in fiction has always been massively more about the stories than the characters. The prevailing wisdom with TFs in the '80s was apparently that the potential customers were primarily white boys and that sales of the toys and comics would benefit from having a young white male human character interacting with the TFs. Now I feel very strongly that TF stories are all the better for having humans in them, because the contrast accentuates their exotic, robotic nature. But I don't think I got any more out of the stories as a consequence of the humans in question being in my age/race/gender demographic. Yet the powers that be evidently thought that enough of the target demographic would be more engaged with a protagonist who was 'like them'. The humans in the TV toy commercials and the toy ads in the comics were all white boys. Buster and Spike were young white males (a bit older than the audience to make them a bit cooler - e.g. they could drive), as was Sammy Harker in 'Man of Iron', as generally were 'you' in the adventure game books. And in the TFUK annuals, the text stories often centred on young white male protagonists - Danny Phillips in stories in the first two annuals, hacker Adam Reynolds a recurring character in two others. And then Daniel Witwicky took on the role in the US cartoon. Masterforce had a bit more variety among the human characters, albeit not with the Autobot Pretenders. Victory and Zone reverted to type. Only the most recent (and best) film, 'Bumblebee', really challenged the prevailing wisdom. And ironically it was set in the '80s, a time when they'd never have thought to make a film about a girl befriending giant warring robots. Martin |
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Post by Jim on Jan 20, 2020 22:12:32 GMT
On a tangent, I've never felt the need to see 'me' in fiction, nor have I ever seen a 'representation' of myself in fiction. I've always felt the same! When I was a kid I never felt a strong urge to read / watch stories with child protagonists, for example. If anything the opposite with television, as child performances can be seriously cringe inducing. On the other hand, I now see that my daughter feels _much_ more engaged by fiction with female protagonists, especially young ones. |
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Post by Grand Moff Muffin on Jan 21, 2020 6:46:20 GMT
On the other hand, I now see that my daughter feels _much_ more engaged by fiction with female protagonists, especially young ones. I do find it bizarre that (unlike in Japan) they didn't make any of the Nebulans who binary-bond to TFs female. The toy designs themselves didn't require them to be male - there could have been women inside those suits of armour - and it wasn't like they didn't have any female human cast members, they just chose to define all the Headmaster, Targetmaster and Powermaster partners as being male. Except for Recoil, Fracas, Nightstick and Knok whose gender was never defined. The comic that introduced the Powermasters was particularly annoying in this regard. There were five Autobots in need of partners, and five Nebulans in HiQ's team - four men and one woman. Now it's a perfectly valid plot point to have some Nebulans say sorry, they don't fancy it. But of course all four men say yeah, sign me up, and it's the one female character who says it's not for them. Why couldn't they have had another male character who also passed on it, or something, just to take the edge off the obviousness of the divide. I dunno. Both the Headmasters mini-series and the Powermaster issue end with the boys flying off into space to have adventures while the girls are left behind. Martin |
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Post by Grand Moff Muffin on Jan 21, 2020 7:13:46 GMT
It would have been interesting if when Bob Budiansky got handed the 1987 Headmaster and Targetmaster toys, his brief was _not_ to invent a new planet or even new human characters, but assign only existing characters to be the Headmaster and Targetmaster partners. But he would be allowed to collaborate with Simon Furman and use characters from the UK comic. It would have been fun to see tech-specs on the toys telling us things like "Weirdwolf is binary-bonded to the human villain called the Mechanic," "Chromedome's head transforms into human archaeologist Susan Hoffman," "Scorponok is binary-bonded to evil Triple-I Director Forrest Forsythe," "Hot Rod's Targetmaster partner is geologist Cindy Newell," and so on.
Martin
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Post by Toph on Jan 21, 2020 7:56:55 GMT
On the other hand, I now see that my daughter feels _much_ more engaged by fiction with female protagonists, especially young ones. I do find it bizarre that (unlike in Japan) they didn't make any of the Nebulans who binary-bond to TFs female. The toy designs themselves didn't require them to be male - there could have been women inside those suits of armour - and it wasn't like they didn't have any female human cast members, they just chose to define all the Headmaster, Targetmaster and Powermaster partners as being male. Except for Recoil, Fracas, Nightstick and Knok whose gender was never defined. The comic that introduced the Powermasters was particularly annoying in this regard. There were five Autobots in need of partners, and five Nebulans in HiQ's team - four men and one woman. Now it's a perfectly valid plot point to have some Nebulans say sorry, they don't fancy it. But of course all four men say yeah, sign me up, and it's the one female character who says it's not for them. Why couldn't they have had another male character who also passed on it, or something, just to take the edge off the obviousness of the divide. I dunno. Both the Headmasters mini-series and the Powermaster issue end with the boys flying off into space to have adventures while the girls are left behind. Martin It doesn't really surprise me when this is the same company that didn't give us our first female toy (blackarachnia) until the mid-late nineties. I mean, even over fiction, they were still limiting Bob Skir in 2000 over how many girls he use when he wanted to base Nightscream on Newt from ALIENS. (Note, I'm referring to Hasbro. Not Takara or 3H/MiB. Both of whom did produce female TF toys before Blackarachnia) For them to give us a female nebulan, I figure their logic would demand they make the accompanying robot would need to be a girl. And that wasn't about to happen. Meanwhile Gobots not only had several female gobots, one of the central leads in the cartoon was a black girl. That was downright revolutionary in the eighties. That still hasn't happened in Transformers. |
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Post by Grand Moff Muffin on Jan 21, 2020 8:03:05 GMT
For them to give us a female nebulan, I figure their logic would demand they make the accompanying robot would need to be a girl. And that wasn't about to happen. Only if you accept the robots as being male otherwise. That wasn't a relevant consideration in the comic continuity, where TFs themselves were without gender. (Except Arcee, who was artificially designed to give humans the impression that they could be female.) I only see a case for diversity among characters from species whose individuals naturally have gender, race, age characteristics, etc. There were no male Transformers, in my mind, so no need for females to address any gender bias. Martin |
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Post by Grand Moff Muffin on Jan 21, 2020 8:12:10 GMT
At least the Autobots had diversity amongst their facsimile construct drivers. Tracks used a female pretend driver mannequin in 'Rock and Roll Out' and a male one in 'Devastation Derby'. It was all the same to him!
Martin
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