Reflections on That One Scene in Peter Pan

Today, I thought we’d talk about something light.  Something casual.  Something easy.  So let’s do that.  Let’s talk about racism.

I’m planning a Disney World trip in the coming months.  In preparation for that, I’ve gotten myself a Disney+ subscription and have been marathonning through a bunch of the classic Disney animated movies.  I’ve found, over the years, I like going through the works of different cultures and different times.  It feels like it opens my eyes, just a little bit, to different ways of life, to different sets of values.  And going through the classic films, which pull from a lot of different cultures and are both made and use source material from a wide variety of different time periods, so the Animated Canon has been a real trip on that.  

A lot of the classic films on Disney+ have a bit of a racist warning at the beginning.  Which is understandable.  Values change with time, our comprehensions of race and people have changed with time, and the things Disney presented then may not match what they want to present now.  And generally the content they’ve been warning of has been pretty benign, in my view.  

And then I got to Peter Pan.  And that was… something.  Now, to be perfectly clear on my own lens on the issue, I wouldn’t consider myself hypersensitive to racism in media.  I’m vehemently against categorism in general, which tends to put me at odds with the mainstream anti-racism lens on things that drives a lot of the outrage that crosses at least my sphere, and I think context and understanding are important before leaping to offense.  And yet even with all that, the intensely stereotypical Native American tribe in Peter Pan and the extended goofy savages show we got out of them was incredibly cringey to me.  The hooting and backwardsness and the extended segments essentially making jokes about a wholesale collection of real world people, I found it uncomfortable.  

“Well, I don’t think we’re ever watching that again,” said one of my family members when we were done.  But I don’t agree.  I actually found the racial insensitivity here enlightening and thought provoking.  The original Peter Pan play was released in 1904, explicitly based the Native American tribe more on what the average child at the time expected of them because of their portrayal in media rather than any actual fact, and was considered pretty noncontroversial.  Because, after all, most people had no knowledge of Native Americans outside of what was displayed in fictional works, and this lined up with that.  Most people didn’t know any better.  That portrayal was then interpreted through the lens of 1953’s American culture in the Disney film, and that goofy savage portrayal described above was actually considered a pretty positive portrayal.  Because in films of the time, Native Americans were generally vicious enemies, whereas this one, although briefly antagonists and possessed of strange ways, showed them to be generally amicable and competent.

Of course, looking through the modern day lens on it, it seems abhorrently insensitive.  And rightfully so.  As we are coming to understand, anything that implicitly represents “this is what this group of people are like” is going to run into that because human beings aren’t stereotypes and dealing with groups rather than individuals leads directly to insensitivity.  There’s a lot of dialogue out there being rather judgmental on the creators.  And if it came out today, I might agree with a lot of that basis.  As is, though, given the context of the time it was made in, I find it hard to make personal aspersions for people who at least seem to have made this is good faith, creating something that was viewed as being in the right direction at the time.  Even if it did turn ugly in the future.  But, I did find this ugliness thought-provoking, as I said.  

Twelve Years a Slave is the auto-biography/memoirs of Solomon Northrup, a black man who was born free in the pre-Civil War north, and was then illegally kidnapped and lived in the south as a slave for twelve years before being rescued.  All that.  Anyways, the first person to buy Solomon, never knowing he was born a free man, was William Ford, who was, as Solomon describes him, a gentle, God-fearing man who was full of kindness and generosity to all.  Solomon really respected William, and thought of him as a great person.  In his view, William was a good man doing evil simply because the environment in which he lived was such that slavery was normalized to the point that it couldn’t occur to him that it was wrong.  

After going through the Native American scene in Peter Pan, I ended up reflecting on that.  The creators of this scene were, I’m just going to assume, generally well meaning people making something in good faith that seems to have been unusually good for the standards of the time.  It’s wrong now, and we know better, but they didn’t back them.  Solomon Northrup went so far to say that slavery would have lost a lot of its sting if all slavers were like William Ford.  But slavery was still evil, and William and his environment were such that they largely didn’t know better.  So what now are common thoughts, actions, behaviors, ways of living that are acceptable at the modern time, but become absolutely abhorrent and seen as evil in the future?

It’s a question with no answer, as yet, but I found the mental exercise valuable, and I’m glad to have run into the racially insensitive spots of Peter Pan to have prompted that.  Several times over, I can recall running into outrage over screenings or reprintings or whatever of old works of media that feature views less controversial at the time but abhorrent to many today.  Lots of calls to either not expose or outright censor those views, so people don’t have to confront them today.  I don’t think that’s the right way to go about it.  I don’t begrudge decisions such as Disney’s determination not to release Song of the South, if it made a statement then they don’t want to now, but I do believe that facing the insensitivity of the old both as a means of seeing what things were like then compared to where we have gotten now and as a means of reflecting on what might be wrong with current habits that will be viewed in the future just like we do on the past is a much better way forwards.

Project G: Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah (1991)

More Memorable Title: The one with MECHA-KING GHIDORAH!!!

Yeah!  It’s Godzilla-time!

So, last time we left of Godzilla with Godzilla vs. Biollante, an ambitious film that ended up falling short of its financial goals.  Longtime series producer Tomoyuki Tanaka wanted to follow it up with something safer, using more material that had proven successful in the Heisei era, leading to the more familiar King Ghidorah returning.  Unfortunately, his failing health limited his involvement, leaving this film and most of Godzilla’s future works in the hands of Shogo Tomiyama, who had co-produced Biollante with him.  Tomiyama continued bringing the film back to its Showa-era roots, establishing a more fantastic atmosphere and simple story with this film, taking it away from the gritty trailblazing of the past two Heisei era works.  Director and writer Kazuki Oumori, thinking that the real reason Godzilla vs. Biollante fell short in the box office was because of being outshone by Back to the Future, added a time travel story to it as well, thinking that’s what people were going for.

So that’s how we ended up with this film.  Now you know.  

As you might guess from the above, it is a bit of a hodge-podge.  Feels like it has a lot of puzzle pieces going in that it has a hard time matching up with each other.  Has a lot of cast members (although not as much as Biollante), a lot of moving parts, and moves at a pretty quick pace.  The Heisei era had really started to find its own identity with the last film, and this movie sees it turn a corner into something more rooted in the Showa era, although it still carries a lot of Heisei establishments along with it.  

It also serves as a retcon of sorts in the Heisei era.  It retells Godzilla’s origin in a way that’s firmly different than that of the original 1954 G and his Showa successor.  From what I understand, there was still some question of continuity by the time this film originally came out, whether the Heisei era lined up with the Showa or not, and this firmly establishes it as something of its own.  Although it also messes a bunch up.  Whatever.  Also, Heisei Godzilla was already canonically bigger than either of the other ones, but apparently Toho wanted him even grander than that.  So they do that here.  Makes him more terrifying for the monster fights to come.

So, how does it all come together?  Well, read on to find out.  

The year is 2204.  We’re underwater.  A submarine is investigating some sort of giant monster corpse.  People are saying mysterious things about it that we won’t realize what they mean until later.  And then the camera moves so we can see just what kind of corpse they’re investigating.  And it turns out, it’s GHIDORAH!

And then all of a sudden the year is 1992 again.  Do you remember that year?  I sure don’t.  Anyways, the world’s all afluffle because a UFO appeared and is flying around.  A bunch of news outlets are covering it.  So there’s this guy who used to write really successful sci-fi novels and now writes for some magazine or other.  And there’s this girl who obviously wants up ons and she goes up to him and goes “Dude!  Aliens! You’ve totally got to write about this!”  And he’s like “Pfffft!  What do you think I am?  A rich and famous sci-fi author?”  And she’s like “Yes.  It turns out that’s exactly what you are.” But he’s still like “No.  I don’t care about the fact that we’ve got proof that so much of what we thought about the universe is wrong and there’s new and exciting forms of life out there.  I’d rather write about what that one crazy loony was raving about in the middle of nowhere, about how he saw dinosaurs in WWII and Godzilla is really one of them and saved his life or something.”  Let’s call the guy Fred.  Because I don’t remember his real name and no descriptor is coming to me, but he totally looks like a Fred.

The Hollow Generation

Man, I feel like I’ve done this sort of thing before. Getting into a new generation the complaining about the games there being less different than I expected. Maybe it’s because I’m too closed-minded. Maybe it’s because new games early in a console’s life are generally much more modest than what we’ll see later. And maybe it’s because an update in hardware is making less and less of a difference as the gaming medium progresses and matures and the natural course of diminishing returns sets in.

That can be left for the experts. Even though those last two are totally true. Either way, what we’re left with is a now familiar feeling of me stepping into a new generation of video games, and me wondering why they even bothered with the hardware separation.

Of course, this year, it’s a little different than it’s been in the past. Previous generation changeovers, it’s always been a game that lured me through. I picked up an N64 because of Super Mario and Mario Kartt 64ses. ‘Twas Smash Bros that lured me through to getting a Gamecube. Then the whole spat of releases for the Wii, followed by Dead Rising showing me the worth of an Xbox 360. And finally, Fallout 4 and Breath of the Wild brought me to the previous generation of consoles.

This time, though, it was simply the trials of time. Consoles tend to be hardy, but computers not so much. Since it released, I’ve been waiting for my opportunity to pick up a PS5, but that never came. Been sitting on enough credit card rewards to essentially get one for free at MSRP, but an opportunity to buy the console at MSRP is quite rare. Supply shortages, plus the shakeups to the market on both the supply and demand side due to the pandemic, ensures that only a lucky, privileged few who can wait for supplies to drop and be on top of them when they do are able to pick one up. For the rest of us, we have to wait. And so I did, until my hand was forced. My previous PC started showing wear and tear and indications that it wasn’t going to last much longer. So I needed a new one. And while I was doing that, I figured I’d pick up one capable of playing modern games.

So I did. And now I’m looking at the modern spate of games, and I’m not really interested in many of them that I couldn’t have gotten on my PS4 or my old PC already. Invested in a highly powered gaming laptop with all sorts of features and settings I don’t even understand to ensure it can get the best resolution and framerate possible, and most of my time spent on it so far has been in a ported PS1 game and a sprite based indie game that released like 5 years ago. And it’s not because new games aren’t new. I’ll definitely be getting to them eventually. But they don’t take full advantage of the new hardware. They don’t give me any new experiences. So many new hardware generations really expanded on what a game could do. Until last gen, where the updates were mostly graphical. And then comes this new one, where again, the only real update people are pointing to is that graphics are slightly better, loading somewhat smoother. Heck, most games I’m actually looking into next generation for, such as Lost Judgment, Spider-Man: Miles Morales, the Final Fantasy VII Remake, and on, are still available on my Playstation 4 for basically no material difference from the PS5 versions.

Which does make me wonder what’s the point to the new hardware. I’m sure the fact that most new releases for modern consoles are also available on last gen’s machine owes something to the aforementioned inability for mass markets to equip themselves with the most modern gear, but even so. If I can get a game brand new game for my last gen consoles that’s almost exactly the same as those on the current gen, what’s the point? Maybe we moved on to a new hardware generation too quickly.

I’m sure eventually, a PS5 will wind it’s way onto my shelf. And I’m viewing my new laptop as an investment, enabling me to keep up with the new releases when inevitably they do move on from last gen’s hardware. But for now, we’re already a year into the next hardware generation, and as far as I can tell, it may as well have not happened at all.