Mickiana said:
I was judging him by his appearance only. I don't even know who he is. He just looked very Sallah-esque in that photo. He might have a helium voice and be unsuitable, unless of course a new Sallah makes a helium voice work?
Don?t bristle so much. It?s bad for your complexion. That said, if you want a ?new? Sallah let?s dig up the original concept of a skinny five foot one inch Egyptian and call up Peter Dinklage or Danny Woodburn. The larger point: If you want to make a full and complete step away from Dr. Jones? casual racism, then no white actor should be playing a character named ?Sallah Mohammed Faisel el-Kahir.? The people on screen should be reflective of the world Dr. Jones inhabits, and not only as background material.
For example, why wasn?t a single sentence of Spanish spoken throughout the entirety of
Kingdom of the Crystal Skull? Or Quechua? Or anything related to the region they were visiting? We won?t even get into the logistics of how Francisco de Orellana ? who died somewhere deep in the Amazon in 1546 and whose body was never recovered ? ended up in Southern Peru.
Montana Smith said:
In any case if he was black (or openly gay) the character wouldn't really be associated with the 'Indiana Jones' of popular imagination.
While The West can applaud itself for being at the forefront of race relations and gay rights, it?s still far from being a global norm. You can still be put to death for ?homosexual acts? in ten countries, and another ~76 countries* have ?Anti-Gay? laws on the books with sentences that combine fines with prison time. A few engage in corporal punishment and forced labor camps. India, the world?s largest democracy, just recently recriminalized homosexuality. So, even in enlightened countries not everything is fine and dandy.
? - Asia in general does not have any laws against homosexuality, but I don?t know that I would want to explore that lifestyle in, say, China.
? - Central Africa has no laws, because they?re still busy finding new and exciting ways to kill each other. Good luck being gay there!
Most of the advancements in gay rights have come over the past twenty to thirty years, and with social and cultural mores being what they were in the Hot & Sticky Parts of the World, an openly gay Indiana Jones would hardly have the kind of access he would normally enjoy. At best he would be denied entry at every port he tried to call on.
The history of the Arab slave trade is well documented, so I feel no need to go through that history lesson or how a black man at the early part of the Twentieth Century would be perceived in those same places mentioned above. So, while Disney could feasibly follow through on either scenario it changes the entire tenor of the series and I doubt that they want to use Indiana Jones as a cipher for what?s now considered to be the cultural norm.
Montana Smith said:
I suspect that if it's the latter, then the actor will be young, providing the role with both growing room for a number of sequels, and a younger target audience with someone more relatable
This is the obvious part. How young depends on just how Disney views the character; a point I've been driving at in that other thread, but haven't expounded upon. An actor in his mid-thirties at the time of any eventual filming will offer Disney the best return on their investment. You can skew Dr. Jone's age five years in either direction without problem.
I'm still not sold on the idea of a surge in toy sales. Sales from that last movie were so poor, that Hasbro/Mattel/whoever that they had to cut their losses and opted out of the final wave.
Montana Smith said:
Or we can imagine ideal actors and an ideal future.
Despite the popular opinion forwarded by the Fetishists, there isn't anything irreplaceable in Ford's performance. He first breathed life into the character, but Indiana Jones is defined in broadest of terms. Speaking for myself, the actors I've put forward would be able to put their own stamp on those same terms based on a cross section of their work. In short, I wouldn't call them ideal, but very, very interesting nonetheless.
Let's add one more: Dominic Cooper
You know him as Tony Stark's dad, the original cad, but he's also played Ian Fleming and did a bang up job portraying Uday Hussein in
The Devil's Double. He just did
Need for Speed, and will be starring(?) in the forthcoming Warcraft movie. He also did some vampire slaying with Abraham Lincoln.
There's that pencil mustache that Raiders12345789927173728 has always wanted!
TheFedora said:
Or maybe Bradley Cooper although I don't think that will happen.
Don't count Bradley Cooper out. If you look at Disney's extended ecosystem, he would slot very nicely into their present direction.
Oh, and welcome to the forum.
Too much typing!
