Aliens, Robots, and More, Oh my!

Afflicted with a passionate love for watching Disney movies as I am, I was watching the film “Treasure Planet” the other day, and was struck by the sudden thought that this kids movie (**spoiler!**) has absolutely no problem with showing children alien species interacting and getting along with humans perfectly well, and even cross breeding between species (the Doctor and the Captain end up having children together).  Interesting, says I to myself, that nobody even bats an eye about complete nonsense like this, and yet interracial relationships are blown way out of proportion.  It’s not even remotely strange that a man and an alien would be working together, or a man and a robot, but stick some color in the picture, and suddenly people have to step back!  

I suppose the two examples that come first to my mind are the response to The Princess and the Frog, which was hilarious because Tiana’s prince was colored, and people were in an uproar that she didn’t get a white prince!  There was a giant fuss that this meant that Disney didn’t think that Tiana was good enough for a white prince.  And then there was a fuss that the Prince was light skinned, and so obviously a black man wasn’t good enough to be called a prince!  There is obviously no pleasing everyone in this situation, no matter what Prince they had picked for Tiana, someone would have gotten worked up over.  However, I find it interesting because there was color in the picture— if this had been Repunzel, nobody would have blinked an eye over the color of the prince!

The other example that leaps to mind is the hullabaloo that occurred upon the release of the newest Star Wars movie, over the color of Finn.  I remember being utterly astonished that people were starting the #boycottStarWars trend because one of the characters was black!  I remember being utterly taken aback!  Of all the things to have a problem with in the film, they chose color!  Nobody seemed to care that there were weird aliens and robots in the film, it all came down to color.  

I’m beginning to wonder if that’s because the other aspects of the films were really just so outlandish that people don’t really relate them back to their own lives.  Yes, talking dogs are strange, but we all know that dogs don’t talk (at least, they don’t speak the same way that humans do, being fair).  Yes, aliens are weird, but there aren’t any known aliens on earth.  Yes, robots aren’t really normal, but the kind of robots we see in films are very unlike any robots that we interact with on a daily basis.  It all comes down to familiarity, I think, and we’re familiar with the concept of darker skin around us.  The shocking part of this is that you’d think, with this greater familiarity, we’d perhaps not be shocked when darker skin shows up in our media?  And yet there always is, even though we see people of a variety of ethnic origins in our advertising all the time.  It’s really a question that people take so much more offense to color in stories than they do in advertisements…