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Sometimes, good, well-meaning people make really bad
decisions. The road to Hell is paved with good
intentions, they say. I have to assume that they had good intentions,
when they created these characters, because the alternative
is that they were a bunch of bigoted idiots and I don't
want to think that of the folks at Hanna-Barbera. I have too
many fond memories of H-B cartoons.
One of the contest entries from a couple of months
ago asked me to take a look at some of the Super-Friends
characters. Specifically, the Super-Friends'
Affirmative Action Heroes, Apache Chief, Black Vulcan, Samurai and El
Dorado.
The first thing I notice is, they're all male. Second
thing....three out of four of them are bare-legged and
the fourth is shirtless. Of course . . . We all know that
ethnic minority types wear less clothing than wholesome WASP
types, right? Ugh!
You know, I don't really have any problem with
characters having a specific racial or ethnic identity. I don't
even care if the character dresses in a costume based on
some kind of ethnic style of dress or ceremonial garb. I've
been known to tap this reservoir, myself. Good design is
where you find it. What bothers me is when an artist is lazy
about it.
Different tribes have different traditions. I can't
claim to know the Apache traditions and know very
little about the ceremonial dress of a chief, but I'm betting it's
not what Apache Chief wore. Brown on brown can work, but
come on! Pants, people! Grown men don't wear shorts to fight
bad guys, at least they didn't in the 70s.
For whatever reason, H-B didn't want to use any
existing DC characters for these guys, but they sort
of borrowed one, Black Lightning, for the
Super-Friends. Only they upped his powers and called
him Black Vulcan, for some reason. Not sure exactly
what Vulcan has to do with lightning, but they went
with it.
Again with the bare legs. Poor Black Vulcan. At least
he got a real superhero costume out of the deal.
I think the worst of all is Samurai. First, he's
dressed more like a sumo wrestler than a samurai.
Second, he has wind powers. Um, is it so hard to find
a Japanese word for "wind"? Whatever. This poor
bastard got the diaper and top-knot. It's like they
just didn't care. This guy had to be embarassed to
leave the damn house. I'm embarassed to have drawn
him, even once!
And last, but not least, there's the token Mexican in
the group, El Dorado. Near as I can tell, they never
bothered with origins for any of these guys, or really
bothered to define their powers. El Dorado seems to
have lucked into the grab-bag of powers, compared to
the other three. Seems to be magic-based, but as I
said, no origin given.
In recent years, some of these characters have
reappeared via the Justice League Unlimited cartoon.
Thankfully, they have new costumes and names and are
not conceived as shallow ethnic stereotypes. The
Ultimen, as they were called, consist of Longshadow,
Juice and Wind Dragon. They each approximate the
ethnic derivation of their Super-Friends counterparts,
Apache Chief, Black Vulcan and Samurai, but are not
portrayed with embarassing pseudo-ethnic costumes or
broken english.
I liked the Ultimen characters so much I decided to
use their names for my own versions of the characters
and used the JLU costume designs as inspiration,
particularly with Longshadow and Wind Dragon.
For Longshadow, I borrowed from the JLU costume for
the most part, adding a matching "fringe" to the
boots, from the collar of the shirt. I liked using the
tan and brown together for this, I think brown is
under used in comic costumes.
For Wind Dragon, I virtually copied the JLU costume,
changing a couple of green bits for gold, because I
think it fits with the red, white and black color
scheme.
I thought the cartoon costume for Juice was just a
little too "busy", so eliminated some of the
extraneous bits. Also, I wanted to give him some of
the Black Lightning color scheme.
For some reason, they left out El Dorado, when they
created the Ultimen, but I decided to do my own
version of the character. With no origin to work with
or anything, I just went with the magic angle and
worked what I could from his Super-Friends costume
into it. I reworked his boots and belt and added a
tunic and gloves. The name I went with translates as
"The Wizard", and I figure he's something like Dr.
Strange.
Well, that's all for now. Happy Holidays everyone.
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