No, not this kind of mandarin!

Faithful readers may recall my prior concerns over the upcoming Iron Man movie, as directed by Jon "Dinner for Five" Favreau, in which children will rush to multiplexes across the world to see Robert Downey, Jr., fighting Farhad from Crash in yellowface*.

Or so it seems.

Farhad may be playing a different East Asian character, depending on studio misinformation. Someone else may be the Mandarin, but the Mandarin is definitely in the movie.

And the movie, like X-men and Spider-Man before it**, is going to be a big deal, if everything goes according to plan.

Here's an interview on Newsarama about the upcoming Iron Man:Enter the Mandarin comic series being written more or less as a tie-in to the movie.

You can check out some preview pages from the series on that page, including this "Ah, so! I velly insclutable!" Fu Manchu-style spread. The comments underneath actually use "that 'Yellow' peril stuff" [sic] as praise.

As praise, yes.

This is the world I have brought my children into.

And, as far as other tie-ins go, the straight-to-video Invincible Iron Man animated thing seems, well, about the same. You can watch some trailers here. Possibly worse. As you can see, the words "Ancient Chinese Evil" figure prominently.

One would think our society had evolved past that point, but no.

If you would like to maintain a fine (very fine) filament of hope in the Hollywood/Marvel Comics/race-relations triangular [expletive deleted], it's being reported that another Fu Manchu-related title is being brought to the cinema by Yuen Woo Ping, who directed Iron Monkey (must see!) and Drunken Master, and did fight choreography for the Kill Bill movies, the Matrix movies and Kung Fu Hustle.

So, it'll be interesting to see if Hands of Shang-Chi comes out at the same time as Iron Man - and which one is going to have the most toys at the fast-food drive-throughs of America. I mean, one can guess, yes, but this is about hope.

And perhaps Favreau will manage to do something wonderful. But my teeth hurt from the clenching.


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* "Yellowface" being the long-running practice of putting European-descended thespians in fairly dismal-looking makeup to play Chinese or Japanese characters. Since, of course, actual East Asian people can't act, or something. See also Mickey Rooney, Katherine Hepburn, John Wayne (as Genghis Khan) and Boris Karloff (as Fu Manchu).


** Fans of The Fantastic 4, I'm so, so sorry. And what have they done to the Silver Surfer?