To a great extent, popular culture is a series of remakes. Remakes of classical theatre. Remakes of children’s stories. Remakes of old movies.
There’s nothing basically wrong with that. Hamlet has been restaged thousands of times, sometimes preserving its original historical context, other times being modernized. Film director Akira Kurosawa transported “Macbeth” and “King Lear” into Japanese historical reimagining with stunning effect in “Throne of Blood” and “Ran.” Director John Sturges reciprocated when he repurposed Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai” as a rollicking American western, “The Magnificent Seven.”
But each remake occurs at a specific moment. Times change and, with those changes, we get altered views of both the originals and the remakes. Changing views of diversity have deeply influenced that process.
In 1965, Sir Laurence Olivier was lauded for his filmed version of “Othello,” complete with Olivier in severe blackface. A half century later, University of Michigan students, faculty, and staff went into an uproar when a music professor showed that very film in his class. The professor stopped teaching the course.
Last month another remade classic was released: “Disney’s Snow White.” In fact, the 1937 “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” has long been a target of fault-finding media critics. Is racial whiteness a requirement for the story? Why should audiences view the stalking, corpse-kissing prince as a hero? Why should the seven dwarfs be so damn happy about living in a cave and working in a coal mine to feed the capitalist industrial machine? Consider the possible reaction had Disney used some of the following dwarf names, which he actually considered: Flabby, Dirty, Shifty, and Awful.
But the 2025 remake raised some different issues. The title role was now a bit less white, being played by a Latina, Rachel Zegler, who burst into screen fame in Steven Spielberg’s 2021 remake of “West Side Story.” That casting was too much for today’s anti-woke crowd, which railed against the mere choice of a Latina to play a character memorialized by her whiteness, made even worse because the modernized screen Snow White also mouths social justice platitudes. The remake tries to counter that criticism by explaining that Snow White got her name not because of skin color but because she was born in a blizzard.
Moreover, casting got caught up in international geo-politics. An outspoken pro-Palestinian supporter, Zegler went front and center with her opposition to the Israeli invasion of Gaza and also posted an “F— Donald Trump.” In response, Disney hired a social media advisor to approve her posts. Adding further geo-political subtext was Disney’s decision to cast Israeli Gal Gadot, who had served in the Israeli Defense Forces, as the evil queen. All in all, the new “Snow White” had enough diversity sore points to irritate just about everyone.
In the end, the remake got mixed reviews, rendering it neither a resounding artistic success nor a bomb. Was it a shining symbol of modern inclusivity or an example of wokeness gone wrong? Actually neither. The result was far too mundane for either achievement, while box office results were disappointing. As a widely-embraced diversity-driven cultural artifact, the new “Snow White” fell far short of the 1997 television remake of “”Cinderella,” which featured African American singer-songwriter Brandy as Cinderella and Filipino American Paulo Montalban as the prince, the off-spring of a Black-White royal couple. That show was a popular monument to color-coded casting, including every possible physical variation at the royal ball.
This brings us back to ”Othello,” with its new Broadway revival featuring film super-stars Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal. Despite middling reviews, boxoffice was never an issue, with seats selling for nearly $1,000 a pop. Yet diversity-related choices managed to rear their head.
One of the keys to “Othello” (also known as “The Moor of Venice”) is the lead character’s blackness. I am using blackness in the historical physical sense of race, not in the contemporary sense of race being merely a social construction. Othello’s physical appearance — his stage-dominating blackness – stands apart from the white Venice population. Moreover, his marriage to the white Desdemona makes racial contrast an even more salient theme, although voiced only occasionally (Desdemona’s father loses it when he is taunted that “a big black ram is now topping your white ewe”).
But in some respects the new Broadway production goes the route of the “Cinderella” remake, portraying Venice as a multi-colored society. However, this lurch toward multiculturalism tends to undermine the interracial tension. Gone is Othello’s racial onlyness, a core dimension of the conflict. Surrounded by a multi-hued community, Othello is no longer the racial oddity who can never find respite from his physical presence.
The decisions involved in the casting and presenting of remakes like “Cinderella,” “Snow White,” and “Othello” are conscious choices. They inevitably bring gains and losses. Creative teams have to live with the results.
These choices are neither easy nor obvious. I was once involved in a comparable situation – although not a remake — when serving as a consultant for Nickelodeon’s television series, “Dora the Explorer.” In this case the issue was not race, but language: what language or languages should the different characters speak?
Some of the other consultants wanted to have numerous bilingual characters so that viewers would hear lots of Spanish. I countered with the argument that most of the characters should be monolingual speakers of English and Spanish. This would make Dora more special because of her bilingualism.
Moreover, unlike Othello in a white Venice, Dora would be able to draw on her diversity specialness as a strength. When dealing with plot problems, she could access her fluency in both Spanish and English to create effective teams by building intercultural bridges enabling monolingual characters to work together cooperatively across language lines. Add to that, Dora could build language bridges to young viewers, teaching them Spanish words and then prompting them to use those words in meeting plot challenges. In this way, I maintained, Dora could embody and champion diversity specialness as a strength.
Despite opposition to my position, the producers went with my recommendation. Nickelodeon publicly characterized Dora as an intercultural bridge-builder. I ultimately rose to the position of Creative/Cultural Advisor for “Dora” and its sequels, “Go, Diego, Go!” and “Dora and Friends: Into the City.”
The moral of the story . . . or stories: Casting and other diversity-related decisions in popular story-telling don’t just happen. They arise from trade-offs and choices, sometimes difficult choices driven by conflicting reasons. As we proceed further into this polarized era when wokeness and anti-wokeness are increasingly (and sometimes mindlessly) pitted against each other, new and repurposed cultural artifacts will increasingly reflect those societal arguments while transmitting diversity-related messages to viewers and listeners. Consider that the next time you opt for a little media escapism.
He also edited the four-volume Multicultural America: A Multimedia Encyclopedia (2013).
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Thank you. Bridge-builders must be able to listen. There is a chasm between the extreme right and the extreme left. Ultimately, moderates on both the left and the right must raise their voices to have more inclusivity and end polarization.