Why “Black Panther” and “Princess and the Frog” were better ideas than Disney’s “Little Mermaid” remake.

I heard this week that Disney is remaking the “Little Mermaid” and casting Halle Baily as Ariel. As you can imagine, this generated the all-too-normal wringing of hands on social media with pro-remake and anti-remake forces taking aim at each other.

I think I can understand some of the points on both sides.

For the pro-remake crew, casting a black woman in an iconic role (Disney Princess) that has historically been pretty uniform in its racial composition feels like progress. For the anti-remake crew such a distinct change from the original feels like they are losing a beloved character that they love.

I like to submit to you, dear reader, that creating new stories that prominently feature historical minorities is a better approach for increasing cultural diversity than changing existing characters with well established identities.

It seems to me that the current trend in Hollywood/Broadway of switching races/genders of existing characters will mostly likely only leave the character’s identity within the broader culture in a fragmented state — with whom no one can really identify with. This strategy seems to me a cheap and perhaps even demeaning way of addressing the historical lack of non-white main characters. I wonder if some people in the industry think “there are no good stories where non-white characters are the focus but we don’t want to be non-inclusive so we will just have some non-white people play some of them”.

Instead of this approach, let’s work together on creating new stories that can help remove the historical lack of diversity in our heroes/heroines. Recent positive examples of this approach include Black Panther, Princess and the Frog, Moana, Coco and Into the Spiderverse. All of these movies (and the musicals, etc that could spin out from them) are true examples of growing diversity in our entertainment/culture. These stories, and others like them, are where children (or adults) who have felt like they didn’t fit in historically can find great characters to emulate/identify with.

Thanks for sharing some of your time with me.