Mike Gold: Oh, Time-Lord! Abuse Me! Abuse Me!

Mike Gold

ComicMix's award-winning and spectacularly shy editor-in-chief Mike Gold also performs the weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking rock, blues and blather radio show on The Point, www.getthepointradio.com and on iNetRadio, www.iNetRadio.com (search: Hit Oldies) every Sunday at 7:00 PM Eastern, rebroadcast three times during the week – check www.getthepointradio.com above for times and on-demand streaming information.

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13 Responses

  1. Jarrod Buttery says:

    Aw, crap — she’s Australian. Sorry, guys — some of us DO have better things to do with our lives than to go blindfolded into unlit coal cellars at midnight looking for black cats that aren’t there.

  2. George Haberberger says:

    “there is nothing inherently wrong with being a white male.”

    Whew!! What a relief that is to my sensitive psyche.

    Apparently being a white male is only a problem for a “bunch of narcissistic holy-holy academicians” if the character is a hero. I made the point in Marc Alan Fishman’s column about the new Iron Man movie that white males, and specifically white male Americans, are the go-to demographic for villains.

    ” ‘Iron Man 3 fires out of the gate with what might be his only namable villain – The Mandarin – only to wink and nod to us that such a racist concept need not be real. While I know this is a polarizing choice, I applauded it.’

    Why is it a racist concept? Seriously? Can’t The Mandarin be a Chinese villain without the automatic assumption that he is representative of all Chinese?
    It appears that only Americans are a safe choice to be the bad guy. In the first Iron Man movie, the bad guys appeared to be Mid Eastern terrorists… until it was revealed that an American, Obadiah Stane, was behind Tony Stark’s kidnapping. In the second movie, a Russian, Ivan Vanko is the villain, but he’s actually a pawn of an American, Justin Hammer. And of course, as noted, Iron Man’s only notable villain, The Mandarin (SPOILER ALERT!!),

    is not Chinese, but just an actor in the employ of an American, Aldrich Killian.

    Apparently, guilt by association or ethnicity only works one way. Tony Stark may be the good guy and an American but he certainly can’t be representative of all Americans. All his enemies must be Americans too.”

    Now I realize that my objection to all the villains being the same sex, race, nationality as myself might be construed as a bit of that self-victimization that you wrote about last week, but really, Stane and Hammer were always white guys. The Mandarin most certainly was not.

    This issue has come up again with the new Star Trek movie in that a very white guy has been cast as the villain when his previous incarnation was… well I may have said too much.

  3. This screed would impress me a great deal more if I knew Mike had read the book, which he very obviously hasn’t (and neither has anyone else, since the book isn’t actually out yet and hasn’t been released nor have review copies gone out).

    The editor, as it happens, has posted a reply to the numerous criticisms that, like this one, have been made by people who haven’t actually read the book yet:

    http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/weblog/view-Post,id=62700/

  4. Neil C. says:

    I think the main reason why they decided to make The Mandarin a white guy was the game reason the villains in the “Red Dawn” revival were changed from Chinese to North Korean: they didn’t want to offend China, which has started to spend a shit-ton (technical term) on going to movies. So in this case, it’s not political correctness, it’s economic correctness. :P

  5. Neil C. says:

    “same reason”

  6. “Now I don’t know if Gallifreyans are capable of changing sex and/or race upon regeneration”

    It’s long been presumed, but Neil Gaiman set it in stone in The Doctor’s Wife when he described fellow Time Lord The Corsair “A good man…a couple of times a good woman”

  7. Rene says:

    I do think some people will NEVER be satisfied. DOCTOR WHO is a very progressive TV show. For one, it advances a very pro-science, pro-secular stance (sometimes it’s even preachy in its atheism). It also has these weekly enemy aliens serving as metaphors of capitalism, war, prejudice, conformity, and everything liberals do not like.

    A more liberal SF show you will not find.

    Also, DOCTOR WHO is a show where the companion is every bit as important as the hero, maybe even more important, since they’re the ones with the character arcs. And the companions are mostly women, and there have been black males and bisexual white males as companions. It’s one of the most inclusive shows out there.

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