Please No Racist Hunchback Remake

hi everyone I'm Swift and today I'm going to be talking about how Josh gadd wants to make a live-action Hunchback of Notre Dame hunchback's problematic depiction of the Romani people and why this movie should absolutely not get a live-action remake unless they rework it entirely from the ground up in my previous video the problem with the Hunchback of Notre Dame I already covered a lot of just what makes this story so inherently racist so I'm going to try to be brief and keep it Disney adaptation specific full disclosure I am of Romani ancestry but was not raised in the culture my feelings do not speak for all Romany peoples and are based primarily on the extensive research I have done in an attempt to learn my Heritage additionally it must be noted that Gypsy is a slur term given by non-roma people and will only be used in this video for clarification purposes or if the reference source material uses the term such as in both the film and novel versions of Hunchback but any other time and I will be using either the terms Romany or Roma that being said spoilers ahead for Disney's The Hunchback of Notre Dom real life history and Josh gadd's Instagram feed gosh dang it Josh Gad I thought this project was completely dead I think it honestly might be but you never can be too sure I wasn't going to make a video on the possible live-action Hunchback remake because I honestly thought that it was safely not gonna happen until of course it had to go viral again thanks to both a very popular fan casting and Josh gadd himself replying to it let me start from the beginning back in 2019 Josh Gad the man most known for voicing a talking Snowman Olaf from the Frozen franchise announced that he was going to be making a live-action Hunchback remake and that he would be playing the titular Hunchback Quasimodo because that sounds like a good idea well covet happened and the unfortunate Mulan remake and all of the news on the film dried up every now and then a rumor would pop up about the movie but it would pretty quickly be disproven or just be a vague Disney's working on it honest it would never be enough to get people excited because duh then in March 2023 a fan made poster came up made by I honestly have no idea I tried looking for the source of the image but at this point it's been reposted to Helen Back and fooled a lot of people and so whoever did it good job graphic design is truly in your skill set the fake poster gave the supposed release date of 2025 and looked pretty legit at first glance it has an updated version of the original movies logo over a fiery background alluding to the end of the movie that's pretty similar to simplistic teaser posters Disney tends to go for with its live action adaptations I even fell for it for a hot second then I thought about the cast for more than two seconds like Peter Capaldi could make a believable frolo and unlike a number of these actors he could definitely sing but Gal Gadot presumably is Esmeralda I'm guessing gal is a great actress but at 38 she is way too old for this role then there's the fact that she and many of the other actors are currently working on other very big projects and again can't sing on the level required for one of Disney's greatest soundtracks of all time but I'm going on a tangent the point is The Fan cast fooled a lot of people and even made it all the way to Josh Gad himself's Instagram feed where he reposted the poster with the following caption wow this spread quickly shrug Emoji bell bell bell well okay for the record this is not real this is a fan cast I was just responding to it love that you guys all want this we do too the script is one of the best I have read and hopefully the powers that be will see this love and let us make this live-action adaptation the original animated film deserves but for now again this is just a fan cast apparently he'd had a different caption before but replaced it and whatever that said before has been lost to the internet my personal theory is that Josh reposted the poster in order to drum up interest in the film and make Disney see that the People Want it especially since he apparently didn't say it was a fan cast originally how successful that tactic is remains to be seen what I can say is that it's still circling the internet because it took a few months to make its way over to me like I'd seen the fake poster back in March but I only just found out about the Josh Gad comment angle and there are still plenty of people who think it's real what I can say is it tells us that the film is currently just a script and probably isn't very far into production if at all this is a good thing because this means that if Disney is going to make this movie which they shouldn't then they can at least try to do so in a way that isn't the giant middle finger instead of Roma people like the original one in case you weren't aware and I wouldn't blame you if you didn't know because this is a place where education has failed a lot of us the gypsies pictured in the film are caricatures of the very real Romany people the Romani are historically nomadic peoples of Indian origin the teal ldr version of our history is that roughly a thousand years ago they were forced to leave India for unknown reasons and traveled Western where they faced immense discrimination they weren't Christian or Muslim and so they were met with suspicion basically everywhere because of their inability to settle down they took on jobs that were mobile such as fortune telling entertaining or horse selling many cities ban their entry or wouldn't allow them to work and so they moved from place to place in Romania they were kept as slaves in some places they could be physically branded their children were stolen from them and assimilated into mainstream culture they are not the free-spirited Wanderers or magic fortune tellers that fiction has led you to believe they are the victims of extreme prejudice who adapted to survive that racism continues into modern times even as most modern Roma are no longer nomadic the Roma were among those the Nazi party committed Mass genocide against the majority of which never even made it to the Holocaust camps because they were gunned down in their homes after the war they face further discrimination the German government is established that the former government had been taking action against a criminal group and that the mass killings of the Romani were not done as an act of ethnic cleansing it wasn't until 1979 that the German government recognized the acts by the Nazis as being racially motivated and made reparations today the Romans struggle for recognition in the U.N and some may choose to hide their ancestry entirely in order to avoid discrimination my great-grandmother's family were horse sellers who also worked migrant jobs in hotels up and down the English Coast they struggled to keep their family together and many of them immigrated to America to avoid Prejudice my great-grandmother chose to pass his English so that her children could grow up without fear moreover the word Gypsy that is commonly attributed to the Roma actually goes back to a misconception that they were Egyptian due to their dark skin compared to calling Native Americans Indians it's not a positive word and it comes with a lot of negative connotations and baggage just consider the word Egypt and how it means to be ripped off it's a tragic history of misunderstanding and Prejudice and it is only further by the inability of the Romani to represent their own Identity or to tell their own story one of the greatest tragedies is that this misinformation is not limited to Outsiders many romanese don't know their own story due to the lack of franchise over their own identity the unified nature of the people in lack of educational opportunities Romani peoples have not been able to control the narrative about their own people The Hunchback of Notre Dame is one of the biggest perpetrators of the disenfranchisement of the Roma people in fictional media because despite having an anti-racism message at the core of its Story the original Hunchback of Notre Dame is a wildly racist film there wasn't a single Roma consultant on that movie did you know that for the original Hunchback movie multiple Romani groups reached out to Disney asking that they be properly represented but were ignored as reported by Ian Hancock contemporary Romanus scholar and Advocate The Producers didn't respond to a single request for fairness and accuracy from Romani organizations at least six of which wrote to them while the films were still in production and yet you'll see the movie praise for its handling of racism it's literally the definition of performative activism but Swift surely it isn't that racist what's racist about it even and even if the activism was performative it being there is a good thing right yes and no the film recognizes that Esmeralda and her people are discriminated against but fails to acknowledge why it uses a blanket they're different style reasoning and in doing so falls into a lot of racist pitfalls in large part because it relies on stereotypes rather than research to characterize its Roma let's run this movie through some sort of racism litmus test in general the most common anti-romani stereotypes that you'll see are as follows they are untrustworthy exotic inherently sexual or dangerous they are wandering unskilled vagrants they are thieves and con men who for some reason steal children they have mystical or magical powers but are somehow also simple-minded and dirty and are of course irredeemably Wicked now let's take a look at Disney's Hunchback the Gypsies in Disney's Hunchback are literal thieves living in the catacombs the very first thing they try to do is hang quasi and Phoebus apart from Esmeralda and Quasimodo's mother they are all drawn as ugly caricatures with big noses and many of them wear Rags the so-called Court of miracles in the catacombs has a mystical Sanctuary angle and can only be found by following a cryptic amulet necklace map and is entered through a literal grave the catacombs wouldn't even exist for hundreds of years and are literally a giant mass grave that was created because paris's graveyards were overflowing ew that pretty quickly covers con men thieves dangerous mystical and dirty I'd even pushed simple-minded because who's stupid enough to hang the captain of the guard as a group of people were trying not to get on the bad side of the law they didn't know he'd just been fired and even then that's still murder Esmeralda herself covers a lot of the rest she bemoans her inability to make cool figurines like quasi-can saying if I could do this then you wouldn't find me dancing in the streets this simultaneously feeds into the skillless Gypsy stereotype and places disdain on her Reliance on portable professions when in actuality she can't make a living because in the real world she literally couldn't even live in a city much less get a job there Esmeralda has another uncomfortable line when she says that gypsies don't do well inside stone walls which is a direct callback to frolo saying it earlier only she doesn't condemn the concept and seems to mean it which ignores the reason why her people are nomadic implying it's a lifestyle or cultural Choice it panders to the idea that she must be free-spirited and wild and she is obviously sexual and exotically so which is obviously inescapable if Disney wants to keep even some semblance of the original novels plot however they go pretty far her red dancing dress is skin tight and she literally pulled dances on one of the guards lances rather than doing oh I don't know an actual Roma dance you'd have to be pretty naive to say that only frolo sexualizes her or that exoticism doesn't play into her beauty in the making of Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame a short film released alongside the movie they explained that Esmerelda is described in Victor Hugo's novel as beautiful fiery independent desirable and a dream come true with an unsettling emphasis on her being desirable in the same video they explained that she is voiced by Demi Moore who is first to describe to be desirable and even Typecast for the role more having played an exotic dancer in the past and to top it all off she uses magical tricks to escape frolo's guards in a smoke and mirrors kind of way reads quasi's palm and is the one who gives quasi the cryptic Magic Necklace rather than just giving the poor guy directions which again magic Roma I will admit that the palm reading scene is super cute though Esmeralda is literally the poster child for the sexy exotic Roma like she's the literal tropes starter what all this means is that the only markers we are missing from the Disney movie is child theft and irredeemable wickedness both of which feature in the original novel version Because by the way in the original novel version Esmeralda was a French baby who was kidnapped by the Roma so at least Disney fixed one really really bad thing but then despite ditching the baby napping they still couldn't even fully commit to her being a woman of color with her design those bright green eyes yeah no they did that to make her even more exotic and unusual and before someone sends me another picture of Rihanna she's not Roma and most likely her eyes are the result of either a spontaneous genetic mutation or from recessive genes resulting from White ancestry somewhere on both sides of her family comparing her to Esmeralda is apples to oranges green eyes are among the rarest eye colors in the world a whopping two percent of people have them and they are unusual even among racially white individuals for instance my Irish mother is the only one of her six siblings who has them and only one of my cousins has them and before you say oh well she has green eyes because Esmeralda means emerald in the book it's because she wore a fake Emerald necklace don't feed into that annoying Trope that women of color and fiction have to have an unusual typically white feature to be seen as beautiful give us more Tiana's and moana's unless esmeraldas and storms like kids actually see themselves in their euros and not impossible beauty standards the fact of the matter is they gave Esmeralda green eyes to make her look sexier and to make her stand out as more unusually beautiful and it's pretty lame of them it's hard for the mini ramp but it was a common comment on my last video and I wanted to address it which finally brings us back to the matter of the Remake as we all know Disney is currently on route to remake as many Renaissance Era animated films as humanly possible and so unless they change gears it's probably just a matter of time before Hunchback gets the CGI gargoyle treatment obviously I'm not a fan of the idea mostly because I don't trust Disney to do due diligence by the Romani people but also because having a comedic actor like Josh gadd playing such a serious role in such a serious movie just sounds like a recipe for disaster like it was kind of funny because in articles that were positive about the Remake you'll see writers struggling with what movie to say Josh gadd is known for that's because if they say he's known for Olaf people will go oh no he can't play Quasimodo most of his other movies are total flops so they usually seem to settle for live-action lefouf and the Beauty and the Beast what she's still a comedic role naturally there are actors who can dance between serious and comedic roles without a problem but it's my knowledge Josh Gad has really only done comedic roles and I don't think it takes a genius to say it might not be a good idea to have the slapstick comedy man played a disabled victim of racism in the story about religion abuse and lust given that he also was in that truly awful Artemis Fowl movie I can't help but be skeptical of this supposedly amazing script and even if the script is as amazing as he claims it is who wrote it were any Roman Consultants brought on during his creation or any going to be brought in once a film stars production or is this gonna be another piece of performative blah only with bad singing and CGI sets a lot of what made the original Hunchback good was visuals and the music both of which tend to suffer during these live-action remakes I have a wish list of things I would personally like to see in a live-action remake of Hunchback if it's going to happen one there absolutely must be a Roma consultant on staff and preferably multiple two I Esmeralda klopin and Quasimodo should if possible be played by people who are Roma I'm not under any illusion that that isn't a tall order we are a rare ethnic group and obviously finding someone who can sing on the level required for these roles is hard enough as it is personally I would allow the inclusion of other traveler groups as their experiences are similar to that of the Roma and it widens the casting pool a little three I would like to see the inclusion of the Romani language like have the Roma characters speak it to each other but then speak English to the other characters four it'll be silly and historically inaccurate to completely eliminate the word Gypsy but it can be used as a teaching moment what I would do is have Gypsy only be used by non-roma characters and then when Phoebus learns from Esmeralda more about her people he uses the word Romany instead five remove the catacombs and rework that entire scene holy 6. Esmeralda rework be more considerate with her dialogue have her do an actual Roma dance ever wear actual Aroma clothes maybe stop emphasizing how desirable she is for 10 minutes I'm sure some people would feel that these simple requests will somehow make the movie woke or blemish it somehow especially when it comes to any changes done to Esmeralda herself if that's the kind of thoughts you're thinking stop and consider how you would feel if your ethnic group was referred to the entire time by a slurred term and had all of its bad stereotypes featured as the normal traits for ethnicity and then you also find out that members of your group were ignored by the writing staff who are just using the cool Aesthetics of your group to make money pretty lousy huh I'm pretty sure that this wish list is a pipe dream and if anything the best we can hope for is maybe a consultant and some Unknown actress for Esmeralda with big name celebrities who've never sung before for everyone else because these remakes aren't even about improving on the original idea or making amends where needed they're about milking the Nostalgia cow until it finally dries up and sure some of them have been fun or enjoyable personally I really like Cinderella in The Jungle Book but dang or some of these others just sad imitations of their original counterparts and I am pretty sure Hunchback is destined for mediocrity if it is made but hopefully it at least won't be racist mediocrity yeah I doubt it overall Hunchback has been a thorn in the Romani people's side since it was first written almost 200 years ago I really don't want this movie to be made it's just a bad idea all around if Josh Gad really wants to make a hunchback movie he can make one of those funny little Olaf recap shorts of it I'll watch that now if you're interested please check out my other video on Hunchback where I go into more detail on its issues of Romani representation and also issues found in other Disney media and for my longtime followers in case you were wondering my thesis is done I graduated I have a masters and that means video making is back on track currently Fox and I are hard at work on four separate videos one on Anastasia one on Tales of Eternia and two that are a bit of a surprise but here's your clue for each I'm also also putting together a separate Channel where I will talk exclusively about history anthropology and culture looking forward to seeing you all again be sure to like comment and subscribe

Channel: Swiftstart

Views: 1,695

Keywords: Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Esmeralda, Romani, Disney Romani, Disney Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hunchback Remake, Swiftstart, Notre Dame Bad, Notre Dame Problem, Hunchback Problem, Disney Hunchback, Disney Hunchback Problem, Disney Racist, Hunchback of Notre Dame Racist, Hunchback Racist, Racism Against Romani, Notre Dame Racist, Esmeralda Racist, Hunchback Justice, Disney Racism, Disney Anti-Romani, Josh Gad, Hunchback remake, Josh Gad Hunchback

Id: w7ztQ6hu_YM

Length: 17min 48sec (1068 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 04 2023