Charlie Chan

Good memory.

And, uh, you know, there w- th- there was the Charlie Chan one with his kids, The Chan Clan.

Yeah.

And they had a, they had a pop band and everything.

I didn't know what The Mikado was? Why, Mary Livingston, before we went into the theater I told you it was an Oriental story.

You told me Charlie Chan was in it, too.

[laughs]

All right, so I made one little mistake.

Really, I have wonderful memories of fall Sunday afternoons.

We'd also watch, like, the Charlie Chan special on TV.

[laughs] Random things remind me of fall Sunday afternoons.

And as I was remembering those, another memory came to my mind, and that was there was ...

Western art also has a long history of using yellowface, which is white actors pretending to be Asian characters, sometimes in really exaggerated and cartoonish ways.

This goes back at least to Gilbert and Sullivan's very popular and popularizing comic opera The Mikado, but continued with Pacini's Madame Butterfly and Turandot to the Charlie Chan movies in the 1930s and 40s, Breakfast at Tiffany's in the 1960s, the Kung Fu television series in the 1970s, the live-action Ghost in the Shell film from 2017, etc., etc., For an underrepresented demographic, this sort of erasure is, of course, not ideal, to say the least.

So a company can, like Opera Orlando did, at least cast Asian actors in the Asian roles.

Impacts.