Ching Chang Chong: Racism and Not-Racism in Entertainment Media

Subjective Reality continued: Today's vocab word is Butt-Hurt.

I just don't have the words for how stupid this case involving Simon Ledger and the song "Kung Fu Fighting" is. It's already over and done with, but it's still an unbelievable incident to say the least, it shows how an out of control obsession to meet an impossible standard can be a serious threat to artistic creativity, and entertainment.

I've picked on Australia previously for doing this kind of thing, but now it seems that its mommy is outdoing it and raising the bar on the stupid-standard to an inconceivable level. Yes those limey bastards have taken political correctness to an extreme the likes of which make Pat Condell seem like a reasonable individual. Yeah, I know the story is from The Sun. but if you must, here have the same story from Daily Mail or BBC.

ENEMY OF COMMON SENSE

This is entertainment not criminality.

NO U
Oh, Internet...

This IS entertainment. One of the pillars of entertainment is it can't be criminalized, if you're American, your right to be creative is protected (hell, your right to be a straight up racist a-hole is protected), while the rights of mental midgets not to have their feelings hurt are not written into insane laws.  This is not the same as advocating that hurtful, insensitive, or even vitriolic expressions should be free from any consequence.  It is that when applying a criminal consequence, there are rigid metrics to follow.  Such is not the case in other jurisdictions.  It would seem that it's only by the consent of the most insignificant plebeian minds and their fragile emotionality, can any media entertainment exist in the UK without being labeled a criminal enterprise.

Well, England being the country that brought us Apartheid in South Africa, the mess in Northern Ireland, India vs Pakistan, driving on the left side of the road, and this non-stop news cycle of 'who gives a fuck' royal wedding carnival of lucky moneyed trailer trash (yes I did just call the British monarchy lucky moneyed trailer trash, and what are you gonna do about it? nothing, that's what.) what can you really expect? It's such a misguided backlash from an unchecked sense of having to make amends from the past, and will most likely lead to the homogenized hell-future of Demolition Man before anyone realizes that the government has taken all the fun out of life. Que the revolution and blah blah blah. Seriously, is this retardulatastic incident really any different from the "swear meter" that fines you every time you drop the f-bomb in public in that movie? Why would a machine do that if nothing else than to "protect" the "feelings" of others from your 1st amendment exercises, no? It puts the state of others in front of your ability/right (depending on where you live) to say whatever you want, while both parties are in a public space.

So the potential problem is huge in terms of not only media, but quality of life in general. I might "feel" the world is flat and screw up your kid's education by demanding the school "respect my belief." Or I might "feel" that sushi is such unspeakable animal cruelty that I might throw a fit if I have to be subjected having someone eat it within my field of vision. Or I might "feel" like Hetalia is offensive to Italians (or anyone else for that matter) and demand that WH Smith not only stop selling it immediately, but also that the person who ordered it and put it on the shelf in the first place be arrested, and they hand over a list of every customer who bought it so they can send Guy Montag to your front door.  There's a difference between withholding customership and busting out the handcuffs.

"Spaghetti" mother fucker, do you speak it?

Like in Miracle on 34th St, on one hand you can count the people who believe that Chris Kringle was Santa Claus and on the other you can count the people who believe the opposite (lol insert religion-joke here). This does NOT mean one group is oppressing the other, this means that such beliefs are totally fucking meaningless unless objective realities can be found to add legitimacy to one side or the other. Without objective facts you have opinions, with objective facts you have conclusions (not opinions). You can "feel" that this song is somehow racist all you want to, but it's not, so shut up. No, your feelings aren't important enough to change the fact that it's not racist. Yes it does kind of feel bad to realize that in the grand scheme of things you and your opinions are pretty much worthless. ...like I said before, deal with it.



The person making the media is the ultimate authority on its meaning.
And before anyone says something about it wasn't the song itself but the fact that the guy somehow played it at the other guy and that's what's illegal in this situation, just shut the hell up. It wasn't.  And don't give me any of that "Isle of Wight isn't England" crap either, because that's bullshit. If you actually think that such minor perspectives are somehow significant, just head on over to Memory Alpha, because there's an argument going on over there about Captain Kirk vs Captain Picard that requires your level of intellect.

This is totally important.

So now is this and every other song that uses the "oriental riff" going to be banned from karaoke joints in WestCliffordShropsherChippingtonShireOntheThems or whatever the fuck England calls it's cities that aren't London? Are we gonna have a good old fashioned book burning where we throw The Vapors "Turning Japanese" sheet music and CDs on the funeral pyre of creative freedom? Are we going to criminalize the possession of Big Trouble in Little China on DVD in region 2 PAL? Is England gonna ban Mikado, HMS Pinafore, and Madam Butterfly while they're at it? Three Little Maids From School are we, singing this now is a fel-o-ny, nicked on the ground as you can see, three little maids in jail.

By that reasoning, you're now a on the UK no-fly list for just watching this.

I feel a kind of personal connection to this because for over a whole decade, I marketed Kung Fu Fighting on home video. No not the song, I mean actual movies where there was Kung Fu Fighting in them and all that good stuff. Michelle Yao, Gordon Liu, Wong Fei Hung, Polly Kuan, Wong Kar Wai, Sammo Hung, John Liu, the entire fucking cast of Shaw Bros, and 10 times more than that, I got their movies into stores like Best Buy and Amazon.com, then I had to make consumers want to buy them. I used shit like this to do it:

You think it's racist? Well, it's not, so fuck off. Involving police over a cover of a disco song from the 1970's can be shown to be incredibly stupid when looking at the alternative possibilities of doing the same thing: Would the police have stormed in and shut the whole place down if the song was being played over a sound system rather than by a live band? What if it was somebody's ring-tone on their cellphone and it went off? Or if this Family Guy clip was on a TV above the bar... or this one... or this one... or, well you get the idea.

Racism makes for great comedy, you know why? Because it's fucking funny, and it's fucking funny because it's fucking stupid. If racism in any media can even be criminal, and then be defined by literally anyone who feels butt-hurt over something, then Chris Rock & Eddy Murphy will be rotting in jail long after Charles Manson gets out.



I seriously don't want to ever go to England ever again because of this shit. It makes me want to find a Union Jack and piss on it.  OK not that, I am just saying that to get a rise out of people (this is the internet), but I do abhor that kind of decision making.  Maybe this whole thing is troll-bait like the Scopes Monkey Trial, but looking back, even the Monkey Trial was still a spectacle which puts the spotlight on how dumb certain people can be. The same is true here. The fact that "Kung Fu Fighting" gets someone arrested is so mind bogglingly 'does-not-compute', that I don't think I can actually understand what it means to live over there. Did they arrest the other musicians? They were accessories after all? They facilitated this "criminal" act, did they not? ...you got a warrant out for Carl Douglas? He wrote the thing, so he must be as bad as Pol Pot or something.

Or maybe this guy?
Bonus points if you can name this movie & actor.

It's not even a small stretch to claim the same "me Chinese me play joke, me go pee pee your coke" levels racist offense is all over the pages and and animations of Hetalia, Ranma 1/2, or just about any manga or anime if you deliberately go looking for it. Like I said before, the reason otakus should be worried about this, is that whoever made this complaint (may they die from cancer up their asshole) could easily cry foul over bruised sensibilities if you happen to be reading a copy of something they find "offensive" because... reasons, while sitting on the bus next to him and force your arrest. The force the bookstores to stop selling any title that they were "offended" by. If you live in the UK or any of it's side projects, you had better worry about what you do/read/sing/fart in public, because if someone decides they don't like it or they just don't like you, then you're in for a world of pain.

Put down the anime and back away slowly! It offended someone!

I'm listening to the song right now. England had better take some time away from kissing the Queen's ass and make sure iTunes doesn't sell the thing to the commoners, otherwise the whole country will just go straight to hell! Pretty prince Willie and Kate whats-her-face are gonna break up, they'll have to start driving on the right side of the road, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!

Common sense has not triumphed in this situation even though this matter has been more or less put to bed, as the keystone-cop police mentioned that they would be happily prepared to do this crap again if it happened. The "accuser" has not been rightfully thrown in jail and punched in the face for wasting police time, and taxpayer money. I seriously want to know who the fucktard is who called the cops in, so that I can laugh when I hear that he committed suicide because there's video of him being anally penetrated by a Tibetan Yak all Mr. Hands style (it's ok, it's a wikipedia link). This kind of thing happening should have been a warning sign that the law is far too vague to be functional. I have lost faith in England's ability to control itself and it should be left in the corner to soil it's pants every day wondering what year it is. The door would be further open to even more ridiculous legal shenanigans based on the subjective reality of any moron's "hurt feelings" and the simply inexplicable notion that those feelings are worth a speck in the grand scheme of things. The logical progression of this kind of thing is simply terrifying:

FURSECUTION!
Oi guv'ner I'm callin' the Fuzz what with me English-ness an' all!
You bungslab that claptrap-tat right now or I'll kippleswig you in the wobbiecobbles!
(or however the fuck they talk over there).

And the moral of the story:

BCI Eclipse and the Inevitable.

"Be water my friend."

Formerly known as Brentwood, the Navarre-owned BCI label is being shut down as, according to CEO Cary Deacon, its “operations have been unprofitable for the past two years.” There’s a lot of news out there already about this story, so I will not go into much of a rehashing of the general history regarding this development and simply dive right in to the commentary.


For someone who has been in this business as long as I have, to look at “unprofitable operations” for two years begs the question of just what the hell kind of operations were they running to begin with. The answer is an obvious extrapolation we can make from the outcome, they were home media operations and nothing else.

Marital arts libraries in particular tend to be full of titles that, even when bundled together in groups of up to 10 for the price of one, just don’t sell. Also, if you are getting licenses from Toby Russell there are all kinds of other things you may want to worry about (the guy George Tan was working with before Toby, went and got himself cut in half for playing musical licenses with a movie made by a certain group of film aficionados called the Triads).


Moving back to the point at hand, although this may only be compared to the fall of Geneon in America in a bit of an abstract way, the final realization that playing follow the leader with a blind person in front has brought you to a “cut your losses” moment, falls into that general category of business shenanigans. This was a case of a Hollywood mentality being applies to a New York business model, and that’s always a recipe for companies following suit of some “ground breaking” market freeze-frame, without any model which will guarantee continued profits via contingency if the primary goal proves unsustainable. Has the same happened with anime, yes. Will the results be the same… not really. Modern martial arts productions are not really going to slow down. They have a big domestic market (an increasingly media-friendly China), cost very little to produce, and do not depend on international licensing for putting gas in the tank.


The demise of this entity is yet another example of opportunity lost when it comes to older niche material which has exhausted a single product lifecycle (DVD/Home media in this case), but exists in a large library owned by a company with some substantial resources. Unlike many other products, entertainment media need not simply become a drag on resources once it has had its turn as a home media product which fails to cover its own costs (especially this classic martial arts stuff)… There is light at the end of that tunnel and that is where having the right licenses comes in. As I am currently actually involved in such project, I won’t be going into detail of what should be done, because that concept is worth money and is proprietary (to me). Sufficed to say that it doesn’t take a vast array of licenses to produce a vast array of commercially viable material. If you want me to come in and save your assets and make them profitable now without having to lay out much new capital, then let me know, there’s a little piece of paper in the Library of Congress that says I own the way to do it.


"Running water never grows stale, so keep on flowing."
-Bruce Lee

This is Not New

It seems to have reached a crisis level, and is the talk of the world of American anime economics, the notion that there is an impending collapse of the anime market in the U.S. in general, because of very poor DVD sales.

So fansubs can be seen to hurt a license, but also help it by creating brand awareness. “Brand awareness” however, is totally worthless if it can not be translated into sales of consumer goods of any kind. In many cases the ability of a property to make money in other fields of licensing is killed by fansub proliferation. It is a form of “bootlegging” in a way, not quite different from another segment of Asian entertainment that went through something similar over two decades ago in the 1980’s; Kung Fu.

One of the most pirated genres out there is the martial arts film. Now what’s important to realize that the audiences for anime and for martial arts films have only the slightest bit of overlapping (Fred Perry), and are mostly made up of groups that have nothing to do with each other. However a comparison of historical context is still worth something.

Like a combination of Adult Swim titles, Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon set off a huge explosion in interest in martial arts both as an activity/sport and as entertainment. There was also a new technology coming out at that time as well, one that the industry said would ruin the viability of all video entertainment, and that was the brand spanking newfangled contraption known as the VCR. At the point that martial arts became popular, the primary delivery method for such media was shifting from the cinema to the home. By the early 80’s there are back rooms in small shops pumping out bootleg versions of every Gordon Liu and Chan Seng chop saki basher to be sold on the street, in mail order catalogues, or at conventions.

The result of this was a large market for such material, but a market with standards which would make legitimate operation of media companies almost impossible based on the levels of pricing and sales would support. At the same time, there was a little known phenomenon that got around the language barrier, and that was Hong Kong colonial law. It stated that any cinematic media made in Hong Kong had to have an English version made as well. This is why all those old English dubs of kung fu flicks are done by drunken Australian sailors. Without this, the spread of kung fu in America would have been seriously hampered by a need for subtitling and a general audience not ready to accept anything in a subtitled form. That, coupled with the ethics of a martial arts movie consumer making fansubbers look like media boy scouts, brought a rapid growth of material with an underdeveloped legitimate infrastructure.

After a while of legit and bootlegs warring with each other on the video shelves things seemed to collapse when production could no longer be sustained due to the inability of the money generated in the U.S. make it back to the studios to finance ever more expensive productions. Throw in a change in tastes in the domestic audience, and you have a dark age for the genre. We are now out of that dark age as Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon has become the Akira of a new era of martial arts as entertainment, but one that still has quite visible scars.

Now what does this remind you of? Let’s run down the list:
• Entertainment from Asia in high demand.
• New Technology circumventing the industrial infrastructure.
• Language barrier overcome without use of commercial means.
• Production of more original content stymied by lack of revenue.

The main difference is that the unlicensed copies of media in anime are being distributed for free, even further damaging the market since the information gathered about the market based on taking a free product is almost worthless and can not help companies make plans for the future.

The recent developments over at ADV are sending ripples throughout the industry and the questions about the future that are being raised now, are very different than those from just 6 months ago. Some questions are bleaker than before, others smack of the denial and ignorance running throughout fandom which simply serves to feed the burning anger and frustration of guys like me.

Like Ancient Rome, American fandom has sucked in the resources from the producers and have built a massive city, all without producing a single thing in return to help further that production. Simply “liking it” does not mean a thing if it operates outside the areas which provide economic subsistence. Like Ancient Rome, anime in America is surrounded on all sides and has no way to pay its own army. Like Ancient Rome, anime in America may see a long dark age before technology or a new method of international collaboration bring us into the light. We have seen it with martial-arts an era ago, and history may be about to repeat itself.

T.A.O.

PS:
AWO used this incident in their latest episode in their news section, very cool. I can now declare victory, in that I have been mentioned twice in a row on AWO and not once has Daryl uttered "Apollo Smile" not even once, as my bluetooth deception master plan is finally complete!