The Ark kills a rat.

Well, it IS Jewish.

The Ark kills a rat.

Re the monkey - yeah, the eyepatch and Nazi salute don't help!

Captain Katanga was a black guy, and he was one of the smartest people in Raiders. And there's nothing wrong with the depiction of the Arabs. I think you're way over-thinking the subject.

Excessive concern about the depiction of race and gender in movies will only lead to every villain being played by a white Englishman.

You're right that Katanga is one of the most fleshed out non-white characters - he has what, four lines? The issue I have with the depiction of 'the Arabs', is that it's just that - virtually none of them are characters, and the ones that are are stereotypically comic.

The issue is not their villainy, it's the lack of attention to them as characters. I presume your comment about white Englishmen is sarcastic (it's sometimes hard to tell on the internet), because that's precisely the kind of lazy stereotyping that I'm calling out. We telegraph everything you need to know about a character into the common beliefs we have about the characteristics of their race and gender. We even see this with the monkey spy - how does the movie signal that he is untrustworthy? He's dressed like an Arab...

With a good bulk of the movie taking place in Egypt, you're gonna have a bunch of Egyptian bad guys. Indy with a horde of Egyptian henchmen would be a bit silly now, wouldn't it?

It's not about whether they are 'bad guys', the issue is whether the characters are fully fleshed out individuals or flimsy ethnic stereotypes.

Excessive concern about the depiction of race and gender in movies will only lead to every villain being played by a white Englishman.

It may be more disappointment on his part. After all, the difference between a story set in a time period and a movie MADE back then is you can look back and have some fun with it. Either go all Blazing Saddles, or play up the racism to get the point across. I'd love, for example, to see a Buck Rodgers show that had the original evil Mongol Chinese going after white women. The original League of Extraordinary Gentlemen went that way, with the horrible movie changing the bad guy into iirc some German.

Yes - I mean, I get that on one level Raiders is lampooning or homaging pulp comics and cheap tv shows of the era, and that's fine, it's just that I think that if that's what you're doing you've got to be a little careful that you really are doing it ironically, not just doing it.

I feel like if you're going to do that (LOEG with Yellow Peril) then you really have to make sure that you hang a lantern on it or subvert it in some way. Simply wallowing in nostalgia of a period when racism was more acceptable seems a little, well, I don't know, inappropriate.

Do you have that problem with Star Wars?

Oh, so it's only real cultures that deserve respect and depth! I see. Hmph.

Actually I kind of do... The whole 'this is a desert planet', 'this planet is high tech' etc recalls the worst of the Star Trek 'planet of the week' episodes where a race or culture stands in for some political point the show wants to make. In the Star Wars movies there are usually so few of any given non-human race that it's impossible to see a diversity in their cultures, and so it's hard to see them as fully rounded representations.

We are shown what tuscan raiders, jawas, wookies, etc 'are like' in the early minutes of Star Wars, and learn little more about them than that. It's a disgrace. ;)