Because of a 1978 Supreme Court 5-4 decision. Prior to that case 30 different states had laws restricting for-profit corporations from engaging in political speech. First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti essentially overturned all of those laws.
State and federal governments need to be able to regulate for-profit corporations once again to prevent them from biasing elections through programming or social media algorithms. Exceptions (news, talk shows, comedy programs, whatever) should be created by Congress and not the courts. Congress can and should fight among themselves about definitions and who decides what qualifies. We can then elect people based on whether we like where they draw those lines.
But that needs to be a political fight, not a fundamental First Amendment right.
The 4 dissenting Justices would have been fine with streamers who are not for-profit corporations saying whatever they want. But for-profit corporations are simply too powerful and too psychopathic (since their only fiduciary duty is to their shareholders) to be given constitutional protection to push whatever political agenda benefits shareholder profits the most.
Yes, the oligarchs can still fund non-profits and pay for lots of speech, but how many people would actually listen to what they have to say? Without the support of for-profit corporations, such programming would be clearly identified as "paid-for" by the non-profit and recognized as propaganda.
Who cares about billionaires raping our planets resources for their own gain? What about Rachel Zegler?? Brie Larson??? Minorities and woke messaging in mainstream movies?? These are the real issues. I'm not an idiot who's personal grievances against women are easily weaponized by propagandists to turn me into a clueless chud.
Imagine if Predator came out now. You’d have people screeching about hollywood ‘virtue signaling’ because almost every actor is a different ethnicity, and Elpidia Carrillo being one of the leads and sole survivors would be called a ‘Mary Sue.’ At the time no one gave a fuck about any of it.
This actually is something I've been seeing. Very very small world views and compassion only for people just like them. Look a little different? Come from a different background? Not in the right echo chamber and using the exact same terms? Suddenly supporting mental health, believing women, and etc no longer apply because that person is "weird".
As have I. Cliche as it sounds, I do believe social media and the last two generations being by and large raised by screens is a huge reason. Echo chambers are easy to get locked into, everything is infantilzed. But to be clear, I do not believe older ones (I was born in 81) would have psychologically fared better were we granted similar conditions
The breaking of Zeus's law, spreading like plague. Our age of bronze is collapsing, and maybe he couldn't bear to see the ruins of what he'd done. Anywhere. Least of all, his home.
Constant algorithms and social media exposure combined with severe damage from Covid/quarantine. It hit the younger generations harder developmentally.
They are being manipulated by old losers though who were alive at that time. Most rightwing grifters are failed actors/writers taking out that failure on the industry that "scorned" them.
If anyone did complain you wouldn't have been able to hear it back then. But the fact they're called Calypso probably made people expect them to look 'exotic'. Also being a nymph and the daughter of a Titan no one could reasonably claim she would definitely look like any particular ethnicity.
Reasonableness plays no part in any of these complaints. Helen is the daughter of a shapeshifter god and was born out of an egg. She could reasonably look like anything. She having feathers would not be an unreasonable adaptation(she was conceived while dear ol’ dad was in swam form).
Remember that version of Cinderella where Whoopi Goldberg was the queen and somehow had an Asian son with her white husband, who then married a black Cinderella?
I was thinking of this the other day. Brandy was Cinderella. I can’t remember anyone complaining about any of those castings. Granted I was in my low teens at the time, but it’s not like I was under a rock either.
That was before Epstein gave matching orders to wage a brain melting culture war to distract the population from him and his billionaire buddies robbing them blind and raping kids.
Colourism functions more like Racism than Redditors and Twitheads realised.
Beyonce v Nina Simone
Yara Shahid v Lupita Nyongo
The darker skinned in each instance are both imo more skilled in their practice and less popular because they adhere less to standards of what conventionally attractive blackness is considered to be: light skin.
The real reason is Calypso was from a far way place not native to Greece so she could be cast as a woman of any race as long as she's beautiful as all goddesses are supposed to be. Helen was a princess of Sparta so her being anything other than white by the modern definition, not Anglo-Saxon pale like most actors in Hollywood is out of character for her and the time period and the mythology.
This is important. People keep calling these Ancient Greek figures mythical - they're not. They're historical figures that sit within the period of oral traditions, not written ones. We have evidence of their civilisations.
The Greeks may have thought Calypso was real from a religious perspective, but they definitely thought Helen waa real from a historical perspective. Helen is a historical figure in a poet's mythical story. Calypso is a mythical figure in a poet's mythical story.
Greek people were shitting on all the greek adoptation by the west for like 50 years and only now the conservative cares because they want to larp as greek civilization.
I remember going to the british museum and in the greek section i remember a british guy talking to his son about how this artifacts were there ancestor history.
Bro wtf are you talking about. Your ancestor were anglosaxons that used to live in central europe. A lebanese catholic and a anatolian turks have better connection to aincient greeks than you.
Many greek scholars shat upon the western interpertation of greek myths. There was a greek paper on hecules disney version and the clash of the titans.
I can imagine this happening because we studied the og versions of Iliad and Odyssey in Ancient Greek in school.
Philologists in school were pretty gung ho on how important it is to read these texts and have at least basic understanding of Ancient Greek for our culture to survive. This has relaxed over the years though, my mum full on understands ancient Greek while I can only catch phrases and words if I read some inscription in a museum.
/uj genuinely it’s because we didn’t have twitter. there’s so much more diverse casting across so many projects from the 90s that didn’t trigger these furors because we hadn’t given everyone and their dog a fucking pulpit and megaphone and the media wasn’t chasing a 24 minute news cycle that makes them milk the screaming schizo online public square for content. I hate this timeline.
Ehhh. I don’t know tbh. It almost feels like we were more racist back then still but these days people are more open about being racist than they were back then. Or maybe it’s because the internet has been able to amplify the voices of racists like no other medium. Like approval for interracial marriage today is 94% in the US, but in 1997 it was 64%.
That’s exactly what I thought too. Like back the. Racists would side eye people that are “other” to them and grumble racist stuff from the comfort of their leather recliner but keep their mouth shut in public for the most part. Now people just openly call things “woke” and “DEI” as if we don’t know what they’re saying
That’s probably just because you can say it on social media without consequence. It really is hard to deny that people were more racist in the recent past.
This isn't true at all... what happened with the advent of the Tea Party, and then Trump especially, ushered in a "permission" structure for people to be more bold and brash.
Add in the rise and ubiquity of social media, and we're where we're at nowadays.
Now we put them in uniforms and let them pull people over for being a shade of brown. (Okay, they were doing that back then, but at least we didn’t let them wear masks)
Lupita Nyong'o is one of the most beautiful women I've ever seen. She's also a very dark-skinned black woman, which is why racist chuds are up in arms.
I would guess is a difference in scale and era. The film was not upsetting people on all fronts simultaneously and it did not fit into a highly charged narrative at the time.
The current Odyssey does both and so brings in detractors from all angles who connect with and fuel each other.
Meanwhile, that Odysseus and Matt Damon both look like they’d be sunburned after an hour in Greece, and nobody complains about that. Anne Hathaway belongs in the movie exactly as much as Lupita Nyong’o
It's because she wasn't cast as Helen, "the most beautiful woman in the world." Racist people take issue with the idea that a black woman could be prettier than everyone else. Calypso isn't a threat.
I'm pretty sure the far right chuds equivalent of that time were whining too. Only, we were not plagued by social media then and thus, spared the relentless crying.
People were actually ashamed of being openly racist in the 90s... who could have thought
There was not out spread online culture and social media to amplifier the shit a few losers say and think online. Only shady forums where troll hid and talked only amongst themselves
This woman has traits that resemble what European centered beauty standards expected, so they'll not see her as a black person but as an "exotic person"... the post itself is proving it "being pretty is its own race"... like, wtf did i just read?
Because disenfranchised white male losers hadn't yet been stoked to a fever pitch via online psy-ops coordinated by the likes of Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and a handful of other influential billionaires/chomos.
Because it was 1997 and the internet wasn't yet a ubiquitous facet of the culture, so sharing your feelings about a black person appearing in a movie would have meant going outside and talking to someone instead of having an autistic meltdown on social media - very challenging for the kind of person who is bothered by this.
Bet all of you would be the first ones using Lupita as an example of the 'f*ckable female of the ugly race' to bully a future actress. She's gorgeous, you just want chalk skin.
The internet in 97 wasn’t used for complaining, it was strictly getting laid, jerking off or talking about Star Wars/Star Trek with the few people not getting laid or taking a 10 minute break from jerking off.
Hollywood should just make Chinese Mythology movies starring only black and white actors as Chinese characters, that should bold well since it's all just fictional, right?
I remember my junior high teacher asking us what we thought of Vanessa Williams as Calypso. None of us new what the hell her objection might be, whereupon she filled us in on the 1984 Penthouse Miss America scandal.
Like this woman is never allowed to do anything else because she did Penthouse once ~15 years ago.
Because the internet was in its infancy and was far away from being used as a way to make everyone argue over things that don't matter instead of bonding together.
Hmmm I wonder why a TV miniseries aired on NBC in the 90s that no one's heard of didn't have a similar cultural impact to a $250 mill budget Christopher Nolan blockbuster movie opening globally in 2026. Just can't put my finger on why. They're obviously similar scale things, so it's definitely not related to scale and exposure. Hmmm.
Calypso was also played by a black chick in Pirates of the Caribbean films. Also Calypso is like the one casting I haven't heard any negative things about even on X.
That is the crux of it. Everyone wants to jump to racism, but 8/10 comments I see about it are only complaining because she isnt attractive enough for her role. The other 2/10, yes, are racism.
Because back then it wasn't an industry standard to cast people of a different race specifically to cause controversy, generating not just attention to the movie but political dispute.
The issue is Helen of Troy is depicted as "the most beautiful woman in the world". The greek beauty standard was Aphrodite. Helen of Troy would have resembled Aphrodite.
Being outragipsly attractive is the number one criteria for being Helen of Troy, its the defining feature of the charachter, Lupita Nyong does not meet the criteria
Jokes aside, being freer with race or gender in that way used to be normal. The Wiz, that I watched a thousand times when I was a kid, would've caused contemporary conservatives to completely lose their shit with rage if it were made today.
No it was because we weren’t as large race huddling then as we are now.
There were tons of black actors and actresses and we didn’t give 2 craps because we wanted a good movie.
Now they take good movie and slap a black person in as lead to get the race hustlers out there to support some race. And it always bombs because the story is shite and just because a black person is in it didn’t make the story go from shite to good.
Calypso is a villain. There are other things at play, but white supremacists are a lot less likely to go to bat for a villain being cast as black than they are for the character whose only role is defined by being the demigoddess/most beautiful woman anyone can imagine.
Casting Williams as a dangerous seductive witch plays very well with certain stereotypes and tropes about race and sexuality.
uj/ I remember two miniseries "television events" from my childhood. This and Gulliver's Travels staring Ted Danson. The latter I don't remember so well because I had scarlet fever and was wildly delirious.
The whole controversy is stupid, I'm in agreement.
But I feel like generally you'll have more wiggle room for casting/interpretation of characters that are supernatural. There's less of an expectation for them to look exactly as expected, if that makes any sense.
It's dumb to take it out on an actor because of race, but I can at least wrap my head around why someone could be annoyed that a character with exactly three traits (attractive Greek woman) couldn't be paired with an actor that matches all three. But ultimately, it's acting. Danny Devito could've gotten the part and nailed it.
If the characters are fictional... none of this shit matters.
If the film or show was about JFK, I could see a hard sell if they got Jamie Foxx to play him. But, you never know. Jamie could play a better JFK than JFK could. If someone is willing to fund the project and take it all the way to theaters ir TV, it may be worth it. Either way, it affects our lives ZERO PERCENT.
We’re talking about a story written 2800 years ago. The next most famous Ancient Greek poet from 2600 years ago called her fair-haired. I think it’s safe to assume that “fair-haired” wouldn’t be inaccurate or a modernism.
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u/Similar_Two_542 1h ago