What was the first movie or TV show that you identified with?
As filmgoers flock to Crazy Rich Asians, some applaud — and others criticize — Hollywood's diversity
Crazy. Rich. Asians.
Written by Randy Boyagoda
I was ten years old when I saw Short Circuit. It's a movie about a military robot that's struck by lightning and comes to life.
I wanted to see it because it starred Steve Guttenberg — and how could anything starring Police Academy-era Steve Guttenberg not be great?
I don't really remember much about the movie, other than Guttenberg's scientist sidekick, Ben Jabituya. That was the first time I remember really noticing a South Asian character in a contemporary movie.
Sure there were brown people in The Party and Gandhi and Indiana Jones, but those were all set far away and long ago.
But Short Circuit was a movie with a story I could imagine myself in, in the here and now, and that's when I wondered: did the existence of Ben Jabituya in the movie mean my only option was to be a skinny brown guy with floppy black hair and bad glasses and bad jokes?
Of course not, you might say, but that kind of character felt a little too believable to Randy Boyagoda circa 1986. And my playing the brown guy on Short Circuit certainly made sense to a few kids on the schoolyard in north Oshawa, too.
Three decades later, lazy clichés about minority characters are no longer the only options on-screen. Maybe that's why an all-minority cast film like Crazy Rich Asians is Canada's number one movie.
But is it really that simple? Are we potentially replacing one set of stereotypes for another, or simply updating them?
Our question: what was the first movie or TV show that you identified with?