Before The Last Airbender, the biggest racebending controversy of the decade was probably over Angelia Jolie playing the character of mixed-race French journalist Mariane Pearl, who was five months pregnant when her husband Daniel was abducted by terrorists in Pakistan in 2002.
Interracial marriage has been legal in the US for 45 years, but that doesn’t mean people are exactly comfortable with the idea yet. And in many countries abroad, countries that contribute a lot to a movie’s overall profits, interracial relationships are even more frowned upon.
No list about racebending would be complete without this unfortunate stain on an otherwise classic movie. Mickey Rooney’s portrayal of Mr. Yunioshi is without parallel in most of cinema history.
After the runaway success of Pulp Fiction everyone was wondering what Quentin Tarentino would do next. What he did was take a novel called Rum Punch, change the race of most of the characters and some of the plot, and turn it into a homage to Blaxploitation films.
Perhaps by wanting to avoid stereotyping Asian-Americans as really good at math, the producers of 21 just got rid of them all together.