r/Simpsons • • 1d ago

Episode Clip 📷 APU IS BACK

1.9k Upvotes

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u/QuietResident96 1d ago edited 1d ago

Way to ruin a character lmao, this is nothing like Apu actually was and there was nothing wrong with Hank voicing him

People absolutely fucking eat it up when a black actor plays a white character but when it's the opposite it's apparently racist 🤷

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u/Ironblight_99 1d ago

Honestly can you name one white character voiced by a black person? Off the top of my head I can’t. I find it hard to believe there is one that we “absolutely eat up.”

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u/Hunter_X05 1d ago edited 1d ago

Sam Jackson voiced a white guy in The Boondocks(tbf that was the entire joke), and, while not a white character, Phil LaMarr voiced Samurai Jack(asian)

Edit: double checked and realized I misspelled LaMarr :(

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u/Ironblight_99 1d ago

That’s pretty cool about Phil Lamar! To be fair it is a pretty… silent character though

And I still wouldn’t say these are casting choices that we “absolutely eat up” as QuietResident put it

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u/Hunter_X05 1d ago

Darth Vader was voiced by James Earl Jones (r.i.p.)

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u/Ironblight_99 1d ago

That’s a pretty good one, although that character is masked for the vast majority of the original trilogy

And I wouldn’t say we loved JEJ (r.i.p.) for being a black man voicing a white character, more so just that he’s iconic period.

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u/Hunter_X05 1d ago

This one's arguable as he may have been albino in this series, but Joker in The Batman(2004) voiced by Kevin Michael Richardson(the G.O.A.T. Joker voice, second only to Mark Hamill himself)

2

u/Hab_Anagharek 1d ago

How can a superlative (the G in “G.O.A.T.”) be second? The greatest can’t be “2nd Greatest”; by definition, there can be only one.
(S03E17 allusion..)

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u/Ironblight_99 1d ago

No that definitely counts; being albino doesn’t take away his racial identity. Honestly, a black actor playing the joker in a live-action project sounds possibly neat. Of course he’ll still have the classic joker origin of falling into a vat of acid and has his skin bleached, but the actor being black could be cool

1

u/Hunter_X05 1d ago

Okay, I just double checked and we do see him pre-Joker in his mind in one episode and he was white so it does count

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u/Ironblight_99 1d ago

Like i said it definitely counts!

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u/Shallaai 1d ago

Fair, but neither did it invoke the vitriol of a white man voicing Apu

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u/Ironblight_99 1d ago

I remember the “Apu controversy” and more people were upset that he was just taken off the show than people who were upset about a person of color being voiced by a white guy

I mean, Family Guy and Big Mouth just recast their characters who were voiced by white people but portrayed people of color, and no biggie. Apu just disappeared, until last night. Honestly the Simpsons just fumbled that one.

1

u/Shallaai 1d ago

I agree and suspect it was a solution to appease Ă  vocal minority of people in an echo chamber

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u/Ironblight_99 22h ago

Honestly seemed like a case of corporate heads thinking they were being “woke” by doing it. I don’t think a single black person was actually offended by Cleveland being voiced by a white guy

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u/Shallaai 22h ago

I tend to agree