It's staggering that the infamous breathy tones of Darth Vader were a last-minute casting, a hasty decision made when IV - A New Hope (nee Star Wars) only existed in that curious purgatory that the film industry calls 'post-production'. Originally, Orson Welles was front-runner to do all that heavy breathing. And why not - he was a name of the same generation as Messrs. Cushing and Guinness, and there'd then be three established 'names' to support the new faces of Messrs Ford, Fisher and Hamill.
However, racial consciousness in the mid 1970s had led to the boycotting of cinema that failed to feature - let alone represent - black actors and / or characters.
Vader, therefore, when everyone else had not only been cast but filmed, got voiced by a black actor. And, in time for the sequels, Han's rogueish but redeemable chum, Lando, was cobbled together. So what's this got to do with Ackbar - fishy fellow from Jedi? Well, the reasoning behind the boycotting was that cinema was pretty much ignoring black people. Sure, Poitier was working, and there were no end of bit parts as noble savages and hoodlums going, but what little work there was hardly what we'd call PC. (Politically correct, not Paul Cornell, obviously).
Now, Science-Fiction, for all its claims of being a progressive, thought - evolving, looking- to- the- better- future- earnestly happening, was just as guilty as everyone else for excluding and misrepresenting racial groups. And since SF was making all the pious claims, the continual prejudice was all the less forgivable. 2001 - A Space Odyssey, for example, may well be a hugely impressive, convincingly 'realistic' (whatever that might mean when you're talking about fiction, let alone SF) and solid piece of SF cinema. Yet, as we actually broach the year 2001 for ourselves, one of the most jarring differences between the prediction and the world we're now living in is that it's not only the space programme that is exclusively populated by whites. So, it seems, is the whole Earth.
Star Trek's Uhura, as we all know, might now seem a mini-skirted bimbo who answered that nice white man's phone, but was for the late '60s terribly broad-minded. Her character and position wasn't seen as sexist or demeaning - she was a black character with a role to play. She was a role model. Even Martin Luther King said so. And if you've not heard the furore over that time Uhura snogged Kirk... well, there are some Treksters who seem rather to think a revolution had happened by the next morning.
Even now, cinema is not largely in favour of positive black characters. If you're a black actor with noted talent, your career won't peak much beyond playing the sidekick of a white bloke. However, hate it or just detest it, Independence Day at least shook things up a bit. Will Smith - who then got to be one of the Men In Black the next year - admitted that when he'd first been offered a script where his character got to saved the world from some very expensive visual effects, he had had to ask, 'Are black people allowed to do this?'
Basically, the consensus in SF has always been that SF heroes are white, Beautiful people, governed by white Beautiful people - albeit older and beardier ones. Ugliness, off-whiteness and anything that even vaguely hints at 'the foreign' is not merely relegated to the status of 'alien', but is seen to be determinedly 'evil alien'. Just ask that Ming The Merciless - Darth Vader's cultural forefather. (He had a bolshy daughter that pirates fell in love with, too.)
So when a bright scarlet and stupendously ugly fish person (i.e The Underwater Menace done with some money) takes the role of highest serving officer in the Rebl Fleet when it takes on the Emperor, things are pretty bloody cool. Sure, an old man with a beard and some whiney woman in a cape (the hallmarks of any civilised authority) may have talked us through the plan, but it's Ackbar who takes the troops out, who wields the executive decision over whether or not to run the trap they all then end up in. Beard and whiney woman wouldn't have stood a chance, but Ackbar does the Rebels proud.
And who pilots the Millenium Falcon while our regular cast of Beautiful people are playing with the teddy bears? Hey, it's our pal Lando, and accompanied by some really frightening looker of a co-pilot. Oh, and the evil Emperor's a white guy.
NOTE: A(c)kbar the Great was a 16th-century emperor of the Mogul dynasty in India. The Arabic phrase "Allah akbar" means "God is great." This is a prime example of Lucas mythic resonance. Or something.
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