h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Do we have any wheelchair-users here? I wonder how they feel when they see another evil mastermind like John Lumic or Davros as being wheelchair-users.

My sister uses a wheelchair and it doesn't bother any of us in the family

Frankly, if I was a wheelchair user I'd be all "Hah! Daleks AND Cybermen! Name one able-bodied villain who better either of those!"

>My sister uses a wheelchair and it doesn't bother any of us in the family.

OK.
What about seeing the rarer example of a 'goodie', like Professor X?

And Ironside

There's also Norton Drake, the computer genius of the ill-fated 'War of the Worlds' TV show.

And Captain Christopher Pike, of Star Trek, who is introduced to us as being in a wheelchair/life support machine combo.

...so, not exactly rare, your wheelchair bound hero. I think we're more or less even in the hero/villain balance.

Nevertheless there is a trend towards deformed/disabled villains generally... there's even a classic Who story where you can tell who all the baddies are simply cos they wear glasses!

I suppose it's just a reflection of one of the less pleasant human instincts - an extension of the same tendency that means Tom Cruise is a megastar and Mackenzie Crook usually gets supporting parts and comic relief.

Don't you think that there's more to it than looks? Charisma plays a big part for sure. Oliver Reed was an ageing drinker but his presence still filled the screen.

Personally I would prefer to see a film with Mackenzie Crook in the lead than Tom Cruise.

Has Tom Cruise made a decent film since A Few Good Men?

I make a point of missing Tom Cruise films (although my ambition is to get through this life without ever seeing a Macauley Culkin movie).

>there's even a classic Who story where you can tell who all the baddies are simply cos they wear glasses!

and wasn't there a really old one where our expectations were confounded, with the ugly ones being good and the beautiful butterfly beings evil?

There are several like that.

I don't know where that whole ugly=evil thing comes from. It's not fairy tales, far as I can tell.

It's much harder to fear someone we fancy.

That explains so very much about human behaviour and also completely rules out Intelligent Design.

Yeah, there are several 'ugly aliens are actually nice guys' stories, the most obvious (in every sense of the word) being Galaxy Four - but the difference between that and The War Games (the 'specs are evil' story) is that Galaxy Four was intentionally written as a rather trite (and arguably quite reactionary) parable whereas The War Games is a rather subversive story with the inherent bias against specs-wearers apparently not occurring to the writers at all (they were writing a rather less trite and arguably quite revolutionary parable).

What about the racism?

All of the monsters, all of the bad guys, have English accents! Clearly, we're all up to no good!

Well, that might be because they're being translated into English for the benefit of English people...?

(Not sure that's strictly 'racism' either, it's not like being English is a bona fide ethnic group...)

I should use more smileys.

All the bad guys in Star Wars originally had English accents, except Darth Vader and Boba Fett.

(Now, bizarrely, Boba is sporting a Kiwi accent). Anyway, it was a semi-sarcastic remark intended to indicate that I have begun to not take the topic seriously.

It occurred to me that folks in wheelchairs are just folks, about as capable of being good, bad or indifferent as any other occupant of the planet. So it's really not the chair that makes the person. And to be fair to people in wheelchairs, it would be wrong to portray them as having less than the full range of character opportunities.

Sure, that's the way things are in the real world - but, there's a natural human instinct (not a very nice one to be sure, but that doesn't mean it's not still there) to be repelled by severe physical imperfection. And if you're doing the kind of broad-brush storytelling that most action movies and SF use, then using that instinct is a convenient shorthand (disabled/deformed = repellent = villain, instantly established with no dialogue required).

I must admit one reason why I was less than impressed with the parallel world two-parter was because it had such a cliched (even retro) villain.

But Lumic's physical condition was his motivation: he created the cybermen *because* he was dying. If he was 100% A1 BFT grade then he wouldn't have created them, and umm, there wouldn't have been a story.