There's an episode where they find a huge underwater pyramid that has ancient Greek writing on it. A character gets possessed and starts speaking Greek. It turns out it's The Temple of Minerva built by Neptune. Now if you had a thing for mythology, like I did, as a kid you probably notice those are the Roman names of the gods. And Minerva is a black woman. This is in the early 90s.
This "replacement rot" has been going on for a long time
90s Disney "underdog wins" sports movies inevitably had a "diverse" cast as the heroes and the WASPiest looking all-White villains. Probably even earlier than that, with the major bad guys in the Goonies being rich whites.
Even a lot of the action movies back then, even popular ones, always had White villains, but everyone else was diverse. Check out the Lethal Weapon movies (except for 4). Lethal Weapon 2's villains were, to make it even more on the nose, racist South African Whites, to help demonize the evil apartheid state of South Africa.
But, hey, at least we proved the racists wrong, and South Africa is paradise now!
And rich White jocks were always the villains in movies like Revenge of the Nerds.
I'd never really thought about it, but when I heard someone else discussing the phenomenon it made sense; it's written by the theatre kids.
It's at least in part resentment, while also being very exaggerated. Jocks are bad because they had a better time in school than the people writing the fictional character did.
Though granted, a lot of jocks across America get a much sweeter deal than they probably should because of the absurd level some people get invested into kid's sports.
I don't have any lingering grudges, all the ones I knew growing up were alright guys and a few were in the Anime Club with me even, but we had teachers who'd literally stop class to applaud them for plays or give them outs on doing homework because they had practice/games.
Its one of those things where its kinda true, but then gets blown up into delusional by guys who were probably the problem themselves.
I was more talking attitudes. It's not that they weren't privileged in some ways, it's that they often weren't jerks and meatheads.
That portrayal was largely resentment-fueled. The stereotypical jock is a senseless, malicious bully with the IQ of a sponge, and that's certainly at the very least exaggerated.
The mean ol' bullies were the heroes all along, while the "scrappy underdog resistance" were really just filthy degenerates and the "oppressive system" they were rebelling against was natural order.
Karate Kid is a perfect example of this. https://youtu.be/C_Gz_iTuRMM?si=O7K8ee0IiFwuK611
For a time every villain was English.
Hah, just remembered the White South African villain in Lethal Weapon 2. Buddy cops good preserving cultural and ethnic harmony bad amirite??
Ace Ventura 2 also did that.
https://villains.fandom.com/wiki/Vincent_Cadby
Mass Effect 2 did it, too!
https://masseffect.fandom.com/wiki/Donovan_Hock
Must be a thing with sequels.
This was heard a thousand times a day in 8th grade
I think I read somewhere originally the villains weren't South African but they changed it to protest Apartheid
Of course.
Man, that just felt so out of place. It was just a very, very weird plot. Stilted and nonsensical.
Well this is something I can understand.