"Chan" Is Missing on Fox Movie Channel

Can we all please just lighten up? Bowing to complaints from Asian-American activists with apparently too much time on their hands, the Fox Movie Channel has reversed its decision to run twenty classic "Charlie Chan" films recently restored for a summer flight. The gist of the complaints, besides the Chan character's thick, cartoonish Oriental accent, was that none of the actors, Warner Oland, Sidney Toler and Roland Winters, is Chinese.

This is reminiscent of the situation that the Cartoon Network ran into a couple of years ago, when it was planning to run a dozen or so "racially insensitive" Bugs Bunny cartoons as part of its (then) annual "June Bugs" marathon. The network even offered to run them late at night with disclaimers, but that wasn't good enough, and again, the network relented to a few loud activists with too little to do.

How about this for a novel approach? If you don't like what a network is running, change the channel! Or read a book! Is "Charlie Chan in London" really so much worse than "Fear Factor" and "Temptation Island"? Come to think of it, "Temptation Island" was a Fox product, wasn't it? Why aren't we protesting these horrible present-day programs? Why don't we care that our kids can hear Ross, Rachel, Monica and Joey talk about sex at 6:05pm every night, or whenever TBS decides they can air it? I find THAT offensive. Let's take it off the air. Puh-leez!

I was five or six, I believe, when Mom and I started our Saturday night ritual. A Philadelphia station began alternating the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes films with the Charlie Chans every Saturday night at 11:30pm. Funny. I like to think of myself as racially tolerant. With that kind of corruption, you'd think I'd be Archie Bunker!

This kind of overreaction is not new to the media. After the occurrence at Pearl Harbor in 1941, radio's "Green Hornet" miraculously changed the nationality of his valet, Kato from Japanese to Philippino. Isn't it time that we progress, however, from 1941? Interestingly enough, that's the period where these classic films once thrived. I'm looking forward to the day that someone decides its safe to screen the "Charlie Chan" films. I can't believe that Fox, of all networks, hasn't got the guts.

By Bill Wilson