It's kinda funny...

Yesterday Stan Lee presents: The Condor was on Toonami (and released on DVD 3/20) and I've been following along some of the message boards discussing it with amusement - okay, not really discussing it so much as slamming it.

I'm the first one to admit it's not a great film by any means and it suffers from several problems - mainly the small budget and short production schedule, but what I find really amusing is the slant some of these critics take on how some of the characters might be negative stereotyopes. What's really funny is these same critics don't recognize the fact that we also broke several stereotypes. The lead character's parents (both Latino) are wealthy owners of a bio-robotics laboratory and they are both smart and sophisticated as is his best friend Sammi (also a Latina). Yeah, I know, Sammi's another type of cliche - she's the typical girl that he should be with, but is too stupid to notice. I agree that some of the other Latinos are stereotypes, but for Southern California they aren't so much stereotypes as actual people you could meet on the street. Since we felt they were balanced out by Tony, his parents and Sammi it sure didn't feel like we were picking on the Latino community.

And actually one of the more intreresting things about this show is that any Latino that has seen it (that I've heard from) actually likes what we did. As ShadowGUN stated on one of the forums discussing Condor.

One of the other stereotypes that is often pointed out in these 'critiques' is Valeria being a sexy Asian. I never realized that this was a negative stereotype, but I doubt it'll offend too many Asians -especially since in the story she much more than eye candy and is the owner of a sports publication and turns out to be more than all that by the end of the film (I won't ruin it for anyone who still might want to buy the DVD). Her grandfather makes an appearance at the end of the film and he does seem to be more in the Fu-Manchu mode of stereotype, but since the implication is he's part of a bigger plot and organization we felt it worked for what we wanted. Frankly, he isn't anymore of a stereotype than the grandfather and many other characters in the Jackie Chan cartoon - maybe less.

The other complaint by many is the stereotypical voice acting and how there are doubts that many of them weren't even Latino. Due to the limited budget we originally went to Vanmcouver, BC to do our voice recording and to be honest there isn't a huge latino acting community up there, but wherever possible we did use Latinos to create these voices - though many of their names are not typical Latino.

I'm not trying to imply this is the Citizen Kane of animated superhero films - far from it, but I think it's no worse than many of the other current crop and better than some. And if you're interested enough in still seeing it (shameless plug) you can click on the button over to the right...

Anyway, I think I've defended this enough -- how about a couple of attitude and expression sheets from Stan Lee presents: The Condor (I created these expression and attitude sheets though the original designs for these characters came from Dan Haskett)....

...and if these aren't interesting enough for you...here's a Lara Croft I did sometime ago (I don't think I ever showed it here or anywhere before)...