Watching The Mummy the other night with two daughters. Fairly early on there is a scene where one of the ethnic characters decides to do something greedy and underhand and gets separated from the rest of the team in the City of the Dead. The girls turned to each other, nodded wisely, and said “movie tropes”. I asked what they meant, and they explained that it’s a well known truism that ethnic characters are at a higher risk of getting bumped off horribly early in any movie (and that’s exactly what happened to this guy straight afterwards). This reminded me of the old legend of the Red Shirts in Star Trek. These were those members of the away team that beamed onto the strange new planet that they happen to have found this week, that you have never seen before and are wearing red shirts. No surprises for guessing who’s going to get shredded by a monster/vaporized by a phaser/crushed by a rockslide. (I love that you can Google “what colored shirts were the crew wearing on Star Trek that always got killed?” And you can get your answer and find that people are still researching it in 2019:
Sorry I have to find a way of putting a close bracket in here somewhere.)
Of course, back in 1999, virtually all the “ethnic” characters were played by Latinos or even European white people with tinted moisturizer on. At least we’ve made some progress since then (21 years!!!), although I’m sadly still certain that that particular movie trope still holds. It’s up there with the teenage couple who have sex and are then the next victims of the horrific serial killer. Too ‘true’ to get rid of.