Sometimes in this ‘wide-world of E’ some crazy and strange things happen.  When it does, I climb on my soapbox to deliver my 2 cents and invite you to add comments of your own.  This time:

It’s the film, ‘The Pirates! Band of Misfits,’ coming this April to multiplexes everywhere.   Turns out, the film has a scene, which I thought was hilarious (having seen it in the first promo released last July), which has been deemed controversial because proponents of fair rights towards lepers believe it harms the image of those afflicted with the disease.

In the scene, the hero Captain swashbuckles himself onto a ship with the intention of robbing it of all its goods.  When he leaps on the ship, he’s greeted by a group of lepers who inform him that their boat has nothing of value and that he’s wasting his time.  As the Captain realizes his goof, one of the arms of the lepers falls off.  I cracked up when I saw that promo.  Not because I have a hatred of lepers, but because that would be a terrible goof for a pirate to make.

 

I think those civil rights groups should ease up, it’s a cartoon.  Not only that, lepers aren’t known to be incredibly social people and the average person when meeting one would regard them in the same way we do any other human being with a handicap – we’re not going to assume that they’ll fall apart in front of us (not that being afflicted with even the most severe cases would cause such behavior).  We’re smarter than that, and in a cartoon, the average child is less likely to know what a leper is and just simply laugh because a cartoon character lost its arm.  Now Columbia pictures is re-cutting the film and changing the scene to appease these groups, and I think that’s taking it too far – what do you think?