*We reported previously that Disney’s first teaser trailer for the live-action remake of “The Little Mermaid,” starring actress/singer Halle Bailey, sparked racist backlash over a Black woman playing a fictional mermaid.
According to Forbes, “The film’s trailer has been flooded with 1.5 million dislikes from angry ‘fans’ – despite YouTube removing the dislike counter, the numbers are still available through an extension.”
The New York Post reports that an artificial intelligence scientist “whitewashed” Bailey in the trailer using AI to make the mermaid a woman white (see Twitter clip below).
“He fixed The Little Mermaid and turned the woke actor into a ginger white girl,” said a promoter who shared the original tweet, according to the report. “He says he can fix the whole move comes out with 4x A6000 in 24 hours. It’s over for wokecels.”
READ MORE: First Teaser Trailer Drops for Disney’s ‘The Little Mermaid’ Live-Action Remake | Watch
????”Wish I could be part of that AI”???? pic.twitter.com/C1V8xogBgq
— Seraphim Rising (@OccupyWpg) September 12, 2022
When Bailey’s casting was initially announced a few years ago, racist Disney fans quickly rejected the first Black Ariel. We reported previously that Facebook even removed a ‘Make America White Again’ group after it shared offensive memes related to Bailey.
Disney-owned Freeform reacted to the critics in 2019 when the company released a statement on Twitter. At the time, haters used the hashtag #NotMyAriel to object to a Black woman portraying a red-headed Danish mermaid. Freeform also noted that Bailey was cast as Ariel because she is “highly talented,” and director Rob Marshall agreed.
Jodi Benson, the voice of Ariel in the 1989 animated film “The Little Mermaid,” also spoke in defense of Bailey during her appearance at Florida Supercon in 2019.
“The most important thing is to tell the story. And we have, as a family, we have raised our children, and for ourselves, that we don’t see anything that’s different on the outside,” Benson said, reported ComicBook.com.
Bailey previously called her Ariel role a “dream come true.”
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