Representation Matters! Or, what happened to Birdie, part 6...

 

The Street Fighter II team was off to a rough start. Their character designs were falling flat and Capcom was trying their best to turn the project around in the quickly changing arcade market. They needed to get a new game out and one that set itself apart from Street Fighter and Final Fight. There was an influx of artists and designers working on the cast. They were looking for the elements that worked, the styles of fighting that needed representation and a way to balance the library of characters. Each artist brought a unique perspective with them along with their talents. Some of these artists were familiar with the various schools of fighting and even had some insight on pro wrestling and action films. Some of the artists were well read in science fiction and fantasy stories. Some of the artists enjoyed traveling and history. The collective was able to pick the designs apart and begin remaking them with a few unique touches. Sakurada Gashou and the Kenshiro-looking Ryu were out. If karate was going to be the star of the game then the fighter had to be become an icon, or exaggerated caricature depending on your point of view of what a karate master should look like. The updated Ryu had torn sleeves to show off his powerful arms, a red headband and red punching gloves to break up the all-white uniform.

   

Capcom then brought back Ken. In was done in part to have a character that the Americans would gravitate to. The blonde hair and yellow punching gloves contrasted his all-red gi. To audiences this was just a pallet swap with different heads. Internally the art team made a distinction between the two characters. Ken had hemmed sleeves on his gi. He was careful about the way he presented himself. Ryu by comparison had torn sleeves and worn edges on his pants. He cared more about the fight than about trophies. They were both very simple designs and the unique touches were subtle, so subtle that many other studios missed the individual elements and couldn't create better karatekas in 25 years of trying.

With the stars of the game figured out the studio then went after the Chinese figure, then called Zhi Li. They looked at her costume, her age and purpose. The were something lacking with the young female fighter. She looked too much like an anime or manga character. Artist Akiman said that it was a period of time where you couldn't get by without creating a Chinese Beauty. Zhi Li had a look that was borrowed from the Pooh sisters aka the Kuniang Martial Arts Club from the 1989 sci-fi action game Strider. The sisters had kicks that were almost as powerful as Strider Hiryu's cypher sword Zhi Li would never be believable as a serious fighter in a cast of adult men. The team decided to make her older, turn her into a woman. It worked for the Pooh Sisters and would probably work again.

 

As the plot of the game was being developed they realized that Chun-Li needed a reason to be in a fighting tournament. Simply being a female fighter may have worked in a movie but games required more effort. Games allowed the audience to see the same story but from different points of view, including those of villains. By making the Chinese girl older they knew that she would never be a damsel in distress. She was not a prize for the competitors, and this was a refreshing change of pace. In fact it was even better because her purpose for competing was to bring the organizer to justice. It was decided that she was actually an undercover cop. The team was elated with the possibilities. This could be something that they kept a secret from audiences until the ending of the game. They took apart the traditional Chinese wushu uniform that Chun-Li had and turned it into a costume. The character would wear makeup, put her hair up in buns and be very "girly" in the tournament. At the same time she would wear wrestling boots and weighted spiked bracelets so that she had a better chance of winning each fight.

What the designer Akira "Akiman" Yasuda did to Chun-Li was a stroke of genius. It would become something that other designers would look to when they were stumped by a character redo. Unfortunately some artists misread the design. They did not catch how Chun-Li was matured to balance out the rest of the cast. They did not even bother to consider that there may have been a precedence set by actual Chinese martial arts practitioners that were women. Imagine that if Mas Oyama and Yoshiji Soeno inspired the development of Ryu then perhaps Wing Chun and the actresses in Hong Kong cinema might have helped shape Chun-Li as well. Instead the subsequent designers thought that it was important to give new characters some sort of "day job" in order to make them appealing. Since the fighters could not all be cops then people with all sorts of random backgrounds began turning in later versions of the series. Dee Jay was a musician, El Fuerte was a chef, Hakan loved oil, Rufus was fat, etc. The other artists, the ones that "got" what Akiman had done were able to turn around the more offensive characters.

Great Tiger was supposed to be an Indian mystic but his look was very bland. He was a dark-skinned character with a turban, he could have been pulled right out of any comic book. Not much else was known about this figure, what form of fighting he represented or what his abilities were. This was when the team looked to a few new points of reference. Where had they seen Indian fighters before and what made them special? Of course the Indian was well known in television and cartoon tropes. Who does not remember seeing a cartoon of an Indian lying on a bed of nails, or running swords through a basket with their apprentice inside? What about the classic Indian rope trick or the Madari better known as the snake charmers?

   

These were things that everyone had seen and was familiar with. Yet these things could have also been negative subconscious cues about a particular culture. India had introduced words like Guru and Yogi into Western language. Whether true or not these images of Indians colored pop culture the world over. In Hong Kong cinema there were two hit films by Jimmy Wang Yu. The One Armed Boxer and the Master of the Flying Guillotine. Actors in blackface portrayed the Indians as having unique powers. In the One Armed Boxer the Indian was impervious to weapons, he stabbed himself in the chest to prove it. He could also teleport around the room by standing on his hands. Magicians from India were part of folklore and many assumed that there was some truth to these legends. The second Indian character feature in the Wang Yu films was even more memorable. He had arms that stretched, creating a very unique challenge for the hero of the film. It was an impressive effect in the film, using prosthesis and a second person to create the illusion. This character, blackface and all, had a profound influence on the development of the Great Tiger.

 

As Dhalsim began to emerge the designers wanted to know how else they could make him unique. Again they used the Indian mystic as a point of reference. In legend the magicians from India and Arabia were highly tolerant of fire. They could walk on hot coals and even breathe fire. These performers ended up in travelling caravans and helped create the myth that found its way to film and television centuries later. The best thing about Street Fighter was that there was a hint to truth to the icons. There was a caste of Sikh Warriors that were armed with weapons and trained in the art of war. During celebrations they would parade in uniform and sometimes put on a show for audiences, singing, dancing and breathing fire. It was an amazing visual. Imagine an animated version of a Sikh warrior in a battle against a karate master. There was real potential in trying to recreate these different arts for game playing audiences.

The team at Capcom began experimenting with the look and moves of the Great Tiger. They stripped away the turban and Sikh costume and made him appear very humble. In Sikh practice hair was a sacred, it was never exposed and was kept wrapped up. Dhalsim was supposed to appear more like a beggar. Literally someone that gave up his worldly possessions and even shaved himself bald to humble himself. A pair of ragged trunks and a rope belt became his new costume. Around his neck he wore three small skulls. It would be revealed that these were children from his village that had died. As a pacifist the only reason he entered the Street Fighter tournament to win the prize money to help his village. His backstory would be revealed at the end of the game. Like Chun-Li and Ryu the developers learned that it was important to know what each character was fighting for and why it made them interesting. At the same time that purpose was not pushed on audiences, like say a Mexican luchador showing up to battle with a frying pan because you know… cooking. The developers respected their characters and audience enough to let players discover what made them unique through the endings of the game.

 

The team then looked at Anabebe and realized that the character had to go. The artists knew however that Anabebe was too ugly and controversial a design. People in North (and Central and South) America would find the character highly offensive. At the same time a wild man was needed to break up the consistency of traditional forms of fighting. Just as they had done with Dhalsim the studio knew that they had to go to extreme lengths to make the character unique. They decided that the new character might be covered in long hair, making him appear more feral. Instead of giving him a skin tone they decided to paint him up in bright colors. The studio looked at the bright colors used by poisonous creatures, snakes and reptiles, to warn predators.

Again Akiman helped with the redesign. He remembered playing against planner Akira Nishitani and being frustrated. Nishitani was good at finding exploits in games and then using them against his opponents. The two would play Pro Wrestling on the Famicom (NES) when it came out in 1986. Nishitani would use a character called the Amazon, he was a green skinned wild man, that looked like a piranha. Anyhow he would use this character to bite the heads of opponents. It was impossible to break out of the hold. Akiman wanted players feel the frustration he did with Blanka's chomping attacks. So the beast man design was pulled from Pro Wrestling rather than black stereotypes.

   

Blanka, shortened from Hamablanka, ended up being a bright neon green, almost lime with an equally bright orange hairdo. He was given sharp teeth and nails to make him appear like a beast. He ended up being not very far removed from the Amazon. On his ankles they left broken shackles, as if he were indeed an escaped wild man. It was the only carry-over from Anabebe's original design. What they abandoned thankfully was his original skin color and even ethnicity. In the end it worked out well for the character.

Both Dhalsim and Blanka started off as ugly if not outright racist caricatures of a culture. Both went on to represent the two most extreme character designs in the Street Fighter universe. They did by going beyond the stereotypical conventions and created figures that audiences had never seen before. Despite these extreme makeovers they were still acceptable in the lineup. In the game series and in canon they were sometimes partnered together. Despite looking very different the duo did a great job visually of balancing each other out. Because Capcom was able to pull away from their highly dubious origins the two became some of the most popular characters ever created. They were an example of how almost any design could be salvaged with enough insight and hard work.

Some of the other characters that were in the planning stages were actually very close to their finished counterparts. The team cut down the wrestlers planned for Street Fighter II from two to one. The studio had found great success with the strong man / wrestler archetype in Final Fight. They had created a large brawler named Mike Haggar. His assortment of suplexes and piledrivers was impressive and never before seen in a brawler. The figure looked very much like MMA pioneers Dan Severn and Don Frye. The two represented the USA in international competitions and Severn had fought in Japan as early as 1982, making him a likely influence on the Capcom staff. By using Haggar as a template the planners could create new moves that were similar to but even more powerful.

 

The USA was getting two representatives, Ken and Guile, so the studio decided to give a different nation the wrestler. Mexico was cut out of the countries that would be represented when Capcom dropped the masked wrestler. They looked at the burly grapplers from the Eastern block countries. People like Ivan Poddubny and Stanislaus Zbyszko were legendary wrestlers and world champions that gave Europe a chapter in wrestling history. The team at Capcom decided to make the next character Russian. What needed saving was not the design as much as the name. The burly sailor on the table would have been named Vodka Gobalsky.

   

The teamed toned down the sailor image and instead focused on making him a wrestler. Thankfully some of the creators knew that names could be just as offensive as skin color. They came to this realization much faster than those working elsewhere.

A few years earlier the people at Nintendo created a boxer named Vodka Drunkensky. The Punch Out!! series by Nintendo had some very stereotypical characters in the lineup, like the Japanese Piston Honda, the Italian Pizza Pasta and the Indian Great Tiger (how about that!). When audiences saw Vodka Drunkensky many thought they had gone too far. It was one thing to give a character an offensive name but to show him drinking in between rounds really took the cake! A few of the planners at Capcom remembered seeing a wrestler on Japanese TV named Victor Zangief. The last name seemed to work well for the character and would be much easier to pronounce than Poddubny and Zbyszko.

 

The final few spots in the roster were filled in by the team. Guile the soldier (whom Americans would naturally gravitate to) and E. Honda the sumo wrestler helped add a little more diversity to the cast. The different backgrounds and different fighting styles were a great compliment to the other forms. The revised lineup was much closer to the version that players would see in the arcade. The rest as they say was history...

 

So what happened to the designers after Street Fighter II. Why has it been so hard for Capcom to create a fighter that matched the legacy of the original World Warriors? We will explore these things in the next blog. As always if you enjoyed this blog and would like to sponsor me please visit my Patreon page and consider donating each month, even as little as $1 would help make better blogs and even podcasts!

Representation Matters! Or, what happened to Birdie, part 5...

 

When players think about the greatest cast in fighting game history they often point to the original World Warriors. The figures in Street Fighter II hit all of the right notes and were universally accepted. They set a standard back in 1991 yet to be topped (even by Capcom). There is something that most people do not know and even die-hard fans of Street Fighter sometimes forget. The original lineup was much different. It was dominated by white characters and was culturally insensitive. Let us look at what Capcom had to change in order to give audiences a memorable experience.

 

Audiences might be able to pick out a few characters from the lineup that made it to the final version. There was a karate guy, possibly Ryu. Next to him was a Chinese girl, possibly Chun-Li and near the bottom was a dark skinned person in a turban. This Indian character must have become Dhalsim. Who were the other characters? Where was Ken and E. Honda? Where was Zangief and Blanka? Well there were actually two wrestlers in the original lineup. A masked wrestler and a more traditional pro wrestler. There was a boxer, an assassin and a beast man rounding out the group. We could guess that these characters were placeholders. A rough outline for something that had would be changed. The studio had their work cut out for them. The planner on the original Street Fighter had left for SNK. The game found moderate success and arcade owners were asking for a sequel. The team at Capcom tried to create one called Street Fighter '89. It went in a radical new direction, one that was prompted by the runaway success of Taito's Double Dragon. The next Street Fighter would be a brawling game, a beat-em-up using up to three players instead of two. Guy was supposed to replace Ryu, Cody was supposed to replace Ken and a wrestler was thrown in for good measure. Arcade owners did not want Capcom to change the one-on-one concept so the game was relabeled Final Fight. Work on Street Fighter II started all over again.

Ryu was not a lock for the main character. Well, Capcom obviously wanted to make a Japanese character the star and make sure that karate was represented. The designers thought that if the first game was about a Mas Oyama-like karate fighter becoming the world's best then the sequel should be about a different fighter that accomplished something very similar. In this case it would be inspired by an understudy of Oyama named Yoshiji Soeno. His in-game counterpart was named Sakurada Gashou. Soeno had beaten the masters of several forms of fighting and had even gone to Thailand to fight their best as well. The Black Cobra was a person that he was supposed to face that inspired the legend of Sagat.

Something was missing with Sakurada. He looked as stern as Soeno, one of the toughest masters of karate but at the same time Sakurada lacked any real personality. The design was a bit bland actually. There was nothing memorable about the character as he was. His black belt and uniform were very much off the shelf. He could have been interchangeable with any generic karateka. The designers working on characters for Street Fighter II was expanded by Capcom. New concepts for the main fighter were explored. The first attempt at bringing back Ryu was highly dubious. He no longer looked like the karate fighter from the first game, instead he looked like he popped out of the pages of a post apocalyptic comic book. When I tell people that Tetsuo Hara had a profound influence on the designers at Capcom I meant it. Ryu was a dead-ringer for Kenshiro, same leather jacket, same shoulder pad and all. The headband was the only thing that made him different.

Poaching a popular character wouldn't work with audiences. As the artists were scrambling to redesign the star of the game the attention was focused on the rest of the cast. The studio knew that they wanted a female character in the game. Given that kung-fu was the root of the Asian fighting arts then it had to be represented in the sequel. The original Street Fighter had traditional kung-fu archetypes Lee and Gen representing the art. The next time it would be a Chinese girl nicknamed the China Daughter. Could Chun-Li have been meant to be a daughter or granddaughter to Lee or Gen? We may never know. What we do know was that the original designs for the female character were bland as well. The original Chun-Li was a very generic design. Her face was very youthful, her eyes large and animated, the look could have been used in any manga or anime series at the time. Her uniform was very traditional and like Ryu's it was something that could have been pulled off of the shelf.

 

Chun-Li and Ryu needed some major work. They were not the only ones that needed to seriously be rethought. The most offensive figure in the original lineup was the wild man, Anabebe. This figure was very grotesque, very crude and based on a very dark era in world history. Anabebe had all the characteristics of a black brute. Big lips, dark skin, tight curly hair, he was for all intents and purposes a caricature of black slaves. As if there were any doubts the character was even presented with a collar and a chain. The stereotype of the black man being a savage, an unintelligent, unfeeling brute that only responded to violence was as old as slavery itself. Anabebe was designed as the largest character in the game, standing about 7' 5". He would have been larger than Sagat or Zangief. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if Capcom had followed through with this character. Would his owners have to lock him down in between matches? Would they have been animated using whips against the wild man? Looking at the character I shudder to think that the developers working at Capcom, some of whom I consider to be personal heroes, thought this was a concept worth pursuing.

Centuries of racist campaigning against black people was sadly very effective. For generations slave owners often used religious texts as well as fraudulent scientific and sociological studies to prove that slaves were inferior creatures. They would dehumanize them, speak about them in animalistic terms as if they were mules. They would say terrible things such as blacks were highly tolerant to pain, didn't need to eat or sleep much like other beasts of burden. They could be controlled with violence, terrorism and whippings because that was the only language they understood. As slaves and abolitionists began to fight for equality and freedom then different interpretations of the black emerged. They suddenly became lazy and shiftless when just a few years prior they were workhorses. They became impossible to teach, to raise and become incorporated into society. There were many ugly caricatures of blacks made through most of the 19th and 20th centuries. These parodies reached every corner of the world, including Japan. Please watch the documentary Ethnic Notions to get a history lesson on the origins of Anabebe's design.

I have to remind myself that Japan has a history of being culturally isolated. The nation remained closed off until 1853 when the US Commodore Matthew Perry took four warships to Japan to "insist" that they begin opening trade routes with the rest of the world. Many citizens and not solely the Japanese can be insensitive to foreign cultures, customs and traditions. Check the history books to find out about the animosity between China, Japan and Korea. There were and continue to be issues with the ways each nation perceives their neighbors. We do not have to go far to see these things, Just look at North America and see how people in the USA, Canada and Mexico all perceived each other as well. What the artists at Capcom had done was take the images that they knew of the savage, one from newspapers and propaganda films and put those ideas on paper. They did not question what they knew, what they heard, they just drew it out.

What was most dangerous was that the Japanese designers were not looking to offend their audience. Notions about black people had become a part of the collective subconscious. People in Asian countries, as well as in the Americas had seen and heard so many negative stereotypes about blacks while growing up that they did not even think twice about them. They simply assumed that there must have been some truth to them. The most heartbreaking proof of how stereotypes had become a problem could be seen in the infamous Doll Test, conducted again and again in this country and around the world. Kids had been conditioned to think that light skinned people were inherently good and dark skinned people were inherently bad. They did not necessarily have to be taught these things by hateful parents. Television, movies, cartoons and even school friends repeated these ideas over and over.

I want you to think about why it is important that the designers at Capcom understand why these caricatures were not acceptable. They have a game that is played all around the world. Not by a few dozen or a few hundred people but instead by millions and millions. With each release they change the course of pop culture. They add a new chapter about what it means to be a Japanese, Chinese, Turkish, Indian, Brazilian, African, British, Russian, US or Mexican. The producer working on Street Fighter has the power to help society adapt and evolve their cultural perceptions. Even if the change is only slightly positive then it is better than repeating old stereotypes. If the team squanders that chance and instead tries to get a laugh because a person is fat or black or anything that makes them not white or Japanese then that progress is lost. These things do not even have to be major changes for the character. The way they behave, the way they act and respond can have an influence on the way players perceive that character. Make minor changes and audiences will either begin to accept or reject that stereotype. Birdie for example was not only made fat but he acted grossly and brutish in many new animations for Street Fighter V. The message he sent to players was that the character had no self respect. Subconsciously it could be accepted that all fat people or all punks had no self respect as well. Street Fighter was simply confirming something that everyone suspected. By the same token Rufus was fat and dumb, very full of himself and a jab at how people from the US make themselves out to be citizens of the greatest nation on Earth. Of course not everyone in the US thought or acted like Rufus. It was a very crude stereotype that did nothing to make the game better.

Making a caricature out of a nationality can be a dangerous act. It can be used by political cartoonists to make ugly parodies of foreigners. Think about how Muslims are depicted in editorial cartoons. Cartooning the prophet Muhammad has now led to the death of dozens of cartoonists and newspaper employees in Europe. Because of that now all Muslims are synonymous with terrorism in the eyes of many. If you stop and think about it the most popular fighting game characters are nothing more than caricatures of people and fighting arts. Japanese people do not really walk around in a karate gi, Chinese people do not walk around in a wushu uniform and Turks do not walk around with barrels of oil. These are not slight caricatures either but extremely exaggerated and dis-proportioned figures. In video games strong men have huge muscles, fat people are incredibly obese and women have large breasts. How sensitive the developers are to a particular style of fighting or culture (even something like punk culture!) can make or break a design. Just a little bit of insight can turn a mediocre character into somebody great. This was something that Capcom used to be able to turn around and something that I do not think the current team is capable of. Sakurada, Anabebe and the China Daughter were very plain caricatures. There was nothing redeeming about these early designs and that's why the team had to go back to the drawing board. But they were not the only characters that needed saving.

 

The designers at Capcom wanted to add an Indian mystic to the lineup. Their original plan was for a character in a turban called the Great Tiger. This character may have even been presented in a Ganesha mask with multiple arms. This character was as insensitive to Indians as Anabebe was to blacks. Street Fighter II was off to a terrible start. It looked like nothing was going to save Capcom from themselves. The studio reached out to other teams and the people working on character designs was tripled. At one point there was 20 or 25 people working on the cast alone. It was a number that was never matched by any other studio. What these people did was amazing. The insight that they landed to the project made the World Warriors something special. It was also a reason why I don't think that the current character designers at Capcom can match the greatness of the Street Fighter II team. Without all the extra eyes, extra input and extra insight from a large design team then the current crop of figures and remakes are not as great as they potentially could be. Coming up with a great character was not impossible but the designers would have to work twice as hard and revise twice as much just to match the legacy created by their forefathers. We will take a look at how the Street Fighter II team was able to turn things around in the next blog. As always if you enjoyed this blog and would like to sponsor me please visit my Patreon page and consider donating each month, even as little as $1 would help make better blogs and even podcasts!