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The Indian actor Jay Silverheels played him with remarkable dignity on television, considering the material. And yet the character Tonto is a noble figure, even as a sidekick, brave and loyal and resourceful. The word, which has no known meaning in any Native American language, means “stupid” in Spanish.
#The lone ranger and tonto movie#
If he’s right, the movie might be a big missed opportunity, since “Tonto,” to Native Americans, is synonymous with ugly caricature. And I’m afraid that Tonto is the only Indian most Americans will ever see.”
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But by playing it straight, he gives the impression that Indians really were like that. Van Alst Jr., director of the Native American Cultural Center at Yale. But after seeing Depp’s makeup (his face is streaked with black and white paint) and headdress (a spread-winged, intact taxidermy crow), Keene says she’s glad an Indian isn’t playing the role, which she calls “extremely stereotypical.”Īlthough Tonto’s grammar has improved greatly since the “Me go now” dialogue of 60 years ago, Depp still reads his lines in the sententious, wisdom-of-the-elders cadences that Indians call “Tonto-speak.” “He could have treated the Tonto-speak as a joke, like the spirit-talk and the funny hat,” muses Theodore C. Depp, like many white Americans, claims some Indian ancestry, though he does not self-identify as such. Adrienne Keene, a Harvard graduate student and member of the Cherokee Nation, who runs a blog called “Native Appropriations,” said she initially was unhappy the filmmakers didn’t come up with an Indian actor to play Tonto. Whether Depp’s intentions will mollify critics of the film, who were out in force even before it was released, remains to be seen. Depp has said he wanted to restore some integrity to the Tonto character, “to try, in my own small way, to right the many wrongs that have been done” by Hollywood’s portrayals of Indians, which were insensitive even in comparison to the industry’s treatment of other ethnic minorities. The studio, which announced a $1,000-a-ticket premiere to benefit the American Indian College Fund, has obviously considered the political implications of making a movie in 2013 in which the Native American figure is an inscrutable sidekick. Hammer, who played the Winklevoss twins in The Social Network, is the Lone Ranger. The moviemakers seem to have lost interest in horses, presumably because they don’t blow up when they crash judging from the trailers, the Lone Ranger’s signature cry of “Hi-yo Silver” might as well be “all aboard.” More significantly, the ads give equal billing to two stars, but one of them, Johnny Depp, is a much bigger name than the other, Armie Hammer.
#The lone ranger and tonto series#
The Disney production is a fascinating study in how tastes and values have changed since the hit TV series of the 1950s. It’s a question we’ll be hearing a lot this summer, as The Lone Ranger bursts onto screens in pinwheels of exploding railroad trestles and hurtling locomotives. The victim, untied, dusts herself off and looks wistfully at the man riding away on a white horse, and asks: Who was that masked man? The desperadoes have been marched off to the hoosegow. Just before the closing credits came the question, which has echoed through the decades. The Lone Ranger mask from the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.