Things Are What They Are

I saw a news item on the internet the other day that said that Puff Daddy wants to be the "black James Bond".

(Insert heavy sigh). Let's get this out of the way right up front. Starbuck is not a woman, the Cylons aren't sexy, Chaka is not a pervert, Adrian Veidt is not 30 years old and James Bond isn't black.
Now on the surface that might not seem like such a terrible thing. I mean, there's no reason that Mr. Daddy or Diddy or whatever he's calling himself this week shouldn't have an opportunity to show off his acting chops (or lack thereof) by playing an urbane, ultra slick superspy.
But no matter what they call his prospective film, he will never be James Bond to me. And it's not because there's anything particularly 'wrong' with him, it's just a matter of definition. The character of James Bond is a British man in his late thirties. Mr. Diddy can be Shaft, or Tenafly, or Superfly, or the Black Panther or any number of action heroes. But he can't be Bond.
It's not prejudice that motivates my position, either. It's a belief that things are what they are, and by continuing to play a shell game with definition, with identity, we as a society are losing track of what things truly are and are effectively diluting the entire concept of identity. I'd be just as outraged if Daniel Day Lewis was trying out for the part of Barack Obama, or any of the African American heroes I mentioned above. Again, it's not that there's anything wrong with Day Lewis, it's just that Obama isn't white.
Why so rigid, you might ask? Can't the spirit of a character be embodied by someone of a different background? In some cases, yes. It's fine, for instance, to portray James Kirk as a young man because even though you are using the same name you are essentially writing about a different person, or at least, the same person but at a younger stage of life. Therefore that characters' attitudes and beliefs might be different than the character we are familiar with.

But in most cases, the character's identity is very much intertwined with their cultural heritage, their gender, their background and place of origin.
This is the same complaint I had against the series "Battlestar: Galactica". The new version may very well have been a well crafted piece of science fiction drama (and I've heard from many people that it was) but "Battlestar: Galactica" is not populated with human looking Cylons and a female Starbuck. These characters have a very specific identity, and to just casually play around with that, to assume that they are defined only by their name, is to deprive them of meaning.

Once we start losing meaning, we've pretty much lost everything.

I'm a very opened minded person (or at least I like to think I am) but we all base our reality on certain principles. Up is up, down is down, east is east and west is west, etc, etc. When you start down the road of more or less assigning whatever name you want to anything, you let your grip on truth slip. When that goes, all that's left is chaos.

You say I'm being picky or inflexible, needlessly fixated on minutae? Perhaps. But big things begin with small things. If you are disrespectful to the truth in small matters, you will be more likely to be disrespectful to it in large ones. It's a slipperly slope and it doesn't take long to let laziness and often well intentioned political correctness to creep in.

So maybe it doesn't matter that Fred from Scooby Doo has black hair or that Velma is an Asian? How about if Abraham Lincoln is portrayed as a woman, or Barack Obama as a blond "cougar"? Hey, it's all in the interpretation right? We shouldn't be hung up on what people look like or what their ethnic background or gender or sexual orientation is, as long as the character's "core" is captured, you say? All good arguments, except that in many of these cases, those qualities help determine that "core". If you take away those things, you have effectively changed the person or character so much that you can't really say the core is intact anymore. Isn't President Obama's status as a middle aged African American male a large part of who he is? Extending that argument to the fictional world, if James Bond were indeed an African American male, wouldn't that have been an integral part of who he was? Growing up in America would have been vastly different from growing up in the UK, so while there may have been some similarities, there would have obviously been a lot more differences.
So to all potential "rebooters" out there, who try to confuse character transformation with creativity, please feel free to include any type of characters you want in your stories. We need more women, Asians, blacks, gays and minorities of all kinds in fiction; those characters will reflect the state of the real world and that's what art is supposed to do. But please don't trample over people's iconic memories to do so.