DOMINIC
Dominic Mah is a writer, director, rock musical aficionado, and ex-professional gambler. He can be found on the internets as dommah, paranormalstatus.com, and @ThorHulkCritic. His personal heroes are Stan Lee, Bruce Lee, Annabel Lee and Barbara Lee.
The villain in Marvel’s latest Iron Man film is the Mandarin, a character who fought Iron Man about 600 times in the original comics, and has always been totally Chinese. That is, until Sir Ben Kingsley was cast to play him in Iron Man 3. Now that the movie’s arrived, we can throw out speculation and see what they did. Here’s a short primer to the original comic-book Mandarin to arm you with nerdy talking points for comparison:
The Mandarin is a ridiculously powerful half-Chinese man. He owns ten alien rings, each with a devastating alien power, which he wears on all ten fingers all the time, because you never know on any given day if you’re going to need the Mento-Intensifier Ring or the Vortex Beam Ring (or the Matter Rearranger Ring, which one imagines is super-useful for the lactose-intolerant). Like Will Smith’s son, he is a master of karate, and presumably some Chinese martial arts as well. He does grand, Genghis Khan-scale evil mastermind type things. He has his own giant robot named Ultimo. In one particularly great X-Men storyline, the Mandarin captured Psylocke (a telepathic British lady, up to that point the prissiest of the X-Persons), and literally turned her Japanese, so that she could become his sidekick ninja assassin. She’s still Japanese, too. Apparently people just liked her better that way.
PRASHANT
EUGENE
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