Imaginary Worlds - Sidekicks: Tonto and Kato

Episode Date: May 15, 2019

In part two of our mini series on sidekicks, we look at two characters that have travelled in parallel since they came out of the same radio station in the 1930s – Tonto and Kato. There wasn’t anything authentically Native American or Asian about these characters, but that didn’t matter to the audiences who enjoyed their team-ups with The Lone Ranger and The Green Hornet. Embodying Tonto and Kato was a lot more challenging for the actors Jay Silverheels and Bruce Lee, who struggled to find humanity within the stereotypes and respect behind the scenes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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I'm Eric Malinsky, and this is part two of our miniseries on psychics. In the fall of 2008, Disney announced that they were going to make a big-budget Lone Ranger movie, and Johnny Depp was going to play Tonto. Now, there was an immediate backlash to a white actor playing Tonto, although Johnny Depp does claim to have some kind of Cherokee ancestry. And adding to the bad press, the movie had production problems that delayed it for five years. And through it all, Disney kept insisting that they were going to put Tonto front and center

as an equal partner to the Lone Ranger. Dustin Tomakera is a professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois. And he was particularly intrigued because Johnny Depp's Tonto was supposed to be Comanche. Dustin is also Comanche. And he wanted to give Depp the benefit of the doubt. Folks didn't give him a chance. And they didn't put it in the context of his relationship with the American Indian movement and his support of

that movement, his own identification as Native, that however fuzzy or questionable that may be, that he does have stories to support. And I think that's what a lot of this comes down to is the stories and the power, who has the power, who has the jurisdiction to tell these stories and to distribute them. Now, Dustin's aunt, LaDonna Harris, is famous among Native Americans because she's a longtime activist. And so in 2012, when she heard about Johnny Depp reprising the role of Tonto and was hearing of how he wasn't being accepted by Cherokee people that he was trying to identify with, she stepped in and she heard about him playing not only Tonto, but was going to play him for the first time as a Comanche version of Tonto, that there would be no tribal ambiguity as there

had been in the past. And so she reached out to her relatives and her dear friends who served as consultants on The Lone Ranger and said she'd like to meet with Johnny Depp. Johnny Depp was all for it. In fact, he invited her to the set. We come from a people who are known for taking captives and building our tribe up in that way. our tribe up in that way. And she said this with a sly smile and with a chuckle that she wanted to do like old Comanche women would have done back in the day. She said, let's go capture Johnny Depp. And she invited him to her home. And there in May 2012, they held a formal adoption ceremony, a traditional adoption ceremony in a Comanche way, and brought him into the family. And so now he refers to LaDonna Harris as his pia, our word for mom. When it came to public relations, Disney continued to make the right moves.

They held a premiere on a Comanche reservation, renting out several theaters. It was a big celebration with music and dancing. Johnny Depp was there. And then the movie started. If you are going to sneak up on an Indian, best to do it downwind. Some Native Americans praised the film, including Dustin's aunt LaDonna Harris. And the people who liked it focused on the work that the Comanche consultants had done behind the scenes to make sure that their culture was portrayed accurately, regardless of the script.

And Dustin appreciated that. But he was bothered by other things, like the fact that the Comanche women in the film were subservient and didn't speak, which was strange because Comanche women have always held leadership roles. They never say a word. There's nothing audible from them. They simply take care of these two white outlaws who have come into their camp. Then a moment later, you see them just laying scattered, lifeless, on their homelands. Also, it's established that Tonto is the last of his tribe, or at least the last of his tribe in Texas.

Either way, that did not sit well with Dustin. Instead of a sense of surviving, of showing Comanches surviving and thriving as we are in the 21st century, this film leaves us with just one Comanche, an outcast at that, being Johnny Depp's Tonto. Chadwick Allen is a professor at the University of Washington. He has Chickasaw ancestry. He's written a lot about the depiction of Tonto in different media. And one of the things that really bothered him about the film is that Tonto never speaks to another Native American character, even though Tonto has to watch his people get massacred twice in the story.

Yeah, he never has an Indian interlocutor. And even though there are a number of scenes where we're in the Indian camp, we're among Indian elders, Indian warriors, they talk to the Lone Ranger, they talk to each other, but they never once talk to the Tonto character. And it's something I find really so devastating about that film that here is this great opportunity for Disney to reintroduce the Tonto character and to update him. And they really go the opposite direction, in my opinion. Now, this may seem like a non sequitur, but two years earlier, Universal brought back another problematic franchise, the Green Hornet. And once again, the studio made all the right moves in terms of public relations. Hornet. And once again, the studio made all the right moves in terms of public relations. They promised that Kato, as played by the Taiwanese pop star Jay Chou, would be portrayed with dignity. And he would be an equal partner to the Green Hornet, played by Seth Rogen.

But that did not seem to be the case when the movie came out. I'm Indy, your short round, Simon Garfunkel, Scooby-Doo. You hit on everything that moves. I'm amazed you haven't hit on me yet. I'm going to beat the living shit out of you, just so you know. I'd like to see you try. It's interesting that these unsuccessful attempts to reboot the Green Hornet and the Lone Ranger came within a few years of each other, because Tonto and Cato

had been moving in parallel for about 80 years. And looking at where these sidekicks originated and why they keep coming back says a lot about the people that created them and the generations of fans that bought into those fantasies. Now both franchises can be traced to the same man, Now, both franchises can be traced to the same man, George Trendle. In 1933, Trendle owned a radio station in Michigan called WXYZ. Westerns were hot. He wanted to jump on the bandwagon with a radio drama that he could license into a million different products. Tonto was there, so the Lone Ranger had someone to talk to.

But the character quickly became a hit for the audiences. Him stop? Yes, he's turned. He's looking at us. See how white he is? Ah, him silver white. Silver. That would be a name for him. Here, silver! Him plenty wild.

Tonto. Tonto,ow is coming toward us. So Trendle and the writer Francis Stryker recreated the same formula with The Green Hornet, which was set in modern day, the 1930s, but was still about a masked vigilante and his sidekick of color. Right now I want to put into effect a little plan I have in mind. This plan have to do with Green Hornet, perhaps? You guessed it, Kato. Gas gun ready. We get masks and take Black Beauty. You've got the idea. Come on, Kato. Let's go. And there was a direct connection between the shows.

Britt Reid, who is the Green Hornet, is supposed to be the grand nephew of John Reid, who is the Lone Ranger. And there was a guidebook of rules that said the Lone Ranger and the Green Hornet should only kill when necessary. But that was not necessarily true for Tonto and Cato. Daryl Maeda is a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and he's written about how Cato was depicted in different media. Both Tonto and Cato exist specifically to aid the white hero in the attainment of whatever his mission might be. And the violence that they perpetrate always serves not their interest, but that of the white hero.

And in some ways, their violence and their facility with it absolves the white hero of having to dip deeply into the darkness of harming fellow human beings. So in that way, both of these sidekicks displace the dirty work and allow the white hero to remain the white hat. Cato and Tonto have an incredible array of skills. Cato designs their souped-up car, Black Beauty, their weapons, and does most of the fighting. Chad Allen says Tonto is equally talented. He speaks every native language. He knows how to read every trail. He knows how to fix every injury, cure every illness. So he gets idealized in all those ways, sort of the noble red man. But Tonto's identity kept shifting. but was an older, diminutive, half-breed character. And that early Tonto seems quite strange by later standards.

Cato's identity kept shifting as well. The radio show first started out with Cato as a Japanese houseboy. When World War II broke out, they changed his ethnicity to Filipino. Later on, Cato was identified as being Korean and then eventually Chinese. The first radio actor to play Cato was Raymond Toyo, who was Japanese-American, but he left. It is believed that he was sent to a Japanese internment camp, although there is some debate about that. He was replaced with the white actor Roland Parker, who did what was for the time a fairly generic Asian accent. Parker also did the voice of Tonto, when the white actor John Todd

was not available to play Tonto. Now they could get away with that on the radio, but the problem of representation became more complicated when Tonto and Cato made the transition to live action. Of course, in Hollywood, it was common at the time for white actors to play Asian or Native American characters. But George Trendle and the other TV producers wanted something more authentic. Now, when television was just beginning, George Trendle was having trouble getting the Green Hornet made,

but not the Lone Ranger. It was a huge, popular brand, and the networks definitely wanted it. And they found their tanto with Jay Silverheels. Interestingly, he was not from the United States. He was from a Mohawk tribe in Canada. Also, his real name was Harold J. Smith. Silver Heels was his nickname on his lacrosse team. Jay was so fast, the shoes streaked like the Roadrunner in the cartoons, in a sense.

Zig Miziak wrote a biography about Jay Silver Heels. And then, of course, the tongue-in-cheek was they say they couldn't call him Jay Whiteheels for obvious reasons. They didn't figure that was going to go over a vig. So they called him Jay Silverheels. Jay Silverheels played Tonto from 1949 to 1958 on TV and film. Now, he started out with high hopes for the role, or at least he thought it could open some doors. Again, Dustin Tomakera. Even though he had very broken English

and even his very first lines and his version of Tonto in 1949 on television, his first words were telling Lone Ranger to, quote, lie still, me not hurt you, unquote, there was a lot of behind-the-scenes work that Silverhills did in trying to further develop that character. That's right, Kimo Sabe. You trustee scout. Trustee scout? Yes, Ranger.

You're Tonto. That's right, me Tonto. Now me take care of you. And he found an ally in Clayton Moore, who played the Lone Ranger. Moore was actually very upset when he discovered that his co-star didn't even have a trailer to change in. Clayton just came to his rescue and said, listen, you can't have this guy changing in the backseat of the car or in a washroom at a gas station. You get a trailer for him. Jay Silverhills also managed to sneak in a few digs that only people who spoke Mohawk would be able to catch. When he was speaking a language, you know, a native language,

he was in fact saying something like, you know, the cow was doing cartwheels into the bowl of cereal. Nobody knew other than the people, the Mohawks, because he was Mohawks that were sitting there and saying, oh my God, he's just making fun of, you know, what he's saying out there. But he was getting mixed reviews among Native Americans and he knew it. Jay Silverhills was interviewed in 1957 by the local paper. And the question was, what do you think of the character Tonto? And he says, Tonto, he's stupid.

Just that couple of words. And yet he didn't participate in AIM like the American Indian Movement. He wasn't that active. Again, see, that's his personality, that quiet personality, that calm demeanor of his. He did what he could using his, I guess, his stardom, but he did it in his own way. Because even in the United States, he was being looked at as a Uncle Tomahawk, which, as you know, is a play from, you know, kind of derivative from Uncle Tom, play from, you know, kind of derivative from Uncle Tom, so that he was moving away from his own people. So he was caught in, he had divided loyalties. He was a man in two worlds and

didn't seem to matter what he did. He was going to get criticism. As a child, Dustin felt a mixture of pride and sorrow for Jay Silverhills. He knew that Jay Silverhills was in a tough spot. At the same time, he was the only Native American actor with a major speaking role in TV and film. But something that I think is also very important to highlight about Silverhills is the legacy that he's left behind was trying to ensure there would be opportunities for Native actors to secure roles in Hollywood and elsewhere in the film industry. And so to that effect, he and the Muscogee Creek actor William Sampson, who is famous for his role as Chief Brompton in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest from the 1970s, Silver Heels and Brompton started the Indian Actors Workshop,

in which they basically just found local spaces, whether it was in apartments or nearby there in L.A. and Hollywood, to hold a space for teaching aspiring natives who wanted to break into the film industry. But he struggled for years to find roles that weren't just another version of Tonto, although he always kept a sense of humor. In 1969, he appeared on The Tonight Show in a sketch where Tonto goes on a job interview. And the sketch ends up becoming kind of a meta-commentary on the career of Jay Silverheels. I'm just looking over your application here and um i'm not sure we have an opening at this

time for a faithful sidekick who can make a tasty dinner out of desert roots first you take our land then you knock our skills no no no i didn't mean to knock your skills it's nothing of the sort perhaps if we had an interview in depth here uh now would you tell me, who was your last employer? Can I have that? I worked 30 years as faithful sidekick for Kimisabe. Hunt, fish, make food, sew clothes, sweep up, stay awake all night, listen for enemies for Kimisabe, risk life for Kimisabe. 30 lousy years. When I was a kid in the 1970s, I remember a joke that we used to tell in the playground. And this is when the Lone Ranger was still in reruns. But even as kids, we knew the politics of the 70s was very different than the 50s.

And the joke goes, the Lone Ranger and Tonto are surrounded by Indians. The Lone Ranger says, Tonto, we're surrounded. And Tonto says, who is we, white man? When Chad Allen was growing up, he heard the same joke. But he says it didn't start in playgrounds. It actually began with political cartoons, the Native American press at the time. And he says those jokes were speaking to a deeper truth. The white fantasy is that the Indian would always be in the service of dominant culture.

But there's always that worry that what if he weren't? What if Tonto really looked after his own interest or his own people's interest instead? And I think that's also part of the interesting tension that keeps the Lone Ranger-Tonto pairing of interest over decades and generations. That tension, like, we think he's going to help us no matter what, but there's always that fear that he might not. That's really interesting to think that that tension is underneath all the way. It's almost like, well, we made it to the end of another adventure without... Exactly. You're really right to pick up on it that the playground joke tells us as much or maybe more about what's really going on with the characters than the kind of official representation.

After the break, Bruce Lee starts out in a very similar position to Jay Silverhills, playing Kato for some of the same TV producers. But Bruce Lee's story ends up in a very different place. Bruce Lee was born in San Francisco. Then as a kid, he went to Hong Kong, where he became a child actor. In his early 20s, he came back to California and was discovered by Hollywood talent at a martial arts demonstration, which is actually similar to Jay Silverhills, who was discovered at a lacrosse game. Also, like Jay Silverhills, Bruce Lee had high hopes when he began the audition process, or at least hoped this could open some doors.

Now, Bruce, just look right into the camera lens right here and tell us your name, your age. In fact, you can actually watch his screen test on YouTube. My last name is Lee, Bruce Lee. I was born in San Francisco in 1940. I'm 24 right now. Again, Daryl Maeda, who teaches ethnic studies at the University of Colorado in Boulder. What you see in the screen test, an incredibly charismatic performance by somebody who has a real chemistry with the camera. A karate punch is like an iron bar, wham. A kung fu punch is like an iron chain with an iron ball attached to the end and it go

wham and it hurt inside. Now, initially, Bruce Lee was supposed to be cast as the lead in a show called Charlie Chan's Number One Son. Now, there are obviously many offensive things about that. But Bruce Lee didn't see it that way because at the time, there had never been an Asian lead in an American TV show. Bruce was very excited about the possibility of playing Charlie Chan's number one son. And this is despite the fact that Charlie Chan is a character written by a white author. In all of the movies, Charlie Chan is played by white actors in Yellow Face. So he saw this as an exciting opportunity, and he really looked forward

to being able to play the role. Charlie Chan's number one son did not get picked up. Instead, he was offered the role of Cato alongside Van Williams as the Green Hornet. And when Bruce Lee got the script from the producer William Dozier, he discovered that his dialogue was even worse than the old radio show. Excuse me, please. Len. And what he really tries to do is to humanize Cato by making him a more central figure and making him actually a more rounded character. Dozier responds by essentially blowing him off. Matt Pauly wrote a biography of Bruce Lee, and he says Dozier's excuse for not giving

Bruce Lee more dialogue was because of his accent. And so he worked with an acting coach to try to soften his accent, eventually petitioned the producer to help give him more lines of dialogue. And they eventually wrote one episode. It was specifically about Cato going to Chinatown and fighting a challenge kung fu match against another master. But he had to win over the stuntmen as well. This is one of the misconceptions that Bruce Lee sort of was born into these roles. He had only done comedic or melodramatic roles.

So this was his first action series. He didn't know how to do kung fu choreography for movie or TV cameras. He went too fast, basically, and faster than the stuntmen could follow him. And it became a real problem. And so they had to slow him down. The biggest clash came over a crossover episode with Batman.

Now, the same producer, William Dozier, ran both shows. But Batman was a hit, and The Green Hornet was not. So they hoped the crossover would boost the ratings. We're heading for another clash with the Caped Crusaders. And I don't like it. Why not? We've never run away from trouble before. Yes, but this double identity poses extra problems this time.

Bruce Lee was furious when he read the script, because he and the Green Hornet were supposed to lose in a fight with Batman and Robin. It was hero to hero, sidekick to sidekick. So Robin was going to defeat Kato in martial arts. And as soon as Bruce read the script, he threw it down on the ground and said, there's no way I'm doing this. No one's going to believe that Robin's a better fighter than me. And it'll be embarrassing. And I just, I refuse to lose to Robin. Dozier agreed, okay, we'll rewrite the script and we'll have it be a standoff at the end, a Mexican standoff.

Neither one wins or loses. But Bruce told everyone he didn't care what the script was like. He was going to show Robin what real Kung Fu was like. And Robin heard this and started to get scared, Burt Ward. And when they went on set to film the scene, Bruce came in all serious, staring, hard stares at Burt Ward. And burt ward got more and more nervous and as they were filming the scene bruce starts inching towards him and burt ward backs off backs off backs off until he runs into a corner finally he starts jumping around saying it's it's just pretend it's just pretend and uh somebody from the side says, look, it's the Black Panther versus the Yellow Chicken. And that caused Bruce to crack up and to reveal he wasn't actually going to hurt Burt Warren.

It's a good thing those guys aren't in town every week. We do need to think about Cato in the context of the 1960s. Again, Dara Maeda. Probably the best known other Chinese character on television was Hop Sing on Bonanza. Again, Dara Maeda. is an improvement. There's absolutely no way in which you can watch Kato on the Green Hornet and think that he's anything other than a badass. Kato actually got more fan mail than the Green Hornet. And so Bruce would go around bragging about that. But, you know, he really wanted to think of himself as the main star. And when he did interviews, he would say, well, I'm the one who does all the fighting. And one of the things he never found out was that Van Williams got paid five times more than he did.

Bruce was making $400 a week and Van Williams was making $2,000. When William Dozier found out that the show would not be renewed for a second season, he wrote two notes, one to Bruce and one to Van Williams, the lead. To Bruce, he said, Confucius say, Green Hornet buzz no more. In contrast, his letter to Williams said, well, it looks like our friend the Green Hornet is just going to buzz off into oblivion. well, it looks like our friend the Green Hornet is just going to buzz off into oblivion. What this tells us is that Dozier continued to see Bruce as an Oriental, and exclusively so. Unfortunately, so did the rest of Hollywood. Bruce Lee tried to find more work, but all he found were stereotypical roles.

Though he did get a lot of work as a stunt coordinator. Eventually, he went back to Hong Kong. This is an opportunity that Jay Silverhills did not have. He did not have an escape valve to a place where he could start over again. Now, before he left, Bruce Lee had not been a big star. But when he got there, he discovered that The Green Hornet was a hit in Hong Kong. They actually called it The Kato Show. So he leveraged his newfound stardom to get his film, Enter the Dragon, financed. And of course, Enter the Dragon turned him and Kung Fu into a global phenomenon. Bruce Lee was a hero to all of us who grew up in the 1970s as Asian Americans.

The discourse on Asian American masculinity remained one that constrained us, that insisted that to be Asian American was to be the opposite of male. So to see a strong, inspiring hero was something that I think many young Asian-American boys in the 1970s and 1980s can point to. So when Darrow watches The Green Hornet, it frustrates him to see how much of Bruce Lee's talent was squandered because the white people in charge lacked the imagination to think of him as anything other than a one-dimensional sidekick. What this shows us is that figures like Bruce Lee, who crossed the Pacific incessantly, back and forth, back and forth, can really bring something new and different and enliven the culture that we consume here in the United States.

So in that sense, we should take the story of Cato as, on the one hand, a cautionary tale, in the sense that we can see the role that racism played in constraining Bruce Lee, but we can also take it as an inspiration because what he managed to do by slipping the bounds of national borders was to become a truly worldwide figure and in doing so draw us into a much broader conversation about representation and culture that's going on across the globe. Last year, Black Panther and Crazy Rich Asians were a great start in terms of representation, but we still have so much catching up to do. I was thinking about the Marvel movies, especially the solo superhero films,

and I was trying to count how many of them had a white hero with sidekicks of color. And after a while, I just lost count. And there's a lot of mutual respect between the heroes and the sidekicks in those movies, and some of those sidekicks are very fleshed-out characters. They're not stereotypes, but they are still sidekicks, at least for now.

That is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Dustin Tomacara, Chad Allen, Zig Miziak, Daryl Maeda, and Matt Pauly. Next time, she began as a sidekick, and a sidekick to a villain who abused her, but she is nobody's sidekick anymore.

In the conclusion of our minseries on sidekicks, the story of how Harley Quinn liberated herself. And if you live in the New York area and have always wanted to start your own podcast, I will be teaching a class at NYU this summer called Creating a Narrative Podcast. The course runs on Monday nights starting June 3rd, and you can register at NYU's website before May 27th. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. You can like the show on Facebook. I tweet at emelinski and Imagine World's Pod. You can also find the show on Instagram now,

where I have pictures of Tonto and Cato throughout the years. And the show's website is imaginaryworldspodcast.org.