What Happened To The Mandarin?

Rating: 7/10 (26 May 2008)

Every super hero needs an arch nemesis. Spiderman has the Green Goblin, Batman has the Joker, Superman has Lex Luthor. As any longtime time reader of the comics knows, Iron Man's arch nemesis is the Mandarin. So why is Obadiah Stane, a relatively minor villain, the bad guy in the movie adaptation? I suspect political correctness. The Mandarin is an old school "yellow peril" inscrutable oriental super villain modeled on Fu Manchu. You could still get away with stereotypes like this in the early sixties when Stan Lee and co. dreamed up the Mandarin, but now the character comes off as distinctly racist.
Which is too bad. The Mandarin could be easily revamped for the current generation. After all, Tony Stark, Iron Man's alter ego, started as a shameless member of the military-industrial complex, doing his part to win the Cold War for Uncle Sammy. It wasn't until the seventies that he experienced self-doubt, redirected Stark Industries into humanitarian activities, and became a born-again peacenik. There's no reason the Mandarin couldn't be similarly redesigned to embody, say, the challenge of modern, industrialized China to the United States' global hegemony. Maybe in IRON MAN 2.