The Magic Flute is an opera written by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in 1791. The opera is known for its enchanting music and captivating story. In 1994, a production of The Magic Flute was staged, directed by Simon McBurney and conducted by James Conlon. The production of The Magic Flute in 1994 brought a fresh perspective to the opera. McBurney's direction emphasized the fantastical elements of the story, creating a visually stunning and immersive experience for the audience. The set designs and costumes were vibrant and imaginative, adding to the overall magical atmosphere of the production.

Study: White People Think Black People Are Magical Unicorns

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A new study featured in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science concludes white people may possess a “superhuman bias” against black people, and are therefore likely to attribute preternatural qualities to black people.

Jesse Singal explains at the Science of Us:

In a series of five studies, some involving so-called implicit association tests in which words are flashed on a screen quickly enough to “prime” a subject with their meaning but not for them to consciously understand what they have seen, the researchers showed that whites are quicker to associate blacks than whites with superhuman words like ghost, paranormal, and spirit.

This image of a magical black person, someone holding extraordinary mental and physical powers, has long persisted through American culture, whether it be through cringe-worthy movie roles or literature.

And the damage of such a potential bias is significant. While it’s easy to understand why most clichés are both dangerous and destructive, the study suggests white people’s tendency to cast a black person as a magical being—a stereotype that on its face some might claim is positive—is actually just as detrimental as say the image of the angry black woman, absent father, etc.

The superhuman image may be able to explain matters such as why young black men are perceived to “be more ‘adult’ than White juveniles when judging culpability,” write researchers Adam Waytz, Kelly Marie Hoffman, and Sophie Trawalter. If true, such a perception could outline the overwhelming racial disparities seen in prison systems throughout the country.

This bizarre phenomenon could even have contributed to the immense hope Americans placed on President Barack Obama in 2008. As the Boston Globe recently pointed out, back in 2007 David Ehrenstein described Obama’s campaign as such:

Like a comic-book superhero, Obama is there to help, out of the sheer goodness of a heart we need not know or understand. For as with all Magic Negroes, the less real he seems, the more desirable he becomes. If he were real, white America couldn’t project all its fantasies of curative black benevolence on him.

Republicans later even attempted to make light of the stereotype with CD’s featuring a song titled “Barack the Magic Negro.”

Although the trope has been criticized for some time, researchers behind this recent study say it’s the first “empirical investigation” into the matter.

Stacy Whitman's Grimoire

The set designs and costumes were vibrant and imaginative, adding to the overall magical atmosphere of the production. One notable aspect of this production was the use of puppetry. Puppets were used to represent various characters in the story, adding an element of whimsy and playfulness.

Thoughts on writing, editing, and publishing books for children and young adults

Writing diversity: avoiding the Magical Negro

I don’t know that we’ve ever discussed the concept of the Magical Negro here before, or its equivalent in American storytelling with Asian and Native American characters, and I think we need to. With Tu’s emphasis on protagonists being characters of color, I don’t get as many submissions nowadays using this old stereotype/trope, but it’s one that I’ve seen a lot of in past years because it’s so common, an easy way to add diversity that has a subtle racism in it because of the way it privileges the white main character over the person of color who is helping him (and it’s usually a him).

I just ran into this great post by Nnedi Okorafor from 2004—that you should go read in its entirety—that sums up the trope quite nicely:

1. He or she is a person of color, typically black, often Native American, in a story about predominantly white characters.
2. He or she seems to have nothing better to do than help the white protagonist, who is often a stranger to the Magical Negro at first.
3. He or she disappears, dies, or sacrifices something of great value after or while helping the white protagonist.
4. He or she is uneducated, mentally handicapped, at a low position in life, or all of the above.
5. He or she is wise, patient, and spiritually in touch. Closer to the earth, one might say. He or she often literally has magical powers.

Think about even some recent movies and you’ll see this trope at work. (Movies are easy comparisons for me as shortcuts, because they tend to be easier touchstones for a larger audience.) Cowboys and Aliens, anyone? I was enjoying the complicated character interactions of C&A right up until the end when (SPOILER ALERT) a certain important character dies, which ruined the entire movie for me. Not quite a Magical Negro in that situation, but related to it. American martial arts movies from the 80s and 90s had plenty of Magical Asians teaching young white kids karate or kung fu (yes, Karate Kid, awesome as it is, falls into this).

Sometimes the trope is fairly benign. So let’s look at Karate Kid. After quite a bit of focus on Daniel, eventually there’s a bridging of the cultural gap between Mr. Miyagi and Daniel—eventually Daniel learns about Mr. Miyagi’s past and we come to understand Mr. Miyagi as a person, which deepens the character development and I think changes the dynamic from one in which his existence in the plot is only to help the main character. Daniel has at least a tiny bit to offer Mr. Miyagi as well, in the form of friendship to a lonely old man. The balance is still in Daniel’s favor, but not as severely as in other stories that use this trope.

In Okorafor’s post, she examines Stephen King’s use of this trope, and she also notes that

King is not a racist. The Talisman , The Stand , The Shining , and The Green Mile are superb novels and I do think that there was good intent behind the making of the characters I’ve mentioned. Nevertheless, these characters are what they are and King does benefit from that fact. Magical Negroes are always interesting, being magical and mysterious, and they make things happen. When a Magical Negro pops up, the story crackles and pops.

The trope is a trope because it can make a story work. Yet just because it’s something that works doesn’t mean it’s something we shouldn’t try to avoid when we can, especially because the trope can be pretty caustic, too—think about, especially, storytelling about Native Americans. Last of the Mohicans and Dances with Wolves are pretty good examples of When Tropes Go Bad: the Native Americans almost always die to leave the land to their white inheritors, and the power dynamic is always tipped in favor of the white protagonist as inheritor of the virtues of the Native Americans. “Native Americans don’t live here anymore” seems to an underlying message from stories like this. The controversial book Touching Spirit Bear comes closer to home for those of us in the YA community.

(Okorafor’s post over on Strange Horizons covers a lot of interesting and important territory on this subject, so go read the whole post.)

How to avoid the Magical Negro trope, or at least the worst version of it? As I think about it, the Magical Negro is kind of a subtype of the Guru character who comes to help the protagonist on his journey. In fantasy, Gandalf is the perfect example of the Guru character. Especially in The Hobbit, Gandalf exists to help, teach, and guide. We don’t know much about him—he’s just this mysterious magical being who helps Bilbo set off on his quest. Gandalf’s role in The Lord of the Rings is expanded a little, and his relationship with Sauron and their backstory more important, but Gandalf is still very much in the role of helper to the main characters, the one who dies so that others can live (getting away from the Balrog)—he just happens to be powerful enough to come back as Gandalf the White, and then AGAIN help the main characters win by bringing reinforcements to Helm’s Deep, among other feats.

But when the Wizard becomes the Magical Negro, we add a racial dynamic to a relatively tired old trope (after all, even if it works for Gandalf, it’s been done so many times) that, especially when the older POC is teaching a young white kid, implies a symbolic inheritance/transference of wisdom and power—especially, as we already talked about, when it comes to stories involving Native Americans in the 1800s.

Occasionally I hear white writers, especially, say things like, “How can I add diversity to my stories, then? It seems like you can’t win. When I do add diversity, I get accused of playing to stereotypes”—the Magical Negro being one, the Black Guy Dies First being another.

I think part of of the solution is seeing past the main character as the most important character to the exclusion of other characters. “Helper” characters need to be fleshed out as independent beings in their own right, with their own concerns that don’t always match up to the priorities of the main character, even if the fate of the world is at stake.

I’m currently catching up on Supernatural Season 6, and there was a really great episode about Bobby, the down-to-earth friend of the family who is always getting Sam and Dean out of scrapes both big and small. (SPOILERS AHEAD) At the end of Season 5, Bobby sold his soul to a demon to accomplish some goal that I’ve now forgotten, the end result of which was to ensure that Satan went back in his cage and didn’t destroy the world. Now in the 5th season, Bobby has to deal with the consequences of that deal. Meantime, Dean has some suspicions about Sam being not quite right and wants to air his worries/grievances to his normal confidant, Bobby. But Bobby now has bigger fish to fry. He has to worry about his OWN soul, literally. Yet Dean’s worries are justified and he really does need help, so Dean has to help Bobby so Bobby has the space to help Sam and Dean.

I think that kind of complication of character motivations makes all the difference. Bobby is sort of Sam and Dean’s Gandalf. He’s always sending them off on quests, or in Supernatural parlance, “jobs.” There isn’t a racial dynamic, but Bobby is a “helper” character most of the time. Yet Bobby is a fully-fleshed-out real person, too, who is just as important as anyone else. He’s not lower in social stature, he’s not obliged to help Sam and Dean out of any other motivation other than friendship/a sense of family. He doesn’t simply exist to serve Sam and Dean and then disappear.

ETA: I know this is already long, but Okorafor has a great point in that same post that sums up what I’m getting at quite nicely:

Part of my point was that Magical Negroes have power that, if harnessed for personal intent, would change the story greatly. What would The Green Mile be if Coffey had been more concerned with escaping than helping? What would The Talisman have been if Speedy hadn’t been there for Jack because he was trying to save the talisman himself, because he thought he himself was capable, too? What would have happened in The Stand if Mother Abigail had been more concerned with helping her own folks make it to a better place than the ragtag group that came along? What would all these stories have been if these characters’ destinies weren’t so tied to someone outside of themselves? If they hadn’t been written that way? The answer: the stories would have been more complex, the characters more human, less lapdog.

Making secondary characters more fleshed-out, real people with their own priorities and individual worth, and less a cardboard cutout, won’t automatically prevent them from still being representative of a trope, but I think it can help mitigate the dynamic. And, of course, more stories starring POC as heroes of their own tales is another solution to this problem. Let’s talk about it some more. What do you think?

**By the way, this post was inspired because I followed a link from Nnedi Okorafor’s post on her bust of Lovecraft, the symbol of her World Fantasy Award, which explores Lovecraft’s racism and the legacy of racism we must confront in fantasy. Go read that as well.

McBurney's incorporation of puppetry added a unique twist to the opera and created visually stunning and memorable moments on stage. Another highlight of this production was the casting of talented singers who brought their characters to life. The opera showcases a range of vocal talents, from the powerful arias of the Queen of the Night to the charming melodies of Papageno. The singers in this production delivered outstanding performances, capturing the essence of their characters and bringing depth and emotion to their roles. The music of The Magic Flute is a true treasure, and Conlon's conducting brought out the beauty and brilliance of Mozart's compositions. The orchestra played with precision and passion, enhancing the emotional impact of the opera. The famous overture and the Queen of the Night's aria "Der Hölle Rache" were particularly memorable in this production. Overall, the 1994 production of The Magic Flute was a captivating and enchanting rendition of Mozart's opera. McBurney's innovative direction, combined with exceptional performances by the cast and the beautiful music conducted by Conlon, made this production a magical experience for all who attended. The opera continues to be a beloved and celebrated work in the world of classical music, and this particular production stands out as a testament to the enduring power of Mozart's genius..

Reviews for "The Legacy of 'The Magic Flute' (1994): Its Impact on Modern Cinema"

1. John - 2 stars - I was really disappointed with "The Magic Flute" from 1994. The production lacked the grandeur and charm that I associate with this classic opera. The sets and costumes were uninspiring, and the performances felt lackluster. The magic that should have been present in the story was simply not there, and I left the theater feeling underwhelmed.

2. Sarah - 1 star - I found the 1994 version of "The Magic Flute" to be incredibly boring and dull. The pacing was slow, and the actors seemed disinterested in their roles. The music lacked energy and excitement, making it hard to stay engaged. Overall, it was a forgettable experience that I wouldn't recommend to anyone.

3. Robert - 2 stars - I had high hopes for "The Magic Flute" from 1994, but unfortunately, it fell flat for me. The direction seemed disjointed, with scenes transitioning awkwardly and a lack of cohesion in the storytelling. The actors' performances were mediocre at best, and I struggled to connect with the characters. Overall, it was a disappointing rendition of a beloved opera.

4. Emily - 1 star - As someone who loves "The Magic Flute," I was severely let down by the 1994 version. The sets and costumes were drab and unimpressive, failing to capture the whimsical and enchanting nature of the story. The singing was lackluster, with many of the performers struggling to hit the right notes. It felt like a subpar production that didn't do justice to the beauty and magic of Mozart's masterpiece.

5. Michael - 2 stars - "The Magic Flute" from 1994 did not live up to the hype for me. The staging was uninteresting, and the choreography lacked creativity and precision. The acting felt forced, and I struggled to connect with the emotions of the characters. Overall, it was a mediocre production that failed to capture the essence and brilliance of Mozart's opera.

The Enchanting Music of 'The Magic Flute' (1994): A Soundtrack Analysis