(PNS reporting from TOKYO) Japanese character actor Bad Badtz-Maru will star as a gang-banging, tagging Chicano in a new animated feature called Angry Bird O.G., PNS confirmed on Sunday.
This could be a comeback role for 20-year-old Badtz-Maru (バッドばつ丸). The spiky-haired method actor has found little work since playing the mascot at the 2006 FIBA World Championship of Basketball here.
The English-language film, to be directed by Yoshi Noya Bifbol, will be set in a noir-styled future East Los Angeles, where the Angry Birds clika (like the Crips, they wear blue) is in a turf war with the Pig Posse (like the LAPD, they wear blue as well.) Morrissey has been signed to compose the soundtrack. Warner Bros., home of Native American actors Road Runner and W. E. Coyote, will distribute.
The selection of Badtz-Maru drew an immediate condemnation from civil rights leader Emiliano Zapata Shabazz-Jones:
We have our own flocking bird actors. Why cast a pinche Japanese penguin like Badtz-Maru when there are well-known Mexican-American birds like Pollo Loco who could handle this role perfectly? This can only heighten the contradictions of the predictions of racial animosity, critical grandiosity and perspicacious fabulosity. There is a pecking order, you know. This flick will flip, flop and not fly, just like that Ritchie Valens joint with Pinoy Lou Diamond Phillips as pocho Ritchie.
Furthermore, both Bad Badtz-Maru and Lou Diamond Phillips only have three names, just like Lee Harvey Oswald. Just sayin’.