Was Tonto the first minority superhero?!


Question: Was Tonto the first minority superhero!?
75 years ago, the biggest hero around was the Lone Ranger, with his Indian sidekick Tonto!. Tonto was WAY ahead of his time!. It's fair to say that he was the first minority superhero! Literally dozens of times, he got to save the day (in the very first episode, he saves the Lone Ranger's life)!.

So why isn't Tonto hailed as a big step forward in minority rights!? He was the first minority on TV to be treated as a total equal!. And because of Tonto, literally tens of millions of white kids grew up wanting to be like a Native American!. That's a very cool thing!.

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Answers:
Generally, Mandrake and Lothar are regarded as the first interracial team in comic strips, but the Lone Ranger and Tonto began their career on the radio on just one station in 1933 and then were broadcast by many radio stations who belonged to Mutual's Blue Network in 1934!. It is arguable if the Lone Ranger and Tonto fit into the "super hero" tradition or not but the Ranger's mask and the fact that they did have a hidden headquarters (the silver mine where the Ranger had a steady supply of silver for his bullets) probably does qualify the two as fitting within the genre!. Mandrake had actual unusual abilities and Lothar was often described as "the strongest man in the world," and Mandrake set the standard for the scores of comic book and radio magicians who followed in his wake, which qualifies he and his sidekick Lothar as not only being super heroes but as prototype super heroes, the first of a specific sub-genre of super heros!.

Neither Tonto nor Lothar were the main character in the stories in which they appeared, and while both can truthfully be said to be an integral part of very popular and influential multi-medium series both Lothar and Tonto are "sidekicks" which means that they are not as important as the main character!. Despite their sidekick status, many fans of the Lone Ranger radio program, movie serial, comic books, movies, and television program thought Tonto was the real "brains" behind the Lone Ranger and the more competant hero of the two!. Lothar was far more than the servant he pretended to be, and was known as "the Prince of the Seven Tribes" a confederation of native africans" before he decided to become Mandrake's partner!. Lothar is fairly unprecedented, but Tonto can be see as a logical extension of James Fennimore Cooper's "Longstocking Tales" and (especially) some of the Indians in "The Last of the Mohicians!."

Believe it or not, there are two versions of how the Lone Ranger and Tonto met, the first being that the Ranger saved Tonto from an unscrupulous white man, and the second being the better known and more repeated (first used in the Lone Ranger movie serial and then later incorporated into the radio program) version where Tonto saves the Lone Ranger after the massacre of a group of Texas Rangers by Butch Cavendish, by nursing Ranger John Reid back to health and then helping Reid create the persona of the Lone Ranger!. Originally, both Mandrake and the Lone Ranger just appeared as characters made from whole cloth in their respective mediums and then later had their backgrounds fllled in; both Lothar and Tonto appeared as sidekicks to their respective heros along in each first appearance of the Lone Ranger and Mandrake!.

The name Lothar probably does not give you a shock of recognition (Mandrake may be in the same boat, for all I know) because while Lothar appeared in the newspaper strip, in a movie serial, and in comic books, there was no popular and long-lasting radio program nor television program!. Mandrake's popularity started to wane in the early fiftes, while the Lone Ranger's popularity stayed steady and perhaps even increased a small amount in the fifties!.

Neither Tonto nor Lothar (nor Charlie Chan, nor Ebony White, nor "Whitewash" Jones, nor other popular minority characters from various mediums in the twenties, thirties, fourties, and even fifties) are considered to be "politically correct" minority figures, because they weren't presented in exactly the right light (in other words, they are judged as negative stereotypes because they have some elements of those stereotypes)!. I find that blanket condemnation of some wonderful characters a bitter pill to swallow, and I find it nearly as appalling that not more than one person in a thousand know that Jay Silverheels (who played Tonto on television and in the first Lone Ranger theatrical movie) was the first Native American to have a speaking part as an actor in "Broken Arrow" in 1947, as the fact that it took until 1947 for a Native American to be given a speaking part in a movie!. I do think both Tonto and Jay Silverheels (who was a fine actor) should be better known and should be regarded as important figures in a long uphill battle, even if they don't please those who are obsessed with what is and isn't "Politically Correct!."Www@Enter-QA@Com



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