Aladdin screenwriter uses racial slur to defend anti-vaccination comments, so welcome to 2018
In a disastrous social media interaction that we can’t help but categorize as “Extremely Online,” well-known screenwriter and (alleged!) garbage human Terry Rossio has found himself facing some serious internet blowback this weekend, after deciding to use this amazing marvel of communication and technology to compare people who speak ill of anti-vaccination activists to those who might refer to a black person using a disgraceful and painful racial slur, using said slur in the process, which, cool:
We actually wrote about Rossio recently, when he expressed unhappiness with the way Disney’s live-action Aladdin remake re-used some of his old script for the animated original without ever acknowledging his contribution. He’s still a fairly prolific writer, having penned most of Disney’s Pirates Of The Caribbean movies, parts of the upcoming Kong Vs. Godzilla, and, again, one of the worst tweets we’ve ever read from someone involved in the production of Shrek.
Rossio later doubled-down on his belief that those mocking “anti-Vax” people are just as bad as those throwing around epithets associated with centuries of oppression, although he did at least use “the n-word” that time, so, you know, growth. It’s not clear yet what sort of impact his comments—which have been quickly picked up and mocked by the denizens of the online world—will have on his career, or whether Hollywood has successfully developed a sufficiently robust herd immunity to keep out this sort of racist bullshit in the future.