Shirley is wearing Vaguely Asian clothing, and eyeliner designed to make her eyes look Suspiciously Asian, and she’s got the Ambiguously Asian name Sumuru. It’s clear enough that she’s meant to be at least somewhat Asian. Probably Chinese. Or half-Chinese? Or something? Not sure if the book is any more specific. But, as noted above, Sumuru was created because Fu Manchu being a Chinese villain (not only packed with racist stereotypes, but generating some new ones), so that probably would have precluded making her specifically Chinese.
I think some of it may have been inspired by the popular (and mainly fictitious) stories of Mata Hari, a Dutch woman who used vague circumstantial knowledge of unrelated Asian cultures to claim to have been trained in India. She had a popular strip tease act which gained her a string of high-profile lovers. She was executed as a spy, but with little to no actual evidence that she ever actually did anything significant, and some indication that the Germans who considered recruiting her decided she was ineffective. At the time, though, it was just taken as canon that she was actually a beautiful and deadly spy who used her exotic mystique to beguile men, seducing them into revealing secrets upon which nations turned.
Our Heroes have plot armor. The local police don’t. That’s par for the course, regardless of race. Happens all the time in the big Bond movie climax showdowns, no matter what country they’re in. Bond just walks through the battlefield while the local and/or British agents backing him die left and right. Likewise, the Indeterminately Asian Sumuru escapes while her mostly white henchgirls die, with only a handful surviving to get arrested.
Anyway, the movie is definitely racist. But the focus is more on the sexism. Fu Manchu is all about how the evil mastermind is conniving and ruthless and hates the West because he’s very Chinese. Sumuru is about how women will work their sexy feminine wiles to secretly control men, but their undoing is that they are weak and vulnerable to girly love and hot guys make them squishy.
I didn’t get the sense that it mattered. She seemed to exist for exposition. Through her, we learn that Sumuru’s agents’ weakness is that women can’t help but fall in love, and that the punishment for betraying the cause is a sexy bikini girl fight.
But that’s entirely possible.
I have watched the KTMA episode a couple of times, although it’s been a few years. But I’m not much for gatekeeping. A lot of MSTies skip the KTMA episodes. Which is understandable, but kind of a shame. They’re fun to watch, and there are some real gems, especially in the latter half the season when they really start getting the hang of the whole riffing thing.
