'The Lone Ranger': Johnny Depp's Tonto proves divisive "Worked 30 years as faithful sidekick for kemo sabe," Tonto said, explaining his employment history. Hunt, fish, make food, sew clothes, sweep up, stay awake all night to listen for enemies for kemo sabe. Risk life for kemo sabe. Thirty lousy years. The joke - considering, for once, how the Lone Ranger's Wild West adventures might have felt from his subservient partner's point of view - drew some laughs from Carson's Civil Rights-era, in-studio audience. More than 40 years later, Tonto's side of the story is being told in a longer and more ambitious form - a saucy, big-budget Disney movie starring Johnny Depp, which opened last week to cool reviews and poor box office. Though this revisionist western has Tonto holding the reins, some prominent Native Americans aren't smiling at Depp's flamboyant portrayal of the most famous and divisive character in their pop culture history. Tonto has been a complex lightning rod for shifting sympathies over four generations. As a submissive sidekick, his very name came to stand for a pathetic, backward stereotype, even though some Native Americans decades ago were pleased to at least see him portrayed by one of their own. For the new movie, the studio went to great lengths to hire a cast that included Native Americans and to consult them while the film was being made. The director points out that the film incorporates the perspective of the original North Americans, but as is clear from some of the commentary since the film opened, not all are impressed. "This represents a major setback in our efforts to combat stereotyping of our image," said Hanay Geiogamah, a Native American playwright and professor at UCLA's School of Theater, Film and Television. This pushes us further back into exotica, into otherness, strangeness, a kind of a mystical, spooky past. To contemporize Tonto for a broad audience required discarding a century of cultural tropes about Native Americans - the blatantly racist ones and the more subtly so, according to "Lone Ranger" screenwriter Justin Haythe, who shares credit with Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio. In "The Lone Ranger," from "Pirates of the Caribbean" director Gore Verbinski, Depp's Tonto first appears as part of a diorama in a Wild West show. Wearing dramatic white and black-striped face paint and a dead crow atop his head, he comes to life to tell a young boy the story of how he met the masked man. This Tonto rolls his eyes at the Lone Ranger's priggishness and complains about their partnership, which seems spiritually ordained after the Lone Ranger (Armie Hammer) survives an ambush. An outcast from his Comanche tribe, Depp's Tonto is comic and strange, with a hint of sadness under his eyeliner - a first cousin to the actor's other memorable oddballs such as Capt. Jack Sparrow or Edward Scissorhands. It was Tonto's point of view that interested Depp and his director. "The only version of this movie I wanted to do was from Tonto's perspective," Verbinski said. It would have been weird to do a movie and make Johnny the sidekick. The task was to make Tonto relevant. Haythe adds that the movie "was never gonna be a piece of social realism." "This is a Disney movie," he said. Being irreverent with a culture is a greater quality than holding a culture in precious terms. We went through a period where every Native American in Hollywood was a bad guy. Then they were all a spiritual good guy. I made a conscious decision not to be precious or overly cautious with Tonto. Tonto first appeared in 1933, in the 11th episode of "The Lone Ranger" radio show, when creators George Trendle and Fran Striker realized that a solitary ranger with a radio show needed someone to talk to. The character, identified as being from the Potawatomi Indian nation, was primarily voiced by Caucasian actor John Todd. The program, which went off the air in 1954, spawned Tonto's term of endearment for the Lone Ranger, "kemo sabe" - "trusty scout" in Potawatomi. "Tonto is arguably the most important and longest continually used Native American character there is," said Jeffrey Richardson, a curator at the Autry National Center. You really do not have any other Native American characters who have the history, the impact or the controversy that Tonto does.