04
Mar
When one thinks about 1988’s Coming to America, a few things stand out: James Earl Jones and Madge Sinclair as the King and Queen of Zamunda speaking to their son Prince Akeem (Eddie Murphy) at a breakfast table with intercom radios; the opulence of Zamunda’s palace, which represented an idealized African nation to 1980s audiences the way Wakanda does today; and of course Murphy and Arsenio Hall’s Semmi fresh off the plane in Queens, New York with no idea what “common” means—or also Murphy and Hall under pounds of makeup as the argumentative old-timers at the nearby barbershop. The film…