Orcs and Goblins in The Hobbit

[Thinlómien]

Originally Posted by Nogrod

What striked me even more at the outset, was the clear change in the general outlook of the orcs... Like from the short, dark and hairy (with a hide of sorts) yellow-eyed skinny-kids to these muscular white-skinned guys with no hair at all. So they have a backwards evolution (a devolution?) from the mutated and over-grown sewer-rats into these naked skinheads?

I'm really wondering if this has something to do with being (overtly) politically correct. Like, last time the baddies were black, now they are white.

[Zigûr]

Professor Tolkien does describe the Orcs as "sallow-skinned" (letter 210) so as much as I hate to do this maybe the film was being (arguably) accurate in a sense by portraying the Orcs with this sickly pale colour? That being said the large, imposing ones like Azog one would assume were Uruk-hai which I believe were generally black in colour so I suppose that could be considered an inaccuracy.
What disappointed me with the Orcs of Goblin-Town was their largely troglodyte appearance. Where are the Goblins who "make no beautiful things, but they make many clever ones" although they "had not advanced (as it is called) so far" - I like the little point Professor Tolkien makes by giving the Goblins the 'technology gone wrong' angle. The Orcs of the Mountains have always come across as sort of anti-Dwarves/anti-Noldor to me, perhaps like the difference between Melkor and Aulë, ie industry vs craft or something of that nature. I would have liked to have seen the Goblins as perhaps more of a foil to the Dwarves: smithing, forging, albeit perhaps with slaves rather than the love of using their own hands etc. We got some mention of elaborate torture devices from the Great Goblin which is consistent with the novel but I wouldn't have said no to that being echoed substantially more in their overall design and aesthetic. That being said PJ probably would have given us a "wacky" mad scientist Goblin with frizzy hair and comedy test tubes or something so maybe we're better off this way...

[Kuruharan]

Originally Posted by Thinlómien

I'm really wondering if this has something to do with being (overtly) politically correct. Like, last time the baddies were black, now they are white.

I partially agree that this might be a motivation of theirs, except that the lesser orcs (the non-uruks) by and large were pale skinned in the original LOTR film trilogy as well. See Gorbag, Gothmog and quite a lot of the Mordor orcs at Minas Tirith as well as the short orcs that were with Saruman in FOTR.