I am reminded heavily of the gambling and dice motifs of Oogie Boogeyman, from The Nightmare Before Xmas, whose voice actor was Black. The gambling motif is completely unrelated to the rest of film, and appears random, since this trope has mostly been forgotten by most of the movie going public.

This movie was directed by Tim Burton, another problematic director who doesn’t traditionally use Black actors in his works, except to make them villains. For example the one time a famous Black actor shows up in one of his works is after people criticized him for not having PoC in his movies, and then he cast Samuel L Jackson as an evil dark being (trying to kill a bunch of white kids) in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children.

But this is the kind of thing that happens when people forget/ignore the past or don’t know the history of the motifs they use in their films. It’s possible Burton may have been entirely innocent of his use of the trope, and most people didn’t catch it, but the result was that people didn’t understand what it had to do with anything else in the film. That along with the voice actor coded Oogy Boogy (itself a racist term) as a Black man who gambles and loses.

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/the-nightmare-before-christmas-tim-burton-oogie-boogie-racist-caroline-thompson-b1443586.html

< I spoke too soon!>😜