I usually hate race bending, but I didn’t mind when the New 52 made the wizard shazam an Australian Aboriginal.
I always got the impression that the wizard came from an old fucking culture and the Australian aboriginals are about as old as it gets. I don’t think race has ever been an important attribute to the wizard to the extent that it is to say, Batman or Superman, so for me it wasn’t a big deal when the deviated from his traditional “old white dude” image.
However, if they wanted to go down the route of going with aboriginal wizard for the movie, then they should have chosen an aboriginal actor rather than an African American.
The REAL idiotic move was, and always has been, changing the hero’s name from Captain Marvel to Shazam. The title of the film or book can’t be called Shazam, so what? The movie was the chance to cement it into the public consciousness that the hero is called Captain Marvel, and the wizard is called Shazam. The movie could have finally cleared that up for the normies.
What is the point of having the wizard and the hero both share the same name? How is that LESS confusing for casuals?
We are now stuck with a situation where the hero can’t say his own name without triggering a transformation, or a situation where he only transforms when he consciously wills it -which takes away the fun of accidental transformations.
