The Part About The “Swapping” Trend That Gets Glossed Over

You can’t deny it’s a new trend in adaptations, one meant to avoid the “hassle” of properly making existing characters that are people of color, women, and whatever as popular as the white ones. Yes, the only reason the white male heroes are in the supposed “lead” is that so many more of them were made but it’s not like there weren’t black women basically running superteams. Filmation not only gave us Space Sentinels but put Isis (since now apparently Egyptians are black because Egypt is a country on the continent of Africa…which I guess means the Inuit are now Native Americans like the Apache or one of the Canadian tribes or something?) in command of the Freedom Force. (Interesting enough, Hercules was somehow on both teams. Guess it’s called the Valley Of Time for a reason.) I’ve listed the heroes I grew up watching and I could (and probably should) easily do another installment. Note how long it took for Black Panther, a hero created by two Jewish men in the 1960s, to become a famous name outside of comics and now a ping pong ball in the culture war.

I was watching a video recently by YouTube commentator Just A Robot I won’t be posting because I’ll be hitting similar points in my article but a bit more toned down. Plus he seems to think Invincible is on Disney+ instead of Netflix. (And apparently I’m as bad, as someone just pointed out in the comments it was on Amazon Prime. Articles are easier to fix than videos thankfully. I don’t have access to any of them, though some older Amazon shows are starting to make their way to Freevee…which I still don’t watch there either because the franchise is a bit too bloody for me.) Of course with the way Disney keeps buying competition and thinking that will solve their financial failures…

I will, however, link to it in case you want to watch it later. Entitled “Is Racebending Making People More Racist“, the host posts the theory that instead of solving racism the replacement of traditionally white characters may make people more resentful, thus making the problem worse. And this may be the goal as the elitists want to divide us to control us.Whatever you may think of his point of view, and it should be noted that even people of those races disagree that the changes are positive since they aren’t what was created (when gay rights activist and former Sulu portrayer George Takei is telling you not to make Sulu gay because that’s the actor’s orientation and not his character’s and you don’t listen, you’re the idiot) in the source material, that’s not really what I want to focus on. The culture war may be ruining modern storytelling, but it’s only one factor. The other is not caring about the source material. The changes made to the Battlestar Galactica reimagine wasn’t because of “wokeness”, it was because they didn’t care about the original show.

No, there’s something that is only part of the discussion that I really want to focus on. Have you ever notice that anytime a male character becomes a woman, a straight character is turned gay, or a white character becomes a person of color that the whole character is different? Not necessarily bad, though most are, but why does changing the race, gender, and/or orientation also mean changing everything else?

I could have sworn there was a story that focused on how she met her husband and how his death in the line of duty led to her view of police work.

In retrospect the first time I saw this happen was Renee Montoya, one of my favorite characters from Batman: The Animated Series. She was snarky but still believed in people and that Gotham could be saved. She was a good contrast to Harvey Bullock, a Gotham City police detective who, unlike the rookie Montoya, had seen too much of Gotham’s dark side and just wanted to see scum busted, lacking Montoya’s sense of compassion and optimism. It was great seeing them play off each other at crime scenes. However, as I went over during my review of the Batman: TAS story bible, she was also straight.

Like Bruce Wayne, Renee Montoya lost someone near her to Gotham’s criminal element. Her husband, also a police officer, was killed two years ago in the line of duty. She has continued on as a “legitimate” crime fighter. She grew up in Gotham’s Crime Alley and saw, first hand, what criminal lifestyles did to people. Young, tough, and cynical, with a dry sense of humor, she holds a grudging respect for the Batman, but has mixed emotions about his vigilantism. Nevertheless, they often find themselves thrown together as allies, and Batman’s knowledge of her past causes him to be particularly fond of her.

As I noted in that part of the article, Montoya would undergo not only a change in her sexual orientation once transitioning to DC Comics proper from the DCAU, but a change of personality, the “angry lesbian” which is a troupe I see making its way through action stories. Gotham had her as a total bitch, going so far as to have her pursue Detective Jim Gordon’s fiancé for a one-night stand because they “knew each other” in the past. She jumped from police officer right to detective (she would get promoted when the cartoon moved to Kids WB to join Superman and basically start the DCAU proper), and that’s pretty much what she’s been like to this day. She’s not a likable person anymore, taking away what made her play so well off of Bullock by eliminating that contrast. If they’re both a-holes then what’s the point?

Of course there’s the case of Velmaish, or that’s what I’m calling it because whatever Mindy Kaling was playing it wasn’t Velma Dinkley. In fact none of the characters are the same, even the one they kept white. “Black Shaggy”, as one commenter refers to him, may avoid the nonsense that Shaggy Rogers is a drug user simply because he’s a hippy with a high metabolism (he’s also a teenager who spends his days running from potential killers in dangerous costumes except for the rare actual monster or alien he’s running from) but he’s also someone more calm and collected than Shaggy from everything I’ve seen. Daphne is a bitch, Freddy is a manbaby rich boy’s son (because all rich people are evil to Hollywood…despite those same Hollywood types making more money than I’ve ever had in my paycheck), but Velma is the worst of all. She’s obnoxious, paranoid, rude, and just plain not likable. There’s a reason fans of Scooby-Doo hated this show, and those personality changes were the worst of them.

Remember when we liked these two and weren’t shipping them?

I can’t speak to Amber from Invincible myself but the usual complaint is that her terrible treatment of Mark was the opposite of how Amber in the comics, a blonde, responded to finding out her boyfriend was a superhero. However, I can speak to Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen and especially with Black Jimmy it seems all traces of the previous character were tossed out the window. We’ve had two race-swapped Jimmy Olsens on TV, and apparently also in the Super-Sons direct to video movie I really want to see. We’ve never had a redheaded Jimmy in live-action but in Supergirl he’s bald, and black, and a whole lot more confident that our ginger, well-intended dope who gets himself into all kinds of trouble trying to help. They wanted to set him up as a love interest for Kara in some kind of love triangle with Winn as the dude destined to lose, so he’s smooth, sophisticated, and handsome. I could also make the case that Winn was more like Jimmy than Jimmy, and Winn Slott was created for the show. (I don’t recall Toyman ever having a son in any other incarnation.)

My Adventures With Superman almost feels like an overcorrect. Hyperactive, obsessed with aliens and his blog, I don’t recognize anything about this black version of Jimmy Olsen. It takes more than a bowtie to make a proper character adaptation, and that’s been a problem. This version of Perry White also seems like an overcorrect for his Man Of Steel portrayal. Snyder’s Perry was too calm and collected while Adult Swim Perry is due for a stroke and doesn’t encourage his interns to work hard to become reporters, taking their hard work from them rather than trying to help them improve as reporters once he sees they have good investigative skills, especially Lois, who is very driven. She’s also gone from tough but feminine to overcaffinated Korean tomboy (points for a straight tomboy who still identifies as female, a growing rarity in US entertainment) who looks more Hispanic and convinces us to compare her physically to an adult Lutz from The Owl House but the Kents are the only thing this show gets right, as if they were dropped into a show made by someone with a surface level understanding of Japanese “anime” styles.

You want an example of a race swap that still got the personality right? Wilson Fisk.

Michael Clarke Duncan’s portrayal of the Marvel universe’s resident kingpin of crime (literally known as The Kingpin) wasn’t spot-on but no adaptation is going to be. I don’t expect one-to-one but I do expect some level of accuracy and trying. The fact that the 2003 Daredevil movie was this accurate to the characters (except for Bullseye and that bit where Matt Murdock has to sleep in a water chamber to dull his radar sense) and disappointing elsewhere is what I mean when I talk about a good adaptation being a bad story. It’s not the adaptation that was bad. You can have good stories that are bad adaptations and good adaptations that are bad stories. What the creators are supposed to be aiming for is a good story that’s also a good adaptation. There’s also the MTV Spider-Man version.

When the show was being put together, Duncan was the version of Fisk that came out of comics, only the second live-action Fisk after The Trial Of The Incredible Hulk, and maybe the third or fourth animated version. Nobody complained. If anything, Duncan was praised for his role because he was damn good but the writing for his character was also quite close to his comic self. Then you have Nick Fury. Sure, the original comic Nick was black but like a lot of the live-action Spider-Man movies much was borrowed from the Ultimate Universe, where for whatever reason THEY race swapped Nick Fury with a man who looked like Samuel L. Jackson…and when you have that opening and he agrees, it would be foolish in Hollywood not to take advantage of that.

In the comics they wanted the MCU version but couldn’t just import the Ultimate universe version like they did Miles Morales, so the writers explained that the new movie import version was the son of the original Nick Fury (so mixed race), meaning the fact that the MCU still ha not given us a scene with Jackson’s Fury’s dad being played by David Hasselhoff, who played the first live Nick Fury in the failed Nick Fury: Agent Of SHIELD pilot movie, is a continuing error in judgement. Make this happen NOW, Feige!

So the race swap is bad enough. It sends the message that the only way to get your not-white guy character popular is to swipe the name rather than pushing the actual history of not-white guy characters. It’s an insult to the character and their creators, and doesn’t send a good message to the people you’re trying to represent who care more about the source material than you do. Static, Black Panther, Black Lightning, and the Falcon all prove you can make a preexisting black hero popular with the general public. We like the characters for WHO they are, not what they are. If you’re going assign stereotypes to every race, gender, and orientation out there don’t be surprised when someone complaints about the cheap paint job when you didn’t have the guts to create something new or build up something that isn’t already beloved by all the everybodies. It just shows you don’t care about what you’re making or inherited. If you don’t care, why should we?