I’ve mentioned before on the blog — 15 years ago, granted — how much I loved Shazam!, Filmation’s live-action series based on the original Captain Marvel that aired Saturday mornings on CBS in the mid ’70s.
Not very long ago it was incorporated into a dream of mine. An immortal Elder from the show appeared to me but (a) he looked more like Batman foe Maxie Zeus as drawn by the great Don Newton than Zeus himself or any of the other legendary figures making up the acronym that is Billy Batson’s magic word — yet still in the style used to illustrate those figures in the ethereal vision sequences in which they appeared, unmoving — and (2) he freaked me out by lifting his arms up instead of remaining static. I think he was giving me a mission that had something to do with cats.
Unlike most dreams, I could trace the components of this one quite clearly to stuff
from my waking life. It came as Matt Re’s look at the stretch of Batman and Detective Comics written by Gerry Conway, which ran throughout 2024 on his blog Not a Hoax! Not a Dream!, was drawing to a close; a fair number of those stories were penciled by Newton. And more germanely to the post I’m writing now, I’d begun playing the intro to Shazam! in an act of self-soothing on an almost daily basis to center myself before getting down to this or that task amidst my latest health crises and the general insanity of life.
I started rewatching the half-hour series early in the pandemic as part of a personal
film festival of favorites that I’d planned around my 50th birthday. To be clear, Shazam!’s 28 episodes are often corny, didactic, and utterly lacking in any cool supervillain battles or cosmic peril, following Billy and his associate Mentor — who likely once had another name, in ages past, something the show never explores beyond very brief allusions — as they travel rural America in an RV and uncover cases of prejudice, bullying, hubris, and even outright criminality that largely get settled through a sympathetic ear and good advice but reliably involve a physical threat that only Billy’s transformation into Captain Marvel can resolve. No matter how far afield from the highly imaginative comics it was of necessity, with limited special effects, I was the perfect age to be enthralled every single time the mystic lightning was called down and, really, just see a guy dressed like the World’s Mightiest Mortal in the flesh. Michael Gray’s Billy, Les Tremayne’s Mentor, and Jackson Bostwick’s and then John Davy’s Captain Marvel, the latter incarnation crossing over a few times with Joanna Cameron’s Isis when her eponymous show was created and paired with Shazam!, are forever in my pantheon of nostalgia. Ditto the narration and voices for the Elders provided by Filmation co-founder Lou Scheimer. Ray Ellis and Filmation co-founder Norm Prescott’s theme music, credited to their usual studio pseudonyms Yvette Blais and Jeff Michael, is as thrilling to me in its way as John Williams’ and Danny Elfman’s respective scores for those guys in Metropolis and Gotham City.
Shazam! was remastered for the DC Universe service, which offered a library of new live-action and animated series based on DC properties to stream — Titans, Stargirl, the Young Justice revival, Swamp Thing, Doom Patrol, and Harley Quinn premiered there — alongside older content like Shazam! and a library of digital comics to read. I have the show on Warner Archive disc but was glad to discover it at the free, ad-supported Tubi site when DC Universe folded until it got pulled awhile back, as did Filmation’s DC cartoons from the late ’60s, not all of which are on Max. The opening sequence is available on multiple YouTube channels, none licensed that I could find unless you want to purchase episodes, as well as the series’ page on IMDB.
Elders screencap from the show and promotional shot
of Gray with Bostwick on set © 1974 DC Comics.
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