Double Billy

Mere weeks after rewatching 1941’s The Adventures of Captain Marvel as part
of the personal film festival I’d assembled for my 50th birthday, which I’ve neglected to dig into here for literal ages now, I was surprised and delighted to see its Billy Batson pop up on a 1974 episode of Shazam!



The CBS show was a staple of Saturday mornings during my childhood, as I noted in April of this year (and long before that). I’m hoping to write about the Republic serial at greater length the near future, but I first checked it out in high school — on a set of VHS tapes from West Coast Video — having read praise for it in Comics Buyer’s Guide; on both viewings, it lived up to its reputation as one of the finest of its kind. Even if Frank Coghlan Jr.’s Billy and Tom Tyler’s Captain Marvel don’t perfectly mirror their comic-book inspiration any more than do their Filmation counterparts — the serial gives us sparks and smoke in place of magic lightning, although it does have the ancient wizard himself rather than six Immortal Elders — we get some genuinely thrilling superheroics for the era.

Coghlan appears in Shazam!’s 13th episode (“The Braggart”) as a zoo employee who chats with Michael Gray’s Billy Batson and Les Tremayne’s Mentor. Gray makes a far briefer cameo (wearing his trademark shirt, taken directly from the page) in 2023’s Shazam! Fury of the Gods, shouting out Zachary Levi’s character by his original name of decades past.

Speaking of time, I spent just a bit too much of it putting together the commemoration of these crossover events below; you’re welcome to share it at full size where you like.




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