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.
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.
There was no more exciting display of thunder and lightning during my childhood
than the bolt from the blue that transformed young Billy Batson into a grown superhero named Captain Marvel at the utterance of a single word.
Screencap of Shazam!'s opening sequence © 1974 DC Comics.
Although not half as faithful to the comics as its slightly later cartoon incarnation, Filmation’s 1970s live-action Shazam! on Saturday mornings was thrilling in large part because it did indeed star real people. Ere long there would be a live-action superhero boom that brought versions of DC’s Wonder Woman and Marvel’s Hulk to our living rooms in prime time — with less successful stabs at other Marvel characters — plus, of course, the sensational reintroduction of Superman to the silver screen
as the decade closed out.
I had a quilt over the top sheet of my bed, and then a dark-green cover made of corduroy over that, with matching cylindrical pillows for show that went at the head and foot. The bed was a single — also known as a twin, which never made sense to me
if you only have one of ’em — while my sister’s bed was queen-sized, again with a bedcover over her quilt. Jen had characters from Sesame Street on her quilt; mine was a pattern of generic toy soldiers, alphabet blocks, and teddy bears.
That placement of quilts as the meat in a sheets-and-bedcover sandwich is crucial to fully grasp the scene of us, on Saturday mornings circa 1975, marching downstairs with quilts clutched tightly in hand and messily cleaving the carefully tucked-in bedspreads of the night before.
