Director: Hollingsworth Morse
Stars: Michael Gray, Les Tremayne, Jackson Bostwick/John Davey
A young boy with verbally-induced superpowers travels the country with a strange old man in an RV and occasionally fights crime.
Superheroes have a storied history as Saturday morning programming targeted at children. SHAZAM! clearly took that responsibility very seriously, turning the DC Comics favorite in to a wacky, weekly morality tale that truly embodied the 1970s. Each episode hammered home its lesson with the subtlety of a Kryptonian punch, sometimes flashing back to the moral three or four times in 20 minutes, so that even the dumbest child could understand it. But don't let its educational qualities fool you—watching this show now after nearly 50 years is super entertaining for just how goofy and stupid it was.
Luckily for Zachary Levi, there's not much pressure from fans to live up to the preious version of the superhero.
For starters, the set-up for the show is wildly problematic. Young Billy Batson travels the country (supposedly, it looks like they're in the same southwest town every week) with an old man known only as Mentor. The two get around in their specialized rape van Winnebago, going town-to-town essentially looking for trouble. It's never explained what the deal is with Billy's parents, why he isn't in school, or why any legal authority would sign off this bizarre road trip. They also don't ever bother to give any backstory to Mentor, his relationship with Billy, or how he knows about Shazam! and his powers. You're just supposed to completely buy the premise without wondering what the sleeping arrangements are in the creepily small RV, and not worry about how weird it is that Billy and Mentor always seem to be having flirty picnics together wherever they go.
I also lost the count of the number of times throughout the series that a young child immediately agrees to get in an RV with a strange old man. That should be the real moral of every episode.
"Do you like movies about gladiators, Billy?"
Amazingly, SHAZAM! also offers zero origin story for its title character other than the brief opening narration that explains Billy Batson got his powers from a group known as The Elders, comprised of mythical legends Solomon, Hercules, Atlas, Zeus, Achilles, and Mercury. The Elders communicate with Billy via a weird game show prop that summons him to appear in trippy animated segments where they impart the week's moral, quoting Shakespeare and Wordsworth to back-up painfully obvious lessons like, "Handicapped people are people too!" or "Don't be racist against Jewish people!" Despite the same formula every week, Billy always seems surprised that the lesson is immediately relevant in whatever situation they find themselves.
The show may be called SHAZAM!, but it spends most of its time with the normal human characters. Captain Marvel gets maybe a few minutes of screentime per episode, usually just swooping in at the last minute to save the day. And for a superhero, he never does anything really interesting or that heroic, always flying to search for missing people and occasionally lifting something heavy. In one episode, a man is literally holding on for dear life to the side of a cliff and Shazam! goes to get some rope to pull him up. He also never actually fights any bad guys or gets in to physical altercations. In fact, when people do bad things, his solution is to fly to the state capitol and get a court order. (This really happens in an episode.) He does fight the occasional lion though.
What happens when Billy Batson yells "Hakuna Matata!" instead of "Shazam!"
It's probably for the best though that Captain Marvel doesn't get a ton of screen time. Granted, this was the 1970s, but the special effects were sorely lacking, even by that decade's standards. For some of the flying shots you can tell the actors is standing up and just bent over. When Shazam! is supposed to be running at super-speed, the vehicle he's chasing is clearly going really slow. Add to that the bad hair, bad fashion choices, and countless production mistakes (wires and obvious stuntmen everywhere), and the title superhero just always looks goofy as hell.
Midway through Season 2, they switched the actor that played Shazam over contract disputes, swapping Jackson Bostwick for an even goofier, slightly pudgier actor. They also introduced an unfortunately named Egyptian-powered female counterpart in the second season that would get her own spinoff show: THE SECRETS OF ISIS. Both shows were eventually presented together on Saturdays as THE SHAZAM! / ISIS HOUR. Yikes….
I know the real-world physics of superheroes flying is mostly nonsense, but I still feel safe saying: You're doing it wrong.
SHAZAM! ended up lasting three seasons and each of the 28 episodes are ridiculous in their own way, but these are some of my favorites.
"The Brothers"
Billy and Mentor nearly run over a young blind boy named Chad with their RV. Turns out, he ran away from home because he's mad that his older brother Danny keeps trying to take care of him. Chad thinks that even though he's eight years old and unable to see, he should still be allowed to be completely independent and go anywhere he wants. Amazingly, the TV show agrees, as the moral for this episode is that handicapped people just need self-confidence, not actual help from anyone else. This message is really driven home by the ending, which sees Danny get bitten by a rattlesnake AND crushed in a rockslide, forcing the blind Chad to smell his way back home alone (through a desert canyon and a river, no less)… and then also smell his way back with help. That'll teach evil Danny to have empathy for those with disabilities!
BONUS: At one point Billy makes a big deal about swearing Chad to secrecy before turning in to Shazam in front of him, even though the kid is blind and would have no idea what happened anyways.
"Thou Shalt Not Kill"
Lynn spends every day at her aunt's farm riding her beloved horse Beckett. But when her aunt dies, for some ungodly reason, she leaves it in her will that Beckett should be killed as well. An upset Lynn steals the horse and runs away, only to run in to Captain Marvel and Mentor, who try to help but ultimately convince her that she needs to follow the law and let Beckett be murdered. There's also another random man who has a personal vendetta against the horse and chases Beckett down with a car and injuring him. As they're about to shoot the horse in the head to put him out of his misery, Captain Marvel flies to the state capitol and gets a court order to stay the execution. Yes, Shazam, in his full costume, goes in to a government building, fills out paperwork, waits in line, and flies out with the necessary documentation.
"Little Boy Lost"
This episode has it all! A mute child who hasn't spoken since he accidentally got his friend killed in a construction accident. A puppy falling down an open mineshaft. A father also falling down an open mineshaft. And a father taking his mute son and new puppy to an abandoned mining town to play near open mineshafts.
Thank God Billy and Mentor are nearby to invite the young boy in to their RV and figure out how to rescue everyone.
"The Athlete"
A girl wants to try out for the track and field team at school even though it's boys-only. Not only do the angry male team members physically assault her, her teachers also tell her not to join because it's not "ladylike." Eventually some of the boys frame her for cheating and get her kicked off the team. The girl drives away on her motorcycle and is so upset that she doesn't see the giant tractor in the road ahead of her. Luckily, Shazam is there to slowly lift the farm equipment and save the day. (That's the big, exciting action element of the episode—Captain Marvel picking up a tractor.)
Also, can we talk about how nobody bats an eye that a random old man and his young boy toy show up at school in their trailer to watch a teenage girl they don't know play sports? Here's some actual dialogue they say out loud:
"Mentor, how'd you like to go to the school and watch Kelly practice this afternoon?"
"Billy, I thought you'd never ask."
"The Treasure"
When two men sneak on to an Indian reservation and dig up Native American artifacts to sell, only white saviors Captain Marvel and Mentor can stop this injustice! (Also, shoutout to the thieves for figuring out how to use a metal detector to find buried pottery.) This episode might have my favorite moral from the Elders, who summon Billy to preach to him about the importance of maintaining our nation's deserts, for humanity still has so much to learn from the desert ecosystem.
"The Delinquent"
This episode is really only memorable for starring a young Jackie Earl Haley as a loner kid who doesn't have any friends at summer camp until he meets Billy and Mentor and their RV. Oh, I guess the random bear attack at the end is also memorable.
"The Braggart"
Alan is a goofy-looking kid who makes up for his ugliness by constantly lying and exaggerating, bragging about beating up people or sneaking in to the rhino exhibit at the zoo. God bless the creators of this show for realizing the best way to teach this character a lesson is to have him get trapped in a cage with a live lion. (Thanks to a zoo that has no security and leaves all their exhibits unlocked.) Of course this means you get to watch a poor stuntman in a Captain Marvel costume wrestle a real lion AND a real condor.
"Bitter Herbs"
In a very special episode, Billy and Mentor take their RV to visit a Jewish family and learn all about discrimination. The teenage son Yale is being bullied by a group of local racists who don't want him to join their club. To get their point across, they send Yale on an initiation—a wild goose chase to cross the desert and climb a mountain with a canteen full of saltwater. Later, they discover that not only is the club leader an Anti-Semite, but he's also smuggling stolen art across the Mexican border. Captain Marvel doesn't even have to do anything this time; a random mountain lion attacks the racist and brings him to justice.
"Goodbye Packy"
If you ever contemplated the age-old question, "What if a girl and a wolf were trapped in a hot air balloon?"—this episode is for you. Kathy is a teenage girl who is shocked when her "pet" wolf Packy starts attacking local chickens, actually yelling at the poor animal, "I can't believe you'd do a thing like that!" When her dad says they have to get rid of the wolf because he's, you know, a wolf, the girl takes her killer canine and runs away from home—directly in to a nearby hot air balloon, which just happens to be sitting unattended, ready to fly. The ending of this episode needs to be seen to be believed.
What happens in the RV, stays in the RV.
Shazam is available to stream on DC Universe, or you can buy the entire series here!
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Thanks to Randall for suggesting this week's column!
Seen a movie that should be featured on this column? Shoot Jason an email and give him an excuse to drink.