KOJAK YOUR ENTHUSIASM (9)

By: Joshua Glenn
April 28, 2022

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of our favorite TV shows of the Seventies (1974–1983).

SHAZAM! | 1974–1977

Until c. 1979 my brother and I were only allowed to watch TV on weekends. So we mostly missed out on shows like The Incredible Hulk, The Bionic Woman, and Wonder Woman — lunchboxes and action figures advertising which our free-range peers toted. To this day, I haven’t viewed the two-part “Secret of Bigfoot” Six Million Dollar Man episode, which (or so I was led to believe at the time) was a pinnacle of Western culture. The only live-action superhero show I watched with any sort of regularity was Shazam!, a preachy, low-budget, Saturday-morning morality play.

Rewatching it recently, I was reminded that — much like the crew of the starship Enterprise before them — Billy Batson and Mentor (Les Tremayne), a safari-jacket-wearing old-timer, roam the trackless void (in this case, the American west’s limited-access highways and principal roads) in a high-tech vehicle (a Dodge Open Road motorhome) in search of local hassles in which to intervene without doing any prior research.

At the beginning of each episode, a high-tech device in the van flashes and chimes — Billy’s cue to commune with the “immortal elders.” Please note that while Billy and Mentor are live-action, Solomon, Hercules, Atlas, Zeus, Achilles, and Mercury are shoddily animated; the show’s mixed-media action did a number on this viewer’s head. In each episode, the elders lay on Billy a maxim about right action, one that he will only understand once he has encountered an adolescent struggling to navigate one of the era’s troubles and temptations. Captain Marvel — the Fawcett Comics hero with occult superpowers — functions, here, as a deus ex machina. When one of his misguided new chums finds him- or herself in danger, Billy transforms into the Big Red Cheese (Jackson Bostwick, in the episodes I’ve seen) and swoops to the rescue.

Shazam! is a generation-gap parable. Billy (Michael Gray, b. 1951) is a Boomer who may mean well… but he can’t get things done until he taps into the godlike wisdom, power, stamina, etc., of the generations I’ve elsewhere named the Anti-Anti-Utopians (represented by Bostwick, b. 1943) and the New Gods (represented by Tremayne, b. 1913). Captain Marvel may deliver the show’s final homily, but it’s Billy who’s tasked with hipping the youth to, e.g., resisting peer pressure, staying in school, and agitating for change “within the law.” Only by joining forces can these generational avatars prevent young members of the Original Generation X from going… over the edge.

I didn’t grasp any of this messaging at age nine. Instead, I was transfixed by what I’d now call the show’s neo-Platonic aspect — the sense that beneath the live-action surface of our daily lives there may lurk a more colorful, fantastical dimension of reality. Shazam!

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KOJAK YOUR ENTHUSIASM (9)

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