Captain Marvel, the big red, white, and gold costumed dude, is a character from Fawcett Comics. Young boy Billy Batson can turn into Captain Marvel by shouting “Shazam!” thanks to some mystic tomfoolery. DC sued the heck out of Fawcett in 1953 because they said Captain Marvel was a copy of Superman. In '72 DC started publishing some Captain Marvel comics by licensing the character from Charlton which had nabbed the rights from Fawcett. By '91, DC bought the whole catalog.
The funny part is that Marvel snagged the copyright to the name “Captain Marvel” in the 1967. DC published their Captain Marvel series under the title Shazam! which lead many to refer to the character as Shazam anyway. DC officially renamed the character Shazam in 2011 when Marvel started to really assert their ownership of the name.
If someone swore to me “Shazam” was a movie they remember seeing, I would’ve suspected they were misremembering the TV series as a movie, not that it flat-out didn’t exist.
Huh, I never knew that. By 2011 I was fairly well beyond my immersive youthful comic reading.
Too bad. I mean, yeah, I guess the dupe Captain Marvel names were confusing for casuals, but Shazam isn’t a good name for the character, since it used to be his top secret word to turn into Captain Marvel.
So what happens to Mary Marvel, Captain Marvel Jr, and Uncle Marvel?!?
They re-jiggered the whole Marvel family, with foster parents and a bunch of foster siblings. They sort of share powers, though Billy still has the big magic. To the best of my knowledge the Marvel Bunny was lost in the process, though Tawny the Tiger survived.
Here was the trailer during the football games by the way, but only the first 53 seconds of that. After that it looks like launches into a more detailed trailer that I’m avoiding.
Thought the shorter trailer was pretty bad in a ‘trying way too hard’ way.
Watched the longer one and I am now much more interested. It also didn’t seem to give much away which was nice. I still think the overly muscled body suit looks terrible though.
