I signed off chat "early" Saturday night (about 1:15 a.m.) because the draft near the door was so cold, but I stayed up to watch the last half hour of TV Land's little superhero programming block, which was the old 1970s live-action Captain Marvel series, Shazam!

I'll admit that I watched this show back when it was originally on. The draw for me was radio performer Les Tremayne, whose voice I adored and who played Billy Batson's genial "Mentor." Les Tremayne would have been the only thing that persuaded me to watch this awful show: it was filmed 1970s cheesy style on soap-opera type videotape, the plots were beat-you-over-the-head morality plays with little or no violence because of the ban on children's action series with their hideous "relevant" hip language and situations, and the acting for the most part was horrendous, probably because of the scripts. Last Saturday's episode featured a teenage Sean Kelly, who as a slightly younger boy had done a pretty creditable acting job on several episodes of Lassie, so I knew he could act. But the characters had nothing to act with; it was as if they had to work with the product of a 10-year-old author of the fifth grade class play.

(Frankly, I think that at ten I could have turned out better material...)

Even at age 61 Tremayne had a great voice. He died last year, age 90. Always wondered if he kept "the voice" until the end.

The music really created flashbacks...Shazam! was produced by Filmation, who did so many series back in the 70s it's hard to count: I can think of Star Trek (the best of the lot), Lassie's Rescue Rangers, Fantastic Voyage, Emergency Plus 4 (Gage, DeSoto, and the obligatory four kids), Valley of the Dinosaurs, Shazam!, Isis... I'd love to see Lassie's Rescue Rangers again just for the sake of accuracy of my web page. I remember it being pretty bad, and Rudd Weatherwax apparently loathed the thing. I do remember Fantastic Voyage with some affection; the plots seemed to be a little more intelligent. But they all had that same, interchangable and memorable, score by Lou Schirmer--once you heard one cartoon, it was impossible not to identify another Filmation cartoon just by the music.

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 12:27:00 PM

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