"Just say the word", read the poster's tagline, and I knew exactly what that meant, although I hadn't said or even thought the word for nearly sixty years. It was like the call of some secret society of which I had been an unwitting sleeper, and immediately conjured up a black and white image of a man flying, with arms thrust forward, and his short cloak rippling in the slipstream. Luckily, I remembered to brake as the traffic slowed, and not try to fly over the car in front.
Perhaps I should explain. When I was about eight years old – this would have been around 1961/1962 – my friends and I used to congregate on Saturday mornings in Shephall Community Centre, one of a number of such multi-purpose neighbourhood centres, not unlike parish halls, which the Council provided for the residents of our New Town. It was just across the road from our primary school, and felt like part of our civic entitlement as junior citizens of the People's Republic of Stevenage; just like the library or the swimming pool, a continuation of school by other means. It was where, a few years later, I would attend weekly judo classes, and it was where my activist-minded grandmother ran the local Over Sixties Club. Anyway, on Saturday mornings, a large room would be filled with rows of stacking chairs, and a screen and projector set up. For a small fee, you could watch, communally, a couple of cartoons and one of those film serials that for a decade or two occupied the slot that would soon be filled by solitary TV-watching. As the room darkened, and the projector started up, numbers would appear on the screen, and we would all join in a ritual count-down. TEN, NINE, EIGHT...
Our favourite serial was the one in which a teenager transformed into a flying superhero by declaiming the magic word, shazam! For years – at our school, anyway – you would see boys with raincoats secured around the neck only, zooming around the playground with arms extended, shouting "shazam!" as their dark-blue gabardine cloak trailed behind. Beyond that single, repeated image of a man flying, however, I found I could remember nothing about it. I assumed the original serial had also been called Shazam! and that the new film was somehow derived from it, but could find no reference to it either in the movie's online documentation or on the wider Web.
After a bit of hunting around, however, I discovered it had really been called The Adventures of Captain Marvel. Its Wikipedia page actually includes the serial's full first "chapter", which is hilarious to watch now, not least for the introductions to the characters, where the actors mug for the camera. The mild racism, orientalism, and general assortment of off-the-peg cliches out of which the storyline is constructed is just the standard fare of the time, and not a lot more sophisticated than an imaginative playground adventure brought to the screen, but with better props and scenery. I expect Steven Spielberg and George Lucas sat in some similar venues as small boys, absorbing the influences that would lead to Indiana Jones and Darth Vader.
I imagine anyone born after 1980 will find it hard to credit that this was the standard of entertainment children expected and enjoyed at that time. No doubt the new Shazam! is slick, full of smart and ironic dialogue, and – it goes without saying – jaw-dropping special effects. But I wonder if it will sink so deep into someone's subconscious that, in 60 years time, they will nearly crash their hovercar by glimpsing the word "shazam!" on some nearby holographic advert?
[N.B. I'm away at the moment, mainly off-grid in Mid-Wales. I'll probably wait to deal with any comments when I get back in a week or so.]
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