Hey kids (of all ages), it's Saturday Morning Cartoon time again!
The company that would become DC started the Golden Age of comic book superheroes in 1938 with the introduction of SUPERMAN. Their success with the character prompted other publishers to roll-out their own demigods in long-johns. DC managed to lawyer several of them straight into oblivion.
But one competitor was just too popular to go down so easily. CAPTAIN MARVEL (no relation to the femarxist using the name for a different company now) was a light-hearted take on the genre, with an extra dose of wish-fulfillment due to the protagonist being an adolescent boy who could transform into a full-grown ersatz Superman by uttering the magic acronym "SHAZAM!" With his comics regularly outselling Superman's, Fawcett publishing was willing to keep DC tied-up in court for years. Only in the early 1950s, when the Golden Age was over and superhero comic sales had slumped across-the-board, did the companies settle their dispute, with Fawcett agreeing to cease production of Captain Marvel books.
Oddly enough, DC ultimately would up licensing, then owning the character. By the time they reintroduced him, Marvel Comics was claiming trademark on his name, so his books were titled "SHAZAM!", though the character's was still called Captain Marvel in the stories.
Filmation studios, which really got its start making TV cartoons featuring DC superheroes in the 1960s, made a live-action, Saturday Morning SHAZAM! series starting in 1974. In their version, Captain Marvel's alter-ego Billy Batson was matured to around college age, and traveled the country in an RV with a less-cartoonish version of the Uncle Dudley character from the comics, here renamed "Mentor". In Filmation's realistic, live-action world, Captain Marvel used his awesome powers mostly to keep misguided kids out of trouble and handle situations the boys from EMERGENCY! could have dealt with easily.
A half-decade later, Filmation still had the SHAZAM! license, so they made a series of animated segments to be included in their KID'S SUPER POWER HOUR. These used familiar musical cues and the announcer from the live-action series, and kept Billy Batson as a young adult. But otherwise they were much closer to the comic books, with Captain Marvel joined by the original Uncle Dudley, Mary Marvel, and Captain Marvel Jr. (No actual biological relation!) As well as Tawny the anthropomorphic tiger and many of the comic book villains.
The KID'S SUPER POWER HOUR did not do well, though the dozen SHAZAM! episodes are considered the better part of the project. It was the penultimate Saturday Morning show before Filmation went fully into producing for weekday syndication, which was a growing market as Saturday Mornings were beginning to fade.
DC recently gave-in to popular practice and officially renamed the superhero "Shazam", dropping the Captain Marvel bit entirely. He's been seen regularly in their comics and animated works, and had a reasonably successful live-action theatrical film in 2019.
So here is the first episode of Filmation's animated SHAZAM! from Autumn of 1981.
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