With references to The Phantom, Shazam! and Lee Marvin in Death Hunt, I was kind of digging this odd look at “Shazam and Prayer”:
Most kids my age during WWII preferred Captain Marvel to Superman, as comic book sales of the time testify. One reason being most of us kids could more readily relate to Billy Batson than to Clark Kent. And after all, Billy was of our world not from some distant planet. Also, we could easily fantasize the magic of “Shazam” as actually being possible to a mortal if one were favored of the gods. Even to Christian kids this did not seem a heretical thought. Many of our comic book heroes of the time had supernatural powers, and we seemed to separate the mystical attributes of these various characters from what we were taught in church and Sunday school. Of course, there was enough of the supernatural and mysticism in the Bible to encourage our believing the same things might be possible for our comic book heroes.
That is, until the part where he says Governator Arnold Schwarzenegger and Satan are BFF’s …
