I vaguely remember the cartoon from the early 80's. Shazam was the word Capt. Marvel would say to transform into his super identity. A little more efficient than ducking into a phone booth and stripping down to your uniform. Believe it or not, Capt. Marvel was the best selling comic of the 40's. I always found irony in DC Comics producing a hero named Marvel.
Ugh. I just looked at this description again and it sucks. One of my earliest efforts. I guess I can lose a half hour updating. Turns out
Shazam, in addition to being Capt. Marvel's catch phrase, is some kind of music selling (or sharing?) service. Honestly, how many of these are there in the world (wide web)?
Holy crap! How did I miss this??? Capt. Marvel was a really, really bad 70's TV show staring
Jackson Bostwick. I mean, we've all seen bad 70's TV shows, but my god is this impressive! The opening credits shows the mild mannered alter ego Billy
Batson receiving his powers from the Greek Gods of Olympus, in this case portrayed by cartoon characters projected on a screen in front of young, bad hair tight shirt Billy (no joke). This show was so well produced that one of the main characters, Billy's mentor, has no name but is simply called
Mentor (again, no joke).
Just goes to show you. I was all prepared to grind through another description redo (I hate redo's) while dredging my brain for inspiration and then simply
tripped over a
rare and exotic gem such as this. It's days like this I am glad to be alive and writing bizarre t-shirt descriptions.
The guy who played Billy Batson now owns a flower shop called
Casa Bella in Beverly Hills, Ca. If you live in LA I would highly recommend buying your flowers from him.
Of course, now I am destined to get a lot of email spam all on the order of "You didn't know about Shazam! the TV show? What kind of pop culture nerd are you?" The thing about nerds is when they sense a weakness in your geek-fu they swim in like sharks sensing
blood in the water.
Unfortunately, the video episodes I watched were all plagued by the horrible Bill-and-Ted-wannabe
Slim Jim commercial that I have seen about 100,000 times thanks to the Zero Punctuation videos. I more or less have it memorized and want to stop myself from being able to hear every time it come on, possibly with a bullet. In case you have lived an extremely fortunate life and have never seen it but want to end your lucky streak
here is the commercial. I am not responsible for any killing sprees that result from watching it, however.
I have seen it so often that I have become focused on the one slightly redeeming element, the super hot girl who says nothing (as all good women should, am I right guys??? Just kidding. Please don't castrate me) but gives what is supposed to be an intriguing look at the end but comes across looking pretty forced. Like a man dying of thirst and spotting a single bottle of Fiji water I am more than a little intrigued by her and would like to find out who she is. Unfortunately, Google is a treacherous beast. If you do a search for "Slim Jim spicy side commercial" you get the commercial video instantly. If you add the word "girl" to that search you get a million bad sites, most of them either porn or
Spice Girls related. If any of you out there know who she is please send me an email or post a review for this shirt. Since I see her on so many nerd related sites I think it would be hilarious to interview her for my blog.
Well, I just spent a lot more time than the half hour I originally committed to this shirt, but I think it well worth it. I feeling good about this one.
Dave
Updated September 20th, 2010
