Sup Forums resolve an argument. When we Captain Marvel first referred to as Shazam? Not in terms of the renaming of the comic book, but the actual character referred to as "Shazam" instead of Captain Marvel.
My uncle is saying that the character has always been known as both names, but I'm insisting it was a recent change due to copyrighting.
Citations welcome. Also Captain Marvel general.
It's not a copyrighting issue at all. DC can use the name just not in the title. You mean branding, I think.
Well when was he first referred to as Shazam? Not the books being called Shazam, but Cap himself being called Shazam as his name?
Freddy Freeman went by the name Shazam in 2006bin Trials of Shazam. But Billy Batson wasn't "Shazam" until after Flashpoint in 2011.
Your uncle probably thinks it's been longer because the comic has been called "Shazam" since the seventies for copyright reasons.
That's what I told him, but he insisted there was a Captain Marvel cartoon that called him Shazam, and that it wasn't the Shazam Hour it was something else.
This. He was never Shazam until recently, that was always the wizard. His book in the nineties was "The Power of Shazam" though.
He may have been referring to The Kid Super Power Hour with Shazam! cartoon from the early 80's. I've never seen it so I don't know if they called him Shazam or Captain Marvel.
I know Shazam is the magical formula behind his powers, but I thought that until whatever trademark business, the wizards name was supposed to be Shazam?
>Tom will never finish this
Yeah, Shazam was always the Wizard's name.
Billy invokes the Wizard's name, Freddy invokes the Capitan's name. If Freddy could give someone powers, they'd have to shout "Capitan Marvel Jr.!"
What about when Billy was sitting at the center of the rock as the Master of Magic or whatever during 52, was he Shazam then?
No just Marvel.
The Shazam thing started in flashpoint.
The Wizard name is actually Jeremia of Canaan btw
S.h.a.z.a.m or Captain Thunder.
Captain thunder is one of the names they wanted to rename him to even decades ago.
He's right that the show was called "Shazam!" and later "The Shazam!/Isis Hour", but he was never called Shazam on the show. It'd be really easy for people who watched the show to think his NAME was Shazam because the Wizard Shazam was never even mentioned on the show.
So he's wrong, the character himself was never called Shazam, EVER, until the recent renaming, but it's an extremely common misconception because there has never been anything with "Captain Marvel" in the title since 1953 and no show with the title since '41, so even most people who actually do know who Captain Marvel is may not even know that's what his name is.
...
First Thunder could be GOAT if the art wasn't so strange at times.
They should have just gone with that - for the movie, they should so it becomes status quo.
Captain thunder is the name every fan would had accepted
So what is this art from?
Your uncle is largely correct.
Ever since DC bought the right to reprint the old Fawcett Comics back in the early 1970s, they've also been looking for other ways to market him. This led to three series - two live action and one cartoon - over the following decade.
These were the The Kid Super Power Hour with Shazam! (animated, 1981), Shazam! (live action, 1974-1977, later the Shazam!/Isis Hour) and The Secrets of Isis (live action, 1975-1977), which was about a Wonder Woman-like character whose powers, like those of Shazam, came from an ancient magical source (in this case the Egyptian goddess Isis, explaining the name). The two live-action shows frequently crossed over, and Isis was eventually adopted into DC Comics as well.
Because DC quickly discovered that they didn't own and would never own the trademark Captain Marvel (which Marvel Comics had held since 1967, some five years before DC tried to acquire it, and a decade and a half after first trading as Marvel Comics), Shazam was the name they chose to market the character under - and the Shazam! and Shazam! Power Hour shows were the biggest exposure the long-forgotten character had been given in decades, which is why your uncle even remembers the character at all, and remembers him as Shazam!
Although the cartoon and live shows did use the Captain Marvel name, this was never prominently featured on any marketing material or merchandise, at least not more prominently than Shazam! (which in the case of the live show was an acronym invoking the elders who granted his powers; the cartoon was closer to the early comic books, unlike DC's 1970s offering which changed to be more like the live show, and pulled some shitty tricks like naming the city Fawcett City, after the competitor DC forced out of business for publishing Captain Marvel originally.) The cartoon was never that popular and cancelled after 12 episodes.
The official switch, as other anons have pointed out, was much more recent.
it's from Super Powers, a back-up feature it some DC and Young Animal comics by Tom Scioli
>always refer to him as Captain Marvel
>it's starting to annoy my friends who are into comics
>"Just call him Shazam"
Fuck all y'all, he's Captain Marvel.
>about to be flooded with normies who think that "Captain Marvel" is some dumb blond bimbo slut
>largely correct
Largely would mean that THE CHARACTER (not a show about him - the shows COULD not be the "Super Power Hour with Captain Marvel" or "Captain Marvel!" live for the same reason that DC Comics cannot use that as the title for a comic book, book, film, etc., etc., as you yourself point out in your argument that the Uncle was "largely correct" that the CHARACTER was known by both names interchangeably.
A more correct way to put would be that this user Uncle 'could arguably be right' on one aspect of it, but not on the name of the character itself.
There was a tv show that had some, but very little people calling him that. It wasn't his common name.
DC pushed that with Freddy, when they tagged him to be the main champion.
They later made it Billy's official name after the Flashpoint, during which he was called Captain Thunder.
No, his uncle is largely correct in respect of OP's original "recent change due to copyrighting".
It's a recent change in canon, and it's due to copyrighting (trademarking, in fact), but the trademark change happened in the early 1970s to protect the IP or it would have been public domain by now regardless of continued use in print (some issues of early comics featuring Captain Marvel are in fact public domain because of a trademarking failure; this is a slightly different issue as in those it's the content of physical media that's being covered, not the name itself, except in context, and not covering it for new media).
DC could call shows, comic books etc "Captain Marvel" - if they hadn't signed a settlement with Marvel after trying to sue Marvel for infringing a trademark DC has never held - they just couldn't trademark the name or anything to do with it.
Because of that, you're correct to say they cannot use the name Captain Marvel as the title of a show, but only because it's very impractical in terms of ownership; as a consequence of not using the name, however, the property as a whole comes to be called Shazam, and the inevitability of Captain Marvel becoming Shazam is establishes - in effect, Shazam became the genericized trademark term for the character as soon as the show gained fans, because those fans were about 10 years old and couldn't possibly have understood the trademark history of Fawcett Comics back in 1974.
So, in effect, as soon as the first kid called the character Shazam in conversation, the character became Shazam. It's not fair or reasonable after four decades to argue that he was always called Captain Marvel, any more than it's reasonable to argue that Dumpsters were always called mobile garbage bins or Kleenex was always called facial tissue - these are genericized trademarks of similar vintage to the coinage Shazam.
#notmycaptain