The Nostalgic Appeal Of 'Shazam!'
How this Christmas caper hones its inspirations to crowd-pleasing effect
Who doesn’t get nostalgic during the holidays? As age-old traditions make their way back to our homes this time of the year and anecdotes are shared with friends and family, it’s probably safe to say that most people’s enjoyment of the season comes from memories of previous ones. While nostalgia has become something of a crutch in our entertainment consumption in recent years, Christmas, Hanukkah, the Three Wise Men—whatever it is you celebrate during these months—are certainly safe from this criticism. ‘Tis the season of fun traditions and gathering with our loved ones.
Still, nostalgia also characterizes much of our popular media to the point of exhaustion. Wading through the infinite sea remakes and franchise installments has become a tricky business; how do you evoke the vibe of an era without resorting to obvious pandering? A colorful Christmas caper, David F. Sandberg’s Shazam! (2019) remains the perfect case study for this proposition.
It’s easy to see how the simple concept of Shazam—a kid turns into an adult superbeing by uttering a magic word—would appeal to children. What makes the 2019 adaptation of the DC comic book series so interesting is the way Sandberg and screenwriters Darren Lemke and Henry Gayden play with this idea’s inverse. By honing the tones, themes and styles of ‘80s and early ‘90s family fare, Shazam! manages to pull the child out of every adult as well, making the metaphor transcend the text in interesting and powerful ways.
“This was a chance for me to tap into those movies I grew up with and made me fall in love with movies,” Sandberg told Inverse Magazine in 2019, referring to the likes of Gremlins (1984) and The Goonies (1985). “They have a lot of heart to them. They’re fun, they have drama and even a bit of horror. It felt like my chance to make something like that.”
Since its release, many have compared Shazam to Big (1988)—which the film briefly pays tribute to during a humorous fight scene. Rocky (1976) is also referenced during a training sequence in which the eponymous hero runs up the Philadelphia Museum of Art Steps. Rather than inundating audiences with pop culture references from previous decades though, the film owes most of its comparisons to the ‘80s blockbuster simply by matching the tone and borrowing tropes from many of these older films we hold near and dear.
Of the various cinematic trends characterized the 1980s, few are as enduring as the modern blockbuster formula. Following the critical and commercial success of Jaws (1975), Star Wars (1977) and Alien (1979), creating the next tentpole movie to outsell previous ones became a priority for American studios during that decade. Big-budgeted projects were now getting greenlit more often than before as the demand for them grew, and studios began creating specialty divisions and partnering with smaller, already existing distributors to cater to different audiences and plan more strategic releases. This gave birth to the “summer blockbuster” trend, with the decade famously being characterized by massive, crowd-pleasing genre and cross-genre fare.
Riding off of the success of Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Steven Spielberg—along with Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall—established a production company that would go on to produce many of the films most synonymous with this blockbuster era in 1981. Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, Amblin Entertainment churned out Poltergeist (1982), E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), Gremlins, The Goonies, Back to the Future (1985), Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), Jurassic Park (1993), Casper (1995) and more; partnering mainly with Universal Pictures for distribution. Now modern classics, these mass-appealing genre films became the new blueprint for family entertainment, shedding tropes and sensibilities that have become staples in action, horror, sci-fi, fantasy and adventure comedies.
In 2016, Glen Weldon of NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour coined the phrase “Kids On Bikes,” referring to a sci-fi/fantasy/coming-of-age subgenre concerned with growing pains and the defects of 1980s middle-class suburbia. Here, he cited Stranger Things (2016-present), Paper Girls (2015-2019), and Super 8 (2011) as examples of recent media that borrow from the likes of E.T. and The Goonies. While the similarities are obviously there, it’s worth noting that Super 8 was produced by Spielberg himself. Similarly, The Verge’s Jesse Hassenger has argued that today’s studios and critics alike are too busy chasing the 1980s “Amblin magic,” pointing to 2019’s The Kid Who Would Be King as a reason why this approach should be retired from modern filmmaking.
While it’s true that there’s been no shortage of 1980s-set media as of late and I wouldn’t blame anyone for feeling fatigued (even staler “Kids On Bikes” movies, such as 2018’s Summer of 84 have come out since Weldon’s segment), mining nostalgia out of tiresome pop-culture references in a period piece is not the same thing as evoking the whimsy of older films while still doing your own thing. I can’t speak on whether or not The Kid Who Would Be King did this properly, because I haven’t seen that movie. No one did. It bombed at the box office. So did King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017) and Robin Hood (2010)—two other medieval time-hopping fantasies that took a similar family-friendly approach to The Kid Who Would Be King. The demand for Amblin-like entertainment isn’t always there, and despite a few obvious exceptions like It (2017), Stranger Things and the occasional new Spielberg, studios rarely cash in on it anymore. Most of today’s tentpoles—endless Star Wars spin-offs, CG animation and superhero movies that either take themselves too seriously or drench themselves in bathos at the expense of sincerity—are quite different in tone and humor than Gremlins and Back to the Future.
And then there’s Shazam!. Shazam! feels exactly like those movies. As an installment in a major superhero franchise, it was pretty much guaranteed to make more than The Kid Who Would Be King—and it did, ranking among the top 20 highest-grossing films that year. But while it’s not a period piece and doesn’t feature bikes (at least not prominently), I wouldn’t be the first to compare this film to Amblin’s 1980s output. So what made it so evocative of these films, then? Paul Bullock, author of From Director Steven Spielberg—an online resource dedicated to the dissection of the director’s work—summed up what made the tones and aesthetics of this production company so enduring in a blog post published in 2017:
To suggest that ‘Amblinesque’ has endured simply because of its fantastical elements is to miss much of what gives these films their heart… The heroes of these films yearn for freedom, whilst also searching for the safety of something familiar because they’re scared and vulnerable. In an age where superheroes stand as strong, often invulnerable, icons to be aspired towards, ‘Amblinesque’ films offer something different but vitally important: a quiet reflection on the pain of childhood. They’re children’s films about children.
To me, this also perfectly captures the sentiment behind Shazam!. The movie, which centers on a foster child on the search for his birth mother, feels so much more human than most other superhero films today. More akin to Miles Morales than Bruce Wayne or Tony Stark, the hero feels that much more vulnerable because he’s a literal child—and the Lemke/Gayden script makes sure he thinks and acts like one. Despite facing so many hardships over the course of his life, Billy is at first too naïve to realize that maybe he wasn’t lost by his mother, but abandoned. When he finally finds out, it’s devastating. This is the kid tasked with saving his city on the eve of his fourteenth Christmas.
And yet, this film feels so comforting when compared to its DCEU predecessors, displaying a lovely tonal and visual lightness absent from Zack Snyder’s steely sensibilities. It’s so jarring to remember that this movie takes place in the same universe as Henry Cavill’s Superman when it feels it could coexist with Christopher Reeves' iteration of the same character (also a late ‘70s and ‘80s staple). Everything about this movie just takes you back to superheroes in their purest, most virtuous form.
Like many 80s coming-of-age movies (Amblin and otherwise), Shazam! uses the contained setting to its advantage, insinuating autonomy for its teenaged characters but not complete freedom. The small-scale finale also helps ground the story; after all, saving your city, family & friends is just as major as saving the world.
Although Sandberg has cited the film’s familial themes as the reason Shazam! takes place during the holidays, the film’s Christmas setting more than contributes to its ‘80s aesthetics—with many modern holiday genre staples like Die Hard and Lethal Weapon being from that decade (like those movies, Shazam! was also inexplicably released before the middle of the year, but I digress). Festive horror is also a prolific subgenre and Sandberg—whose roots are in the genre—has cited the decade’s horror-tinged children's entertainment as one of several reasons he was drawn to making a film reminiscent of the ones he grew up with.
Which brings me back to this film tapping into viewers’ inner child. In an industry saturated with superhero entertainment, the phrase is thrown around pretty often but this is a rare case it's actually warranted in. Whether you grew up watching these films during the ‘80s, had them passed down to you on video or discovered them recently, blockbusters and genre classics from that era are ageless in that they appeal to pretty much everyone—but also time-specific because (for the most part), they don’t make ‘em like this anymore. Without mocking its predecessors or referencing them to death, Shazam! wears its inspirations proudly on its sleeve to crowd-pleasing effect.