Well, shut my mouth! Last time we looked at a Shazam! episode, I teased that they weren’t going to have a stuntman wrestle a bear. No, they had one wrestle a lion the following week instead! And if that’s not enough, they had Jackson Bostwick wrangle a freaking big vulture.
You can sort of tell that Len Janson and Chuck Menville’s script started with the producers getting a day or two of filming at some zoo in California and needing to write a story around it, and so a teen claims to have walked through the rhino pit one day and his pals make him prove it. But never mind the story, look at the animals.
I’m reminded that when I was in college, I once overheard two guys arguing the merits of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, with one guy insisting that Marlon Perkins was television’s biggest badass, because every week “you had this seventy year-old guy beating up giraffes and shit.” It was the seventies; lots of people wrestled lions back then.
