It's Always Shazamy
Speak his name, Bozos.
I always forget I have this but Skoobz1 on Twitter reminded me that my substack is, in theory, a vehicle I can use to talk about my writing process. So with the Always Sunny Shazam episode being the first fiction thing I written and released in a while, this is a good time to start the substack back up.
If you haven't seen it, I made a post on twitter that ended up at something like “it would be funny if the Always Sunny guys met Shazam” since both live in Philly (at least in the movies). I responded to someone with a picture of a sweaty Dennis propositioning Caylpso with some weird sexual alliance since that’s definitely what he would do.
And it got me thinking. What would the rest of them do?
Someone would definitely try to hook up with one of them (this could be anyone but Charlie)
Frank would try to kill them since he’s usually suspicious of characters like the Shazam family.
Dennis would definitely think he can join them, since he has the biggest ego.
And that was enough to come up with a few gags. Stuff like Frank gets Kryptonite, someone makes a joke about how they’re too old to date the Fiascos (not knowing that they’re even younger than they seem, which is already pretty young for these fifty year olds).
I thought about some things that happen in the movie like the monsters at the end of the bridge from the beginning and how that would look to a man on the ground. It feels like superhero media doesn’t examine that point of view outside of shows like Venture Bros or Harley Quinn.
And it’s a shame because there is so much comedy there. It’s a good place for nitpicking (Like what the hell happened when Anne used her spinny powers? Did everyone in the city spin around?) and a good place for super heightened slice of life comedy (like character complaining about big alien invasions as if they’re bad weather because alien invasions happen so often).
So I started writing and decided to call the thing Fury of the Fiascos. Here’s a link to the twitter thread. Originally Fiascos was spelled with a Ph since that’s how the Philly Phanatic spells his name and that seems like what they’re going for here but it looked weird so I changed it back to the usual spelling.
Couple gags showed up on their own. The idea that the Gang is actually responsible for most of the bad things the Fiascos get blamed for is pure Sunny. Honestly, if I went back into more of those movies, I could have retconned a few more events like the bus crash of the first Sivana fight to also being the Gang’s fault but the bridge collapse was enough for me.
Some of the character moments came up naturally. When characters were discussing how the Fiascos were really strong, of course Mac would butt in and get offended so that was his arc. Same with Frank thinking they’re diddlers. If you wanted to justify hating someone, diddling allegations are Sunny 101 and the Shazamily does hang around schools so that opens up a lot of fun jokes.
Dee was always gonna want to sleep with one since I love the idea of her backing up Dennis saying one of the Fiascos is hot and Dennis, because he never wants only Dee to be on his team, immediately rejecting her idea. This gives us something to tie these two characters together and also gives them a way to compete.
It’s only tricky because I didn’t want Dee to be the only one who is trying to sleep with the Shazamily as the only woman in the group. But it does feel like the most natural move for her character. And since only Dennis has the ego large enough to think he can join the group, that left either Dee or Mac to be the one who wants to hook up with a Fiasco and Mac already had a solid gig, so Dee got this.
As a compromise, Dee is one of the two voices of reason in the episode, the other one being Charlie. And I don’t think she’s necessarily in love with the Fiascos as much as casually into them, so Dee ends up being one of the more grounded characters in the episode.
Most Sunny episodes split The Gang into either two or three groups, with a couple characters switching sides. So with Dennis and Dee in one group, that meant Charlie, Mac, and Frank were the second group. And since Frank is the most likely to lead one of the groups, since he’s just got more of that energy, the second group would be trying to kill the Fiascos. Also in case it isn’t clear, in the movie the Shazam family is referred to on the news as The Philly Fiascos, so that’s what the gang would call them.
I thought about story beats that we wanted to hit and it always made sense to start with the dome argument since that’s the kind of thing the Sunny characters would be split on. That means the episode starts about halfway through the movie. And that gave us an easy midpoint, the beginning of Act Three of the movie, the monsters all breaking out. That lets our characters get to be more active, dealing with the monsters instead of the Fiascos since by this point in the movie, there are only two Shazams left and we know what they’re doing the entire time.
I didn’t figure out how Dennis would try to join the Shazamily until I had to decide what he would wear. Dennis loves his leotards, so it made sense to go with one of those as a base. And then there is the implication that Dennis is a serial killer, so maybe he has a black one that he uses to sneak around. And when I decided on the black leotard, then it hit me. He’s doing Black Adam by accident. And we get some jokes about appropriation as well as some meta jokes about how Black Adam and the Shazamily don’t seem to know about one another in universe because of (allegedly) a certain someone’s ego.
And I knew Dee laying into Dennis needed to end with some sort of “well I’m not taking fashion advice from someone dressed like that” line directed at Dee, so I figured I’d give her a costume too. Originally it was going to be just a bizarrely sexy outfit but that felt boring and also not how she would tackle this problem. There was some time when I wanted Dee to either have on a tiger print or alligator print dress as a nod to Talky Tawny or the Alligator Men but I didn’t love either of those ideas.
I landed on the Wonder Woman costume because A) it’s iconic B) Dee might have one lying around and most importantly C) this gives us an opportunity to play with the idea that Dee doesn’t really know who these guys are so she keeps messing up the name and calling Wonder Woman names of other heroes like Power Girl or Wonder Girl. I think, especially in the DC universe, it’s gotta be hard to keep track of the multiple Flashs, Robins, Lanterns, and character with Super or Wonder in their name. The headless Wonder Woman gag at the end of the episode was something I came up with super late in the game but tied everything Dee was doing together.
At this point I also realized that since Frank is doing supervillain stuff, why not dress him like comic Sivana and give all the guys a classic Shazam villain that they accidentally dress as, ending the episode with a Monster Society gag. Originally Mac was going to be Captain Nazi but that didn’t work for a million reasons. I thought it could be fun if Charlie did Green Man because that sounds like a superhero name and at one point Charlie thought he could join the team. But then I realized that Green Man, if tied up, could sort of look like a worm so then Charlie was Mr Mind.
It wasn’t until I was writing the ending that I came up with the Mac/IBAC idea. It’s a great fit because one of IBAC’s costumes is just a leather vest and no shirt and that’s absolutely something jacked Mac would wear. And also IBAC sort of sounds like Mac. So everybody had their Shazam analogue.
Writing all of the diddler stuff was super easy because we know what these character sound like when they talk about diddlers. It comes up on the show quite a few times. And sending Charlie and Mac to the school made sense since that’s where a lot of the movie takes place and Charlie was a janitor for a little bit, so why not have this be the same school with the same Principal (who in this version of the story is rehired). And this is where blackface came back into the picture.
I figured I needed to mention the blackface, since its part of why Charlie was fired. And then I realized it’s similar to the appropriation conversation that Dennis is having about Black Adam. And that’s when the anti woke ending came into focus. So someone needed to get cancelled. And since Mac is the one who actually wears the blackface in the original episode, he was the perfect fit. So I split him up from the group and gave him the hero moment, which we would tear down in the last scene.
The school scene gives you some opportunities to make jokes about how Shazam is always at this school and what that must seem like in universe. And this scene is another Charlie and Mac try to get a job scenes, like in the Pepe Silvia episode. I also wanted to have the characters bring up the absolutely brutal suicide scene at the school because it really comes out of nowhere and it could be another link in the Fiasco conspiracy chain.
This scene is also where a joke pops up about Charlie misunderstanding the name and thinking the Shazamily is actually a bunch of Italian people all named Fiasco, since its a weird word. I dropped that from the back half of the script since it didn’t fit but I figured little details like that are what make Sunny episodes super memorable so I left it in this and the next scene.
One other joke I LOVED is the idea that everyone just assumes all these superheroes work the same. Cause in universe, if you saw Shazam show up, wouldn’t you just assume he’s Superman in a new outfit? Or one of his cousins or something? So the argument between Frank and Mac about whether Kryptonite will work on Shazam or not plays with that confusion.
And everything else pretty much came together pretty simply. Frank loves guns so he puts the Kryptonite into his gun. Charlie is a worm, so he’s bait. Mac tries to fight one of the monsters because he’s easily goaded into dumb stuff like this. Dennis gets chewed out by Jackie Denardo for appropriation. And then they all meet up at the bar for the finale.
The last joke I wrote was Captain Nazi, which really is the perfect button for an episode about golden age Shazam villains and cultural appropriation. The guys would absolutely get defensive when they get pushback on the racism and decide to become villains. So then, the logical endpoint is the gang ends up in the same circle as Captian Nazi and realizes that all this anti PC stuff always ends up attracting the worst people and giving up.
And that was the episode. Here’s the link to a version in my drive if you want to read it for yourself. I would love it if the Sunny guys or David Sandberg and the Shazam team read the episode. I imagine they would get a kick out of it. But also I’m totally fine with this being it’s final resting place. It’ll probably go in my packet for future writing jobs.