Iconic actor Bill Murray is part of the MCU now, thanks to his small role in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. But what if we told you he actually played a very famous Marvel hero role back in the seventies? Thanks to an Instagram post by Marvel writer Dan Slott, (via Laughing Squid), we’ve learned about a short-lived Fantastic Four radio show that aired 13 episodes in 1975. A young, pre-SNL Bill Murray played none other than Johnny Storm, the Human Torch, in that Fantastic Four show. Long before Joseph Quinn, Michael B. Jordan, or Chris Evans, it was Murray who was saying Johnny’s iconic catchphrase “Flame on!” You can listen to the episodes of the Fantastic Four‘s 1975 radio show, uploaded by Youtuber Overlord Radio, below:
The Fantastic Four‘s own co-creator, Stan Lee, narrated the radio show’s 13 episodes. These brief episodes adapted early issues from Lee and Jack Kirby. The classic, early Fantastic Four staples are all there, including the team’s outer-space origin story. Not to mention the Fanastic Four’s face-offs against the Mole Man, Doctor Doom, Namor the Sub-Mariner, the Hate-Monger, and other villains are recounted in the radio show.
This show only lasted one season. It came in between the 1967 Hanna-Barbera cartoon and 1978’s New Fantastic Four, which replaced Johnny Storm with H.E.R.B.I.E. the robot. The Fantastic Four radio show is a rare piece of non-comics Marvel media from an era when the Marvel Comics branding wasn’t yet ubiquitous.
While most people have no idea that Bill Murray was ever a Marvel superhero these days, one superfan did. They knew that in his pre-SNL days, Murray played the Human Torch on this Fantastic Four radio show. And that fan was Jimmy Kimmel, who once asked Murray about playing the resident hothead of Marvel’s First Family when he was a guest on his show.
All Murray remembered about it was saying “Flame on!” Hey, it was almost fifty years ago. We can hardly blame him for barely recollecting it. Now, we sort of wish Murray made a cameo in the upcoming Fantastic Four film instead of Quantumania. If only to honor his true Marvel roots.
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