Remember When Bill Murray Played The Human Torch In The Fantastic Four?

Not a comedy sketch! Not a parody! Not an imaginary story!

The Fantastic Four: First Steps hits cinemas around the world today! Marvel have a lot riding on this one. This is the fifth Fantastic Four flick all up, and every previous iteration has met with reactions that, generously could be described as “mixed”. It’s the first film of the MCU’s Phase Six (apparently they’re still doing phases) and also the last Marvel flick we’re getting for a year – Spider-Man: Brand New Day isn’t due ’til July 31, 2026, and then we’re into whatever Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars turns out to be.

But just as First Steps won’t be the last Fantastic Four movie – all else aside, they’re showing up in Doomsday – it wasn’t the first. Of course, there were three different animated series starting in 1967. 1978’s The New Fantastic Four introduced H.E.R.B.I.E., the team’s robot helper, replacing the Human Torch. The received wisdom says that was down to nervous TV execs worried that kids would immolate themselves trying to emulate the pyrokinetic powerhouse, but that’s not true – the rights to the character were tied up elsewhere.

But before then, in 1975, there was a Fantastic Four radio series that ran for 13 weeks, directly adapting various issues from the original Stan Lee and Jack Kirby comics run. Narrated by Stan Lee (naturally), it starred Bob Maxwell as Reed Richards, aka Mister Fantastic; Cynthia Adler as Sue Storm, the Invisible Girl; Jim Pappas as Ben Grimm, the Thing, Jerry Terheyden as Doctor Doom… and future Ghostbuster Bill Murray as Johnny Storm, the Human Torch. Here, have a listen:

What’s interesting is that this was the same year that Saturday Night Live premiered, and Murray didn’t join the cast until the second season, so he wasn’t really occupying the Bill Murray-shaped space that now exists in our collective unconscious. He was a cast member on the National Lampoon Radio Hour, though, which led directly to his involvement with the FF.

Details are a bit scarce, but Comic Book Media has a decent breakdown, which notes that the show was the brainchild of disc jockey Peter B. Lewis, who secured the rights from Stan the Man and aimed to do a Silver Surfer series down the track. That never happened, sadly, and the whole Fantastic Four radio experiment is now something of an obscurity. It’s never been officially rereleased in any form. Luckily for us, though: this is the internet, and the whole thing has been uploaded to various sites over the years. Copyright being what it is, you never know when any given instance is gonna get DMCAed, but you can check out the whole thing here for now: