Here's proof that young people worshiping comic book movies is nothing new: from one of the silliest yet entertaining episodes of the 1950's-born DRAGNET rebooted into the late-1960's... titled DRAGNET 1968: BULGLARY: DR-31 where Jack Webb's Joe Friday and Harry Morgan as partner Bill Gannon traipse from one movie theater to another, investigating stolen or looted movie posters and lobby cards advertising a brand new comic book adaptation...
Turns out being the most bizarre and surreal of the show's villains in a pudgy, mustached, monotone twenty-something donning a cape and costume, deeming himself The Crimson Crusader played by a frumpy, almost non-acting Tim Donnelly who, in one soft-interrogation sequence, provides a dirge-like, melancholy monologue about being fat and bullied in school, and how this drove him headlong into a fantastical world to find a safe place within it... thus making this eclectic fan-favorite episode all his own.