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Yet Matt Shakman’s superhero tale feels like it should be watched on an ancient RCA colour TV while the viewer wears jammies and a bathrobe and scarfs down Lucky Charms cereal — on Saturday morning, of course. The family-friendly, committee-written story is digestible enough that it could be boiled down to 3D images on a single View-Master reel for click-through fun. This is meant as a compliment.

The film is essentially a live-action cartoon, not unlike the earlier summer ’25 hits “How to Train Your Dragon� and “Lilo & Stitch,� although this one is part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which has been struggling with battle fatigue lately.

After too many superhero movies where the main objective seems to be to introduce myriad morose characters and multiple convoluted plot lines (I’m looking at you, James Gunn’s “Superman�), it’s refreshing to experience one that just wants to remind you of the simple pleasure of reading a comic book.

This Fantastic Four outing also redeems a problem with this particular Marvel property, which has not achieved heroic acclaim in several previous film incarnations. (The “First Steps� of the title sounds like a winking rejection of previous missteps.)

The truth is that Marvel’s “First Family� — ingenious Reed Richards/Mister Fantastic, intuitive Sue Storm/Invisible Woman, incendiary Johnny Storm/Human Torch and indomitable Ben Grimm/The Thing — were never really all that into being superheroes.

Married couple Reed and Sue, plus Sue’s brother Johnny and Reed’s close pal Ben, have always spent as much time squabbling as they do fighting supervillains. Brick-faced Ben doesn’t even like using his trademark battle cry, “It’s clobberin’ time!� because it sounds too much like a comic book to him.

The solution, it turns out, was to lean into the family angle rather than fight it. After a prologue establishing that the Fantastic Four live in a retro-futuristic 1960s version of Manhattan (think “Mad Men� meets “The Incredibles�), on an alternative world called Earth 828, “First Steps� properly begins with Reed (Pedro Pascal) and Sue (Vanessa Kirby) discovering they’re about to have a baby after years of trying.

They happily share the news over dinner with Johnny (Joseph Quinn), Ben (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) and the family’s comically retro helper robot H.E.R.B.I.E. (Humanoid Experimental Robot B-Type Integrated Electronics), who looks like a rejected prototype for R2-D2. Sue and the anxiety-prone Reed are concerned the cosmic rays that gave them all superpowers while on a space mission (they’re astronauts) might cause abnormalities with their unborn offspring.

They barely have time to process this when they and the rest of the world are alerted to the arrival of the Silver Surfer (Julia Garner), a board-riding being from another realm who resembles a Barbie doll dipped in silver paint. (She’s an alt-universe gender flip from the male Silver Surfer of most Fantastic Four tales.)

The enigmatic Surfer, whom Johnny immediately hits on, is the herald for a hungry giant space god called Galactus (Ralph Ineson), who looks like an ancient Mayan deity with glowing eyes. Taller than the Statue of Liberty, he devours entire planets as snacks. Some say Galactus could beat Thanos, the finger-snapping menace of “The Avengers� movies. Maybe he could even eat Thanos.

Earth is next on the menu, the Surfer warns, and there is nothing to be done about it. The Fantastic Four beg to differ.

When they come face to face with Galactus, riding their rocket ship straight into his rocky lair, they learn he’s willing to spare the planet if they agree to an unthinkable deal. Tensions rise within and without the group as they look for a way out of their monstrous dilemma. Proceedings often get plain goofy. Reed, making it up as he goes along, proposes a plan to fight Galactus that would necessitate everyone on Earth turning off their lights at the same time.

But the cast and Shakman approach their material like it’s a lost Shakespeare play, giving it everything they’ve got. Especially Pascal’s Reed, who delivers mini soliloquies about the agonies of being the brainiac group leader. “It is my job to think terrible things so terrible things don’t happen,� he laments to Sue.

Shakman directs with the instincts of a pop-culture geek and the curiosity of a filmmaker who delights in swapping genres as easily as most swap lenses. His previous Marvel work had him directing and executive producing TV’s “WandaVision,� a surreal sitcom take on superheroes, featuring Marvel’s Scarlet Witch and Vision characters and stories that intersected with MCU film characters and plots.

Along with cinematographer Jess Hall, production designer Kasra Farahani and composer Michael Giacchino, Shakman bathes his alt-NYC in a retro sci-fi dazzle and glow: flying cars zip above period-accurate streets, while the Fantastic Four’s iconic blue costumes gleam with the white necklines and boots from their 1961 debut, straight from the imaginations of co-creators Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.

There are many sly visual asides that make “First Steps� a joy to behold. One favourite is the stage used by the Fantastic Four when they appear together for an interview on “The Ted Gilbert Show,� an ersatz copy of “The Ed Sullivan Show.� They stand on a version of the arrow-adorned stage the Beatles, a.k.a. the Fab Four, performed on for their 1964 Sullivan show debut.

“First Steps� also introduces Paul Walter Hauser as Harvey Elder/Mole Man, a crusty former foe of the Fantastic Four; Natasha Lyonne as schoolteacher Rachel Rozman, a love interest for Ben Grimm; and Sarah Niles as Lynne Nichols, the chief of staff for the Fantastic Four and their Future Foundation.

We’ll likely see more of them in future episodes. For now, they’re smaller parts of a film that happily clocks in under two hours and plays like a delicious Saturday-morning cartoon memory.