Todd’s Serial Blog

The Green Hornet seems to be gathering momentum this year.  Not only is VCI announced they are releasing the original serials, The Green Hornet (1939) and The Green Hornet Strikes Again (1940), but Hollywood has announced yet once more that a new Green Hornet is in preproduction, this time scheduled for release in 2010 with Seth Rogen as Britt Reid (Seth Rogen? Seriously? Seth Rogen? The chubby comedic actor from Knocked Up? Yikes!)  Anyway, I was cruising around the tv channel guide and came upon a channel listed as ALTVN, and saw they were showing the classic TV show late Friday night.  I rushed home after work to see it and was amazed.  I had always heard about the show but had never seen it.  Though produced by William Dozier of Batman fame, the show is played completely straight (though there is some capiness in it, as there is with all live action superhero shows, the idea of a costumed crimefighter is automatically a little goofy when seen in live action).  How good is it?  Even my wife, who generally doesn’t care for superhereos was captivated by it.  Why?  Simple, Bruce Lee.  Even on this little short lived TV show, his star power shines out and keeps you riveted on him regardless of anyone else in the shot with him.  Even when he is nonchalantly lounging in the background of a scene you are wacthing him instead of the actors in the foreground.  Two scenes impressed my wife and myself.  One had Lee drag an unconscious hood twice his size to a car and toss him in, all in one long sustained take.  He did it with little effort and wasn’t even breathing hard afterward.  The other was during the climactic fight scene where he is beating the crap out of one villain when another tries to sneak up on him.  Lee kicks sideways, hitting the guy full in the face without even looking at him (that is up there with Dave Sharpe’s backflip from Adventures of Captain Marvel (1941)).  Watching this I can’t understand why the show wasn’t a big hit.  Lee should have been a superstar from this show instead of having to return to Hong Kong to achieve world wide fame.  My only idea has to be it wasn’t campy enough.  Compared to other hit shows at the time; Batman, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., even The Wild, Wild West had true campiness to different degrees while The Green Hornet was, for the most part, a serious crime drama.  So it was regulated to having a cult following like Kolchack: The Night Stalker and Firefly, instead becoming a TV legend.  Such is the fate of too many good shows.

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In looking at the plot for the new film The International, it is a real throwback and should be a warning sign to politicians who state things aren’t as bad as they were in the thirties and that we are not heading into a depression.  The villain of the film is an unscrupulous banker.  Like Edwin Maxwell in Burn’em Up Barnes (1934), the villain in the new film is a super rich banker wanting to get richer by illegal means and will order people’s death to achieve it while being pursued by a hard to kill hero.  I could see this plot being used by Universal with John Davidson as the villain and Tom Tyler as the hero, or at Mascot with Robert Frazer as the villain  and Jack Mulhall as the hero. Then like now, films are a reflection of the public’s fears and concerns.  The International shows our already lost faith in financial leaders, when we get an action film featuring an unscrupulous, greedy politician who wants to get richer by illegal means and ordering people’s death while being pursued by a hard to kill hero, start watching the polls to see if there is a large turn over in Washington come election time.  Maybe I’m reading a little too much into what is essentailly a mindless shoot’em up action film, but people generally see what they want to see in a movie, and I see this one as a sign of the bad times we are in not getting better any time soon.  Of course it could also just be Hollywood pandering to the public by having a banker as a villain in an attempt to make money by giving us a sterotype we are geared to immediately hate and want to see pumped full of lead by a dashing hero (or in this case a rugged hero).  Guess it just depends on your level of cynicism.

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As a follow up to the teasing of serial fans with the inclusion of Chapter 2 from Mysterious Island on their Icons of Horror: Sam Katzman Collection, Columbia has released the Icons of Adventure Collection, which includes two pirate movies, The Pirates of Blood River and The Devil-Ship Pirates, and two movies set in the Orient, The Terror of the Tongs and The Stranglers of Bombay.  Included as extras is a Scrappy cartoon, an Andy Clyde short, and most importantly Chapter 1 of The Great Adventures of Captain Kidd.  I think this was a much better extra than their previous release.  Including the first chapter better allows a non-serial enthusiast to experience a cliffhanger and not feel totally lost, since they are starting at the beginning where every thing is laid out.  The setting is certainly different from most cliffhangers, taking place in the 1600’s and dealing with pirates.  The action is little disappointing with three sword fights that barely make up a full minute of screen time combined and a less than thrilling escape from a Man of War by the heroes using the simple method of walking on deck and jumping over board, but there are also lots of feature film footage of ships firing cannon balls back and forth which is pretty exciting and leads to pretty good cliffhanger when the ship the heroes are on explodes. It certainly made me want to see more. Once again I am left wondering why Columbia doesn’t just commit and start issuing complete serials on DVD, even in these hard economic times, fans will part with some hard earned bucks for a good copy of a favorite serial.

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