Confession time; I was originally planning to write a review of the new Green Hornet movie, starring Seth Rogen as the verdant-masked crimefighter and Taiwanese actor/pop singer Jay Chou as his aide, martial arts expert Kato, here. And since I had already convinced myself I wasn’t going to like it, I had the oh-so-clever headline “Seth, Where Is Thy Sting?” ready to go. As it turns out, the film was pretty much as bad as I had anticipated. Rogen’s performance is just too goofy to be taken seriously as an action hero; the tongue-in-cheek tone meant to emulate Robert Downey, Jr.’s Iron Man turn doesn’t work; and how good can a Green Hornet movie be when the soundtrack features Digital Underground’s “The Humpty Dance” and Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise” more prominently than it does the 1966 TV series theme by Billy May and Al Hirt? However, at least two publications beat me to the punch with the aforementioned witty headline, and the film’s $34 million opening weekend box office shows that anything I might say at this point would be superfluous. What I can do, though, is offer neophytes and those too young to recall the Hornet’s heyday as a radio, comic book, movie and TV star a little bit of background.
First, let’s make it clear that Rogen and co-scripter Evan Goldberg did not create the Green Hornet out of whole cloth as a Batman clone. In fact, the Hornet’s debut actually predated the Dark Knight’s by more than three years. Detroit radio station owner George W. Trendle and writer Fran Striker, riding tall in the saddle since their series The Lone Ranger first hit the airwaves in 1933, came up with a new show, featuring a modern-day spin on the frontier hero, in 1936. When millionaire playboy Britt Reid (who, it would eventually be revealed, was the Ranger’s grand-nephew) inherits control of his family’s newspaper, the Daily Sentinel, from his father, he finds that news articles and editorials aren’t enough to free his city from the grip of gangsters and racketeers. With the help of his Japanese valet Kato (who turned out to also be a top-notch inventor and driver), Reid developed the persona of the Green Hornet so he could pose as a criminal even as he battled the real crooks. The duo’s main weapons were a special gun the Hornet carried, which fired sleeping gas pellets to render targets unconscious, and a super-swift car dubbed the Black Beauty. Only Lenore “Casey” Case, Reid’s secretary at the Sentinel (and later on a full-fledged reporter), knew of his dual identity.
With the tagline “He hunts the biggest of all game…public enemies that even the G-men cannot reach!” (which later became “public enemies who try to destroy our America!” for the war effort and not, as often alleged, because of a perturbed J. Edgar Hoover) and Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee” as its theme song, the radio exploits of the Green Hornet and Kato proved to be as popular with audiences as the Lone Ranger and Tonto’s. The Hornet became a comic book crimebuster in 1940, and that same year made the jump to the big screen in a pair of serials produced by Universal.
The Green Hornet found the title hero and Kato battling a crooked insurance syndicate involved with everything from unsafe mines and car theft rings to manufacturing munitions for foreign governments, all in 13 cliff-hanging chapters. “B” actor (not “bee actor”) Gordon Jones played Britt Reid and his masked counterpart, but apparently his voice under said mask wasn’t suitably imposing, so radio Hornet Al Hodge was brought to Hollywood to dub in the dialogue (luckily, moviegoers couldn’t see Jones’ mouth). Former Charlie Chan Number-One Son Keye Luke (more about Luke’s long career here) was Kato, whose nationality was changed for World War II sensitivities from Japanese to Korean (a similar change on the radio program had him now pegged as Filipino). Warren Hull, who played serial do-gooder Mandrake the Magician two years earlier, would replace Jones in The Green Hornet Strikes Again, in which he and Luke once again had to track down a mysterious underworld boss. The two Hornet serials rank as among the best to come from Universal, managing to maintain the flavor of the radio shows while offering fans their first glimpses at their heroes in action. The performances are as good as one could expect from the genre, and it’s interesting to see how Luke manages to avoid the stereotyping typical of the era in his portrayal of Kato, who as the builder of the gas gun and Black Beauty really was the technical brains of the team.
The Green Hornet’s regular comic book adventures ceased in 1949, with the radio series ending three years after that (Trendle by this time was concentrating on the Lone Ranger TV series with Clayton Moore and Jay Silverheels), and the character pretty much remained in pop hero Valhalla until the mid-1960s. TV producer William Dozier and ABC had scored an unexpected hit in early 1966 with Batman, starring Adam West and Burt Ward, and in looking for other properties to put on the tube opted for the Hornet. Produced by 20th Century-Fox and debuting on Sept. 9th, 1966, The Green Hornet starred Van Williams, square-jawed regular of such ABC crime dramas as Bourbon Street Beat and Surfside Six, as Britt Reid and a Chinese-born martial arts instructor named Bruce Lee as Kato. While the two shows shared similar elements (masked heroes, unique weapons and automobiles, etc.), unlike the campy Batman series The Green Hornet was played with a more serious tone. It also tried to remain faithful to its radio roots, with the Hornet battling mobsters, crooked businessmen and the like instead of the costumed supercriminals preying on Gotham City.
I have to admit that, an 8-year-old watching the show in 1966, the interchangeable jacket-and-tie bad guys didn’t really hold my attention (imagine if, instead of the Joker, Catwoman, King Tut and company, Batman and Robin each week fought the cast of Mad Men). What did keep me tuning in every Friday night, though, were three things. First was that unforgettable opening title sequence (narrated, like Batman, by Dozier himself) with the updated “Flight of the Bumblebee” theme and Al Hirt’s incredible trumpet. Second, the similarly-revamped Black Beauty–a snazzy ebony Chrysler Imperial that was equipped with eerie green headlights, smokescreens, rockets, and its own camera satellite launcher–zooming through the billboard that suddenly splits in half. The final thing, which everyone remembers, was seeing Bruce Lee in full “kung fu fighting” mode for the first time. Veteran stuntmen were actually afraid to work with him on the set, and Lee apparently had to slow down his moves because the cameramen couldn’t keep up with him. All the kids in school knew that, while the Green Hornet and Batman would battle to a stalemate if the two teams ever met, Kato would mop the floor with Robin. Well, they actually did meet in a two-part Batman episode, designed to boost the Hornet’s flagging ratings, that found the foursome pursuing Roger C. Carmel as perfidious philatelic pilferer Colonel Gumm, and the inevitable showdown between Lee and Ward ended in a draw (hey, it was Robin’s show, after all).
The rare crossover didn’t help the ratings that much, though, and the neither totally adult-nor-totally silly flavor of The Green Hornet probably helped spell its own demise after one season. The show lived on in reruns around the globe (particularly in Asia, where it was retitled “The Kato Show” as a nod to the late Bruce Lee’s undying fame), and in 1974 a feature-length film was cobbled together from four episodes and released theatrically, with Lee prominently displayed on the poster. But the show is perhaps best known in America these days as being one of the most asked-for series never officially released on home video. Similar, yet again, to the Batman TV show and its rights tug-of-war, where Time Warner owns the characters but 20th Century-Fox owns the program, a hornet’s nest (sorry) of copyright questions between Fox and the George W. Trendle and William Dozier estates has managed to keep The Green Hornet in legal limbo. For all of my problems with the new Seth Rogen movie, maybe if it proves to be a success it will spur the involved parties into settling their differences and finally putting the series out on DVD and Blu-ray. Gee, Rogen’s goofball Britt Reid may yet turn out to be a real hero, after all.
And now, since they couldn’t be bothered to feature much of it in the 2011 film, here’s that oh-so-cool (as anyone who saw Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, Vol. 1 knows) Green Hornet theme song with the 1966 show’s opening credits: