Besouro Verde

It should not have been surprising to the World that the dynamic, young Publisher of The Daily Sentinel, Mr. Britt Reid, would become that double-agent of crime fighting, The Green Hornet. You see, Britt Reid had a Great, great, great Uncle, John Reed. Uncle John had been a Texas Ranger and the only one to survive as a group of those Lawmen were ambushed by the gang of cut-throats and their leader, Butch Cavendish.

Do you give up? Of course you don't, for everybody in 3 or 4 generations knows of the exploits of "the masked rider of the Plains" and his Indian companion, Tonto. This is just too easy, so there's no prize! I bet ya'll knowed it was the Lone Ranger all along! So being that there's those "Champion of the People" gene in his lineage it followed that in the mid-Twentieth Century, when the Nation was being plagued with Organized Crime and free-lancing Bank Robbers & Stick-up men that somebody in the family would assume an identity of a Masked Man to strike back at the Underworld in an extra-legal manner.

"THE GREEN HORNET" was born on the Radio. It was in the fertile Studios of WXYZ Radio in Detroit that Mr. Britt Reed and alter-ego, The Green Hornet, first HEARD the light of day. (Remember, this is Radio and only the mind can see!) Soon, the whole Green Hornet ensemble was present and prepared for action. There was Kato, Valet to Mr. Reed but secretly the Hornet's partner in crime-fighting, expert driver of the super-auto, the Black Beauty. Kato is as well, a great inventor and scientist-innovator in that he is responsible for the powerful sedan's make-up underneath the hood, as well as its futuristic design.

Kato was also responsible for the "Hornet's Sting" a sort of stun gun-type weapon. But Kato could and did deliver a stun of his own; via his mastery of the Martial Arts, being Jiu-jitsu, Judo, Karate, Aikido and other related disciplines.

So, let's imagine. This is 1940 and Universal Pictures, one of the 3 Hollywood Studios that regularly turned out the Serials as a part of their films, was looking for new properties suitable for adaptation to a Screen Chapter-play. And from out of the airwaves, presto! There's The Green Hornet, already known and quite popular! It has made its theme music, Rimsky-Korsakov's "The Flight of the Bumble Bee" into a well known household tune.

Universal wasted no time in putting the project on their production schedule. For the leads they cast a slender and youthful Gordon Jones as Britt Reed/The Green Hornet, Keye Luke portrayed his partner Kato, Anne Nagel as his Secretary and Confidant Miss Lenore Case (just "Casey" for short), Wade Boteler as retired Cop turned Reporter Mike Axford, Selmer Jackson as the District Attorney, Stanley Andrews as the Police Commissioner; also Cy Kendall, Joseph Crehan, Walter McGrail, Gene Rizzi, John Kelly and a cast of thousands! (Well a lot more anywho!) They did one more thing with the cast. As the sound of voice was the story telling medium on the Radio, a popular leading character's voice was as well known as the face of a Movie Star. So the Universal production team decided to give us the "real" voice of The Green Hornet from the Radio. Actor Al Hodge* dubbed in his voice to speak any of the lines that Gordon Jones spoke when he was decked out in the Hornet's garb. It was a very neat and effective dramatic device.

As for the story and plot of THE GREEN HORNET serial, the usual subjects of international espionage agents and Renegade Super Scientists were jettisoned away from the first Hornet Screen appearance. Instead The Green Hornet, Kato and company concentrated on Organized Crime and their involvement with rackets in the building of sub-standard buildings, collapsing public works, intimidation and extortion. All of these are real-life type problems being dealt with then, now and as long as Man walks the face of our home, Planet Earth.

NOTE: * Actor Al Hodge not only got to be well known as the Radio Voice of the Green Hornet/Britt Reed; but also during the period of 1949-55, he was famous World-Wide as Television's CAPTAIN VIDEO.

Addendum: 1/07/2008. Oh, by the way, we did forget to mention that a condensed feature version of this Universal Serial was released to TV and to video in 1990. There still may be some of those VHS Casettes floating around out there.

"It's gone... like a spook! I've never seen a car move so fast." The two police officers who are constantly chasing the Green Hornet's car say that in almost every episode. Britt Reid (the Green Hornet) is a rich guy who like Bruce Wayne (Batman) and Lamont Cranston (The Shadow) has a secret identity that he uses to fight crime.

This serial is a lot of fun and like most serials ends each episode with an exciting cliff hanger. It suffers from the defects typical of serials of this era but also has the charm that is also typical of them.

Those of us who remember the Abbott and Costello Show will enjoy seeing Gordon Jones as Britt Reid/The Green Hornet. He was Officer Mike. Although Keye Luke (Kato) is no Bruce Lee he plays the part well. Those who enjoyed David Carradine as Caine in Kung Fu will enjoy seeing how Master Po (the blind monk who called Caine "grasshopper") looked as a young man.

Don't expect a sophisticated plot or deep character development. The dialog is corny but there is plenty of action and lots of fun.

In 1936, 'The Green Hornet' was created for the radio. Only four years later, Universal Studios made the first movie serial version of the crime fighter and I saw it mostly in order to see pre-stardom Alan Ladd before his break out films of 1942 (such as "The Glass Key" and "This Gun for Hire")....but ended up enjoying the serial in its own right.

Now I should stop for a moment to talk about serials. These installment films were very popular in the 1930s-50s and normally had to do with crime fighting, such as the Batman, Spy Smasher, Captain Marvel and other serials. A few were westerns or sci-fi. If you see them today, you'll notice a few things about all of them....death-defying escapes that are often utterly ridiculous and a lot of repetition. Audiences of the day didn't mind seeing the heroes appear to die at the end of one chapter...only to see that they actually survived miraculously (sometimes with film footage that completely contradicts what you saw the previous week). And, seeing the inconsistencies wasn't easy in the day because folks were never intended to see them all in one sitting! And, as far as repetition goes, this is because each episode needed to summarize each week in case a viewer missed a chapter or to jog their memories. They were never intended as high art and they were usually made by second and third-tier studios, such as Monogram, Republic or Universal.

When the story begins, police officials meet with Britt Reid (Gordon Jones), the publisher of 'The Daily Sentinel'...the town's newspaper. They are concerned about organized crime and Britt seems to care little about their concerns. Of course, he is the hero of the tale...so you know that he's only pretending to be a lazy jerk. In reality, his way of dealing with it is to don the guise of the Green Hornet, accompanied by his man-servant Kato* (Keye Luke)...and his hot rod car.

Soon you learn that one of the activities of this organized crime ring is graft in public works projects. The mobsters use substandard equipment in building dams and other dangerous projects...and when one of the workers threatens to go to the police, he dies in an 'accident'! So, Britt is out to get the goods on these gang activities as well as figure out who's behind this evil. And, it turns out that there's one big baddie...and his 12 evil disciples...and they are up to all sorts of crimes in addition to the dam project.

Because this is a serial, you really cannot compare it to a normal film. Sure, it's cheesy at times...but all serials are...so I cannot deduct points for this. And, compared to other serials, it's a pretty good and exciting one. Decent action and worth seeing.

*In the serial, Kato is a Korean by birth. However, on the radio he was originally Japanese. Why the change? Well, although the USA and Japan were not yet at war against each other, tensions between the two nations over the Japanese invasion of China made having Kato being Japanese a public relations problem...so they changed him to Korean.

'The Green Hornet' is, overall, a pretty good serial. Certainly it is a darn sight better than the superhero movies made since about, say, 2005, when suddenly Batman was willing to confess his true identity to a deputy DA just because he has the hots for her, or since 2006, when we learned that Superman was a dead-beat dad and a stalker (and don't get me started on the Fantastic Four or 'Spider-Man 3': blech!). 'The Green Hornet' features a hero unencumbered by ridiculous modern angst and subplots, who is good in a fight, yet is only able to perform feats that actual human beings could conceivably perform.

This serial has a good plot, or rather a series of good plots, that are much more grounded in reality than most other serials. It does not involve super-powers, magic, outer space, or super-villains. It's about crime. I myself enjoy the demented hallucinations of 'Flash Gordon' or 'Atom Man Vs. Superman' as much as the next person, but I like crime stories too.

This serial has decent fight scenes, not dazzling like 'Spy Smasher,' but nothing like the painfully ridiculous fights in Columbia's two horrible Batman serials. The cliff hangers are generally good, with the average amount of 'cheating' to resolve some of them. There is a good sequence with the Hornet jumping from his car onto a moving train, and who doesn't like that? To predict if you are going to like this serial, a lot depends on if you like the Green Hornet as a hero. This serial is very faithful to the original radio show, even to the extent that whenever actor Gordon Jones puts on the Green Hornet mask, his voice is dubbed in by Al Hodge, who played the Hornet on radio and later went on to be the best Captain Video on TV.

I like the Green Hornet because he has a super cool gas gun to knock out crooks (the special effect for this action works well here) and has a super cool souped-up car to chase crooks. Also, instead of wearing tights, he wears a suit and a hat, which looks a lot classier and certainly less sissy than superhero tights.

But now a word about Kato: in this version of Green Hornet, Kato is the one who invents the super cool gas gun and high powered engine that powers the super cool car. In real life, a guy that smart would have patented those things and gotten rich from them. Or if he got into the crime fighting business, he might have kept the gas gun and super motor secret so as to avoid them falling into the wrong hands, but certainly he would have invented other things and gotten rich from them.

Also, besides being a scientific genius, Kato is the one who knows martial arts. The Green Hornet is pretty good in a fight, but a Judo expert would outfight him every time.

What I am getting at is that Kato should have been the main hero, and the Hornet should have been his sidekick. My guess as to why the Hornet was dominant is that is something to do with the fact that Kato was not a Caucasian and Hollywood has been known to, from time to time, exhibit a little institutional racism.

To the credit of the writers, however, at least Kato was portrayed as smart, tough and valiant, rather than being a subhuman idiot or a satanic sadist (many non-Caucasians were represented thusly by Hollywood at the time). There are several instances in this serial when Kato saves the Hornet's butt.

Keye Luke, who played Kato in this and the 2nd Green Hornet serial, was a good actor who, while he never became a household name, worked steadily on a multitude of roles for about 50 years. He played Number One Son in many Charlie Chan movies, and had small to medium-sized roles in scores of other films. He was a constant guest star in TV shows of the 1960's, ranging from 'My Three Sons' to 'Star Trek.' But my favorite role of Keye Luke's was his excellent portrayal of Master Po, the all-seeing yet blind teacher from TV's 'Kung Fu.' IMO, he was the coolest person on the show. Strangely, the original concept for 'Kung Fu' would have had Bruce Lee playing the hero. Unfortunately some twit in Hollywood decided to hire David Carradine, who was pretty good, but still Lee would have been cooler. Bruce Lee, of course, besides being a martial arts movie superstar, played Kato in the underrated TV version of the Green Hornet.

Mr. Watson is correct. Green Hornet radio programs aired up to at least 1938 and earlier which still exist describe Britt Reid's chauffeur as his "Japanese valet." When international tensions subsequently increased, in 1939 or 40, the announcer's line was changed so the phrase became "trusted valet," which Kato remained throughout the majority of the the war years. In wartime programs his nationality was simply not mentioned in the show's opening or anywhere else during the program. After the war, in 1945, the opening was changed again, and announcers begin to refer to Kato as Britt Reid's "Filipino valet," and that is how openings were recorded till the end of the series. So the change didn't happen overnight, but in fact took at least five years, and the "Pearl Harbor" comment is an oversimplification, but the general idea is correct. The idea that this is all an urban legend arises mainly from the posting on urban legend website snopes.com, which is wrong about a lot of other things too and apparently more interested in perpetuating legends than publishing facts. Also, later syndications of Green Hornet radio programs consisted primarily of later broadcasts which would have for the most part included the description of Kato as Filipino. It is also correct that in the movie serials Kato, played by Keye Luke, is identified as Korean, and in the first serial Britt Reid and Kato discuss how they first met -- Britt saved Kato's life in Shanghai. In comic books published by NOW in the 1980s and authorized by the Green Hornet Inc., the situation is rectified and Kato's Japanese heritage fully acknowledged. Perhaps the truth of it all is that Mr. Reid told people his friend was something other than Japanese during the war to protect him from being taken to an interment camp.