The Green Hornet

Being an avid comic book fan, watching the BATMAN tv series as a kid made me ill; it lent credibility, I thought, to the wonky “seduction of the innocent” scenario espoused by one gonzo nutso. Along came THE GREEN HORNET, and suddenly there was a good reason to watch superheroes on tv again. These guys were serious about stopping crime: they went after drug dealers (unheard of at that time on television- at least the television I watched) and murderers (something superheroes very, very rarely did in the comics of the day). To top it all off, The Hornet’s sidekick, Kato, hit below the belt. For a kid who’d grown up on comics, this was a tv show with real grit. I was fascinated by Bruce Lee’s Gung Fu. Kato stole the show, to be sure, but that’s not to suggest that The Hornet was just another masked man: Van Williams was a solid performer in his own right, and was totally believable in the lead. I’ve since listened to the old radio plays (which I love; they rank right up there with the best of THE SHADOW), and have recently acquired the entire tv series on video tape. Guess what: the show still holds up, after all these years. The two features that were cobbled together from various episodes were watchable, but nothing beats the series in its original format. If anyone’s listening (anyone with clout, with a good eye for a potential goldmine just waiting to be mined), I’d suggest putting four thirty minute episodes per tape in a six-tape boxed set and selling it for whatever the market will bear. Think of it this way: bootleggers have been selling washed-out third generation copies (for far more than they’re worth) at comic conventions for decades. Let it slide, and those aforementioned bootleggers will continue to rip off people dying to see the series and the network that financed the series in the first place will continue to lose millions of dollars.