Recently I was talking about Jay Chou 周杰倫 with a colleague at work - basically saying he’s the best classical-music-Chinese-traditional-new-wave-rapper she’s never heard of. Unsurprising really, as he records in Mandarin for the Taiwan market (however, he’s also kind of a big deal around southeast Asia and parts of the US).
On the back of this it made me miss the 2011 big-screen remake of
The Green Hornet as he stars as Kato. I pulled this out and watched it again and, all over again, enjoyed it for the fun and frolics and basic Charlie’s-Angel’s-2000-with-Boys feel to it. I know lots of people hated it or derided it for the way it dumbed-down the character of Britt Reid - and it was never going to have Bruce Lee in it. While it did make Reid out to be a major dumbass who actually
needs the Hornet Gun, it also expanded on Lenore Case’s role so that she wasn’t just coming into the office to tell Reid some plot is going down. On balance, not a bad thing. It also showed what Kato actually did - yes, he made a coffee machine, but now he was also a gadgets whizz who could sketch schematics and make them himself, reworking polycarbonate (the stuff they make shark tanks out of) into car windshields, turning everything bullet-proof and adding proper
Ben Hur tyre rippers to the nice custom wheels. He had lines, a role, a real life - even a back story. From the streets of Shanghai to the fabulous mansion of one James Reid newspaper mogul, Kato was now a modern American success story.
To be honest, I had never seen any Bruce Lee TV work as it’s so hard to get hold of, so part of me wondered what the original 60s version had been like. The way people were whaling on the 2011 movie, you’d think it was shitting on Desilu Studios’ Star Trek. So what was all the fuss about? Had the original really been that good? It was time to find a copy of the original 1966 Green Hornet and find out.
First of all - some context. Imagine it’s 1966. Well I know you can’t do that - I can’t do that as I was born in the 70s. So let’s instead imagine your choice of TV that night. The British series
Doctor Who had already been on the BBC in England for three years (in black and white), however it would be another six before it would be shown on US television. The high-camp, high-colour crowd-pleaser
Batman had exploded on the scene and was doing pretty ok.
Bonanza and
The Andy Griffith Show were going strong, Lucille Ball was at it again with the very successful
The Lucy Show,
The Dick Van Dyke Show was still winning Emmys,
The Man from U.N.C.L.E. was still charming audiences, and more and more US TV watchers had colour television sets and wanted more Technicolor content.
Where did the Green Hornet fit in? To begin with, this wasn’t his first disco. He was originally a radio drama that started in 1936, after George W. Trendle wanted to add another proper fun, righteous radio serial to the airwaves alongside the successful The Lone Ranger (interesting fact: the Green Hornet was the grandnephew of the Lone Ranger, hence the similar eye-mask). Arriving full-fleshed out and with built-in audience awareness, the series wasn’t the massive hit the network wanted but it did well enough, being syndicated to all parts of the States and beyond - in the early 1970s it was playing in Hong Kong where the voracious TV audience referred to it as ‘The Kato Show’, for obvious reasons. However back at home in the US it ran for one season of twenty-six episodes before it was cancelled by its parent the ABC network.
In that time it had had a few crossovers with
Batman (I remember seeing a rerun of this when I was about seven or eight - Batman and Robin are ‘climbing’ up the side of a building, as you do, and Kato and the Hornet open one of the windows and stick their heads out as they go past. I remember asking my Dad who the heads were, as I got the feeling I was supposed to know them and get some kind of joke. He said they were from ‘another famous TV show at the time - the name escapes me’) and although it continued to bring in viewers, the ratings declined and eventually the inevitable happened. Interesting to note is that Van Williams, the superhero-chinned, charming lead who played Britt Reid, was constantly pushing for Kato to have more airtime and more lines (sometimes he was lucky to get three lines an episode). The network refused - Kato was not white American, and besides, splitting airtime that only ran to twenty-eight minutes anyway would take focus off the star. If they
had let Kato speak a bit more, and use more of his innate talent for beating the crap out of henchmen and villains, perhaps the show would have had a second season. But who knows, eh? The path not taken.
This brings us to the show itself; was it any good? Everyone looks back at things past with rose-tinted glasses - but I’d never seen it in the first place. What would I, who grew up on 80s TV, reruns of The Man from U.N.C.L.E., comics, superheroes and spy films, make of it in today’s climate?
In the best traditions of the old-fashioned serials (and today’s arc-for-a-season Netflix bingeing), you’ll have to wait until the next post to find out. Gotcha!
Soopytwist.
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