The Green Hornet
Combining The Scarlet Pimpernel with The Shadow
- Score
- 2
Couldn't finish it, too difficult to buy Seth as Britt Reid.
By Tym Stevens
Combining The Scarlet Pimpernel with The Shadow led to The Crimson Avenger and The Green Hornet.
Like The Shadow, The Green Hornet originated in radio adventures (1936) before skipping pulps to hit comics in 1940. A gun-toting anti-hero in emerald fedora and threads, he hinges the suited action detectives of the pulps into the mystery men and gadgets of the comics (followed quickly by the gasmasked Sandman and The Green Llama). While the handling of sidekick Kato in this period is not faultless, he is one of the first Asian American superheroes in the Western mainstream, a welcome antidote to decades of cliched Fu Manchu clones.
The Green Hornet tends to pond-skip media, in sporadic bouts across comics, TV, and film. This makes him an oddly peripheral character flitting the margins of mediums, not unlike his stealthy modus operendi. The most famous is the brief TV series (1966), a companion to the Batman show, which launched the career of Bruce Lee playing Kato. The Hornet's influence is also felt sideways with Cato in the Pink Panther films, and The Brown Hornet on Fat Albert cartoons. (And perhaps abstractly in Ditko's The Question and Mr. A.) His son now carries the mantle with his partner, Kato's daughter, in a recent reboot by Dynamite Comics. But many modern viewers know him by the 2011 action comedy film starring Seth Rogan and Jay Chou.