Overview: The Green Hornet is a fictional masked fictional crime fighter, originally created by George W. Trendle for an American radio program in the 1930s. The character has appeared in two Universal serials.

In the first 13-episode serial, the city is faced with rising crime and increased racketeering activity. Intrepid newspaper editor, Britt Reid (Gordon Jones) becomes the crime fighter the Green Hornet to take on the bad guys. As far as the police are concerned, the Hornet himself is the criminal. This misunderstanding enables Reid to operate outside the law to battle evil and injustice. Blu-ray Verdict: Through thirteen chapters in this serial The Green Hornet manages to discover and eliminate a number of various criminal enterprises that are plaguing his city. Playing The Green Hornet in this version is a younger and leaner Gordon Jones, who was best known for being Mike the Cop on the Abbott and Costello show. Keye Luke plays his sidekick and chauffeur Kato who, because of the impending war, was changed from Japanese to Korean for this serial.

Not that this serial is all that much better, though it is a cut above most of them, but one of the things that struck me was that each chapter stood more on its own than you would normally have. The premise here is that the various rackets are controlled by a city syndicate of twelve and the Green Hornet as himself and in his real identity of Britt Reid, millionaire publisher of a crusading newspaper the Sentinel, systematically exposes each racket in each chapter and eliminates the head through death or imprisonment.

The obvious comparison is to Batman, but The Green Hornet relies a whole lot less on gadgetry than most superheroes. His car, the Black Beauty is really a souped up hot rod, nothing unique about it in any other way. He has not got the variety of gadgets that Batman or most of his other peers seem to have.

He even has a gas gun that shoots small gas pellets and when they hit the target they merely disable. Fran Striker who created The Green Hornet also created the Lone Ranger and the Ranger’s creed was always to shoot to wound. Modern technology has given the Green Hornet a weapon that will do nothing else. In fact, The Green Hornet is the grand nephew of The Lone Ranger.

A cut above maybe, but The Green Hornet is as dated as all those other serials that the Saturday afternoon kids used to enjoy, sure, but all that said, I really liked Gordon Jones as the Britt Reid/Green Hornet character. It certainly didn’t matter to me that this character had no superpowers to speak of for I found that the Hornet’s bare-knuckle brawling with the bad guys was satisfactory enough for me!

Liner Notes by author Martin Grams Jr.
Two Radio Episodes of THE GREEN HORNET
I AM…THE GREEN HORNET Audio Piece by Clifford Weimer
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