The premise was simple: Britt Reid played the militant newspaperman by day, putting his principles into action by night, when, as The Green Hornet, he struck at every phase of crime fostered by a racketeering syndicate. Under cover of night and known only to one other living person as The Green Hornet, Reid waged a one-man fight to bring law breakers to his self-made justice. Through police circles and his own reporters, Britt Reid was familiar with crime and racketeering and this source of information gives him first-hand opportunity to enact the secret role of “The Green Hornet.”
Britt Reid’s father, a retired financier, believing that his dilettante son should find a serious mission in life, turned over the publishing of The Daily Sentinel to Britt, with carte blanche opportunity to handle the newspaper. That was in 1936. Also, the senior Reid, knowing of possible pitfalls to any exuberant young man, assigned as a personal bodyguard Michael Axford, a former police detective. Axford was put on the payroll as a reporter and took his duties seriously, especially when The Green Hornet began his one-man raids upon “law breakers within the law.” As publisher, Reid offered a huge reward for the capture of The Green Hornet, keeping people from suspecting he was, himself, the notorious masked man. This circumstance allowed for highly interesting plots and situations and yet furthered the success of his fight against crime.
In truth, the radio program was primarily created by Fran Striker (with Trendle’s request for a modern-day crime thriller to replace Warner Lester, Manhunter). It was Striker who borrowed elements from The Adventures of Jimmie Dale (1914), a pulp fiction hero written by Frank L. Packard. Jimmie Dale was a wealthy playboy by day, but at night put on a costume and became The Gray Seal, who enters businesses or homes and cracks safes, always leaving a diamond shaped, gray paper "seal" behind to mark his conquest, but never taking anything. In Striker’s rendition, The Green Hornet left behind a green seal at the scenes to taunt the police and remind the racketeers who was responsible for betraying their partnership, an element that would be dropped from the program by 1940. It was Striker who decided to replicate The Lone Ranger formula which he himself also created, that of a minority sidekick. Instead of a white horse speeding away, The Green Hornet and Kato sped away from crime scenes in a black roadster known as the Black Beauty.
During World War II, the radio plots were tweaked to feature black market racketeers and fifth column spies as villains. In 1947, due to an ever-growing criticism of The Green Hornet program from concerned parents, the plot device was changed so that The Green Hornet worked alongside Commission Higgins of the police, was cleared of all charges and no longer considered a wanted criminal, and even his secretary, Lenore Case, was brought into Britt’s confidence. During this four-month transition on the program, Britt’s father, Dan Reid, learned of his son’s secret and chuckled in response. Calmly, Dan revealed he once rode alongside a masked man on a white horse… Britt’s great uncle was the masked man known as The Lone Ranger!
By 1952, during the final year of the radio program, The Green Hornet found himself exchanging fisticuffs with Communist spies. But after a 13-week revival, the radio program ceased any chance of returning to the major networks. Trendle himself confessed the program had always been a “tough sell,” even after the major revision of the character.
During the course of World War II, The Green Hornet and Kato battled Japanese saboteurs and Nazi fifth columnists as well as racketeers and gangsters. Historically, issue No. 13 was the first Green Hornet comic book to depict a Nazi on the cover. Issue No. 20 featured a two-page text story with a plot involving Japanese who take charge of an old, unused movie studio on Fisherman’s Sound to rig up a television set and demoralize the American people with fraudulent images. That same issue featured “Terror From the Past,” a 10-page comic story about a mad Japanese who seeks revenge against Americans with a Tyrannosaurus Rex, still alive and awakened from its slumber in a cave on Long Island. Not the type of stories children expected to hear on the radio program, but that is what makes the comic books so unique and sought after.
Careful review of the publisher’s production files reveals that the first issue had a print run of 213,169 copies, and the comic book reached a peak of 480,000 printing with issue No. 21 (November 1944). While print runs should dictate the scarcity and value of the comic books today, the condition of the issues now also makes a major difference.
There has long been a common myth circulating that Kato switched from Japanese to Filipino the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor. In truth, Kato was referred to as Filipino on the radio program months prior to the attack. For the cliffhanger serial, Universal Pictures had its own solution: Kato’s nationality was disclosed in the very first chapter of the serial as Korean, avoiding any possible reference to the Japanese.
The cliffhanger was financially profitable for the studio, which produced a second serial, released a year later in 1941. The Green Hornet Strikes Again starred Warren Hull (replacing Gordon Jones) and Keye Luke. Like the first serial, the second recycled plots from radio scripts. Trendle would later attempt to make a TV series cut from the serials. Unable to sell the proposed series by 1951, though, he chose to film a 25-minute TV pilot with Steve Dunne in the title role. (To date, that 1951 pilot is considered “lost” due to a lack of preservation.)
Trendle never liked the gimmick of the fireplace going down to a lower level of the house like a secret passage, nor Kato alongside The Green Hornet. Trendle rationalized that if anyone saw an Asian – also referred to as Kato – standing alongside a masked man, they would be able to put one and one together and identify the Green Hornet as Britt Reid. Dozier assured him that this was television and therefore viewers applied a suspension-of-disbelief aspect.
This did not stop from Dozier having to negotiate for colorful plots such as having John Carradine play a notorious Jack-the-Ripper style killer known as “The Scarf,” who owned a wax museum, or a two-part adventure involving aliens from outer space, despite Trendle’s protests. Having learned the valuable lesson of having two of every prop made for the television series, auto customizer George Barris produced two of the Black Beauty, both of which appear on the same screen in one episode where a counterfeit Green Hornet roamed the streets in his own black speedster.
The ABC network expected the same popularity from the show as Batman, but the ratings were not as strong, nor was the fan mail. This did not stop ABC-TV from renewing the initial 17-episode contract for an additional nine episodes, for a total of 26. First run episodes of The Green Hornet aired for only half a year and it was never renewed for a second season. By that time, producer Bill Dozier had filmed a five-minute Wonder Woman pilot (starring Ellie Wood Walker) as well as a 25-minute Dick Tracy pilot, neither of which would be bought by the network heads.
When Dozier noticed the ratings slipping, he theorized: “I think there was a great deal of curiosity about it at first, particularly because of the great success of Batman, and apparently now that the audience has sampled Green Hornet, they are more inclined to prefer what they see on Wild, Wild West and Tarzan. My personal feeling is that our shows have all looked pretty much the same and that our format is much too narrow.”
In desperation, after an exchange of letters, Trendle relinquished script approval to Dozier and granted permission for a Green Hornet crossover on a two-part Batman adventure. The crossover was meant to draw in a ton of fan letters from viewers to convince the network to renew The Green Hornet for a second season. Alas, it was not meant to be. The expected large volume of fan letters totaled four.
In January of 2011, a big screen movie of The Green Hornet was produced and released through Sony Pictures, with Seth Rogen in the lead. The film received generally mixed reviews from critics and grossed $227.8 million against a $110–120 million production budget. (Which is not bad when you consider that many eagerly-anticipated movies released this summer never even grossed half the money it cost to produce.)
