The Green Hornet (serial)

The Green Hornet
Directed by	Ford Beebe Ray Taylor
Produced by	Henry MacRae
Written by	George H. Plympton Basil Dickey Morrison Wood Lyonel Margolies Fran Striker (characters)
Starring	Gordon Jones Wade Boteler Anne Nagel Keye Luke Phillip Trent Cy Kendall
Cinematography	Jerome Ash William A. Sickner
Edited by	Irving Birnbaum Joseph Gluck Alvin Todd
Distributed by	Universal Pictures
Release dates	January 9, 1940 (1940-01-09) (USA)
Running time	258 min
Country	United States
Language	English

The Green Hornet (1940) is a Universal movie serial based on The Green Hornet radio series by George W. Trendle and Fran Striker.

Synopsis

Newspaper publisher Britt Reid, secretly The Green Hornet, and his Korean valet Kato investigate and expose several seemingly separate rackets. This leads them into continued conflict with the Chief, the criminal mastermind behind the Syndicate and the individual crimes.

Cast

• Gordon Jones as Britt Reid otherwise known as The Green Hornet
• Al Hodge as the (uncredited) voice of the Green Hornet. Hodge played the Hornet on the original radio series.
• Wade Boteler as Michael Axford, Reid's bodyguard
• Anne Nagel as Lenore "Casey" Case, Reid's secretary
• Keye Luke as Kato, who is Korean in this serial rather than the original Japanese nationality of the character due to anti-Japanese sentiment rising at the time. This was two years prior to the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor and the USA's entry into the war (all thirteen episodes are copyrighted 1939). The radio version dropped the nationality from the introductory sequence, included passing references to him being Filipino in dialogue, and only years later added that to the standard intro.
• Phillip Trent as Jasper Jenks, a reporter
• Cy Kendall as Curtis Monroe, the Chief and secretly posing as the Syndicate lieutenant henchman
• Stanley Andrews as Police Commissioner
• Selmer Jackson as District Attorney
• Joseph Crehan as Judge Stanton

Alternative versions

In 1990, GoodTimes Home Video released a feature-length movie version, re-edited from the last six chapters, under the same title.

In 2011, VCI Entertainment released its own version, The Green Hornet: Movie Edition. It includes the beginning, end, and selected other chapters of the serial. The DVD was released on January 11, 2011.

Influence

The 1960s Batman television series was created based on the popularity of a re-release of Columbia's Batman serial. The success of both led to the production of a Green Hornet series, which was played as a straight action mystery series, "in the tradition of its former presentations", rather than the camp Batman series. It lasted one season.

Chapter titles

Source:

1. The Tunnel of Terror
2. The Thundering Terror
3. Flying Coffins
4. Pillar of Flame
5. The Time Bomb
6. Highways of Peril
7. Bridge of Disaster
8. Dead or alive
9. The Hornet Trapped
10. Bullets and Ballots
11. Disaster Rides the Rails
12. Panic in the Zoo
13. Doom of the Underworld

External links

• The Green Hornet (serial) at IMDb
• The Green Hornet (1990 feature compilation) at IMDb
• The Green Hornet is available for free download at the Internet Archive
• The Green Hornet at AllMovie