MovieChat Forums > The Green Hornet (1966) Discussion > Besides the fact that the script was wri...

Besides the fact that the script was written that way...

posted 14 years ago by SBL84
4 replies | jump to latest

...why exactly did the concept of The Green Hornet work?

First I'll just say that I've always enjoyed the series, and the non-traditional vigilante style of crime fighting, and I was able to catch a few episodes on SyFy a week or two ago for the first time in quite some years, which made me think of this.

Why did The Green Hornet have such a notorious reputation? For most, if not all of what we, as the audience saw, The Green Hornet was pretty much a huge failure as a criminal. We know his real intentions, but for the average citizen in the world of the show, he would just seem like an incompetent fool in a costume running around screwing every plan of his up. Since Britt didn't actually want to harm people or ruin lives/businesses, The Green Hornet usually wasn't very successful. He would team up with some criminal who was planning a heist or kidnapping or whatever, and then would screw up their plan from the inside. The headlines would always be something like "4 suspects arrested during attempted bank robbery, Green Hornet evades Police"
So:

1. Where did his reputation come from if all of these plans the news/police reported he was the mastermind of would all fail?

2. Why would criminals keep letting him in on their plans? Wouldn't they realize that everyone that teams up with The Green Hornet seems to have their plan fall apart, and then get caught when it goes bad, while he manages to get away at the last second?

Did Britt and Kato pull jobs on their own every once in a while besides the stuff we see, possibly focusing on businesses that Britt owned so they wouldn't harm anyone by doing it? Just so they could keep their reputation up? It just doesn't make sense how he would have the reputation he has when everything he does appears to go wrong to the average citizen who isn't in on the real idea of what The Green Hornet does.

[–] tbrittreid 14 years ago

Universal Studios' old Saturday matinee serial had Britt intending the Hornet to be only "a modern day Robin Hood" but on his first time out somebody was killed and the Green Hornet was blamed for it. While the details were very different, NOW Comics' used the same concept in their origin story as well. In what turned out to be their very last issue, NOW depicted one crime boss genuinely cooperating with the Hornet and giving him his demanded cut--which reduced the "Green" operation's drain on the Reid fortune; according to that story this had been going on for decades, with the mobster presumably off the hook for these payments during the periods when there was no active Hornet. IIRC, there was an implication that he was not the only racketeer who had ever done this. This sort of thing would obviously help our hero's reputation, at least among the criminal element. As for the public: While I like your last suggestion, it occurs to me that our heroes might also "hit" seemingly legitimate businesses which they know to be actually owned by and profitable to some crime boss. That's the best I can do.

The GREEN HORNET Strikes Again!

[–] SBL84 14 years ago

Thanks, that explains a lot. I figured there was more story to the character that wasn't explored in the tv series. And yeah, since a lot of the criminals in the series seemed to be average businessmen with secret illegal plans, there probably were a lot of front businesses he could have gone after.

After I posted the thread I also realized that the people he delivers to the police probably blame some of their crimes on him. So if there's some kind of theft that Britt finds out, goes out and finds who was responsible as the Green Hornet, and then joins them, getting them arrested when the second heist goes wrong. When they're being interrogated, they pin the original crime that caught Britt's interest on The Green Hornet, claiming he found them and got them to do it for him instead of taking responsibility for it themselves.

So he may be credited with many crimes he didn't even pretend to commit. So instead of every crime he's believed to be involved in going wrong, it looks more like the 2nd, 3rd, maybe 4th or more is the one that goes wrong.

[–] 14 years ago

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 14 years ago

Also, remember that the Hornet's day job is running a newspaper. Plenty of room there to stir up animosity toward the Hornet.