Green Hornet given the Starship Troopers treatment
I just saw the trailer for the new GREEN HORNET movie, a flick I was looking forward to with tag-wagging fanboy eagerness, since I am simple minded and easy to please.
The formula: hunted by the police as a wanted criminal, the Green Hornet is in truth crusading newspaperman Britt Reid by day, by night a masked vigilante in a supercool rolling arsenal chauffeured by the most kick-ass of all kick-ass Oriental manservants, the deadly and all-competent Kato. The plot: Green Hornet pretends he’s a crook, he’s actually a vigilante, he kicks some racketeer ass, shoots a few mooks with his gas-gun, and Kato unloads a whole sixpack of whup-in-a-can on any number of gangland thugs, and the car shoots rockets.
Can’t miss. Simple. Can’t mess it up. Proven formula that dates back to the Golden Age of Radio.
They messed it up.
They messed it up.
The only way make a story these days where the white guy has an oriental manservant is to make the white guy an utter boob so goofy and drool-stupid that the yellow guy will not even touch his hand.
Don’t get me wrong. In the original, Kato was indeed the one who built the car, built the gas gun, and he had saved Britt’s life when he was traveling in Asia. So Kato was pretty cool. But modern political correctness is racist to the core, and so a white man, because he is a white man, cannot be the boss of a chauffeur or a valet from the Far East. It is not allowed. The one exception, which we have seen in any number of shows where the guys have to look like total ninnies compared to the girls, is to make the white guy utterly without any redeeming virtues or manliness.
Let me not be one to leap to conclusions, except, of course, in the case of popular and well-love pulp-hero entertainment from the thrilling years of yesteryear, when they are degraded by the greasy thin slime of political correctness.
I have not seen the movie. I am entitled to leap to this conclusion, because I am a fan of the Green Hornet, and have been from my youth up.
Another bit of my childhood polluted by Hollywood.
Here, by way of contrast:
And then there is this one, done a little more inexpensively, but with even more and better kick-ass asskickery. The end credits in stark silhouettes starting at about 7.40 into the film, have some of the best GREEN HORNET theme music I have heard since, well, KILL BILL vol II.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
