Captain's Theatre THE GREEN HORNET "Alias the Scarf"

It's an Episode Better Suited for Halloween than the Middle of Winter...

...as a local wax museum updates it's displays to include The Green Hornet and Kato, the statue of the previous "spotlight" exhibit, The Scarf, apparently comes to life and resumes his murderous ways!
One of the weirder shows in the series, heavy on mood, no fight scenes, and no appearance of The Black Beauty!
Legendary horror film star John Carradine as museum researcher (with an ominous secret) James Rancourt was the only famous guest-star on the series. Unlike Batman, where celebrities from Tallulah Bankhead to Liberace were given villain roles written especially for them, Green Hornet used dependable, but little-known, character actors as baddies.

Side Notes:

John Carradine had been considered for the role of The Joker on Batman, but his poor health precluded his doing the role.

SPOILER (sorta): The Scarf's statue really should have shown a younger version of Carradine.
Since it looks just like the elderly James Rancourt (albeit with a Van Dyke beard) played by Carradine, it's obvious who The Scarf really is from the very beginning!

The music score written specifically for this episode was never reused! (Most of the music on the series was reedited and reused in at several other episodes besides the ones they were originally written for.)

Background info on a number of the unnamed city's villains from the early 1900s up to the late 1940s, when The Scarf disappeared, is presented during a tour of the museum, but there's no mention of an earlier Green Hornet.
So, gangster Glen Connors framing Britt Reid's father decades earlier in "Frog is a Deadly Weapon" doesn't refer to Reid Sr being the 1940s Hornet.
What the elder Reid had been blamed for is never explained.

From February 24, 1967, here's the 23rd filmed and aired episode..."Alias the Scarf".

Next Week: It's a Surprise Birthday Party for Britt Reid...but the Present is Death!

MOVIE OF THE WEEK BLOGATHON "Shadow on the Land"

In 1968, the creator of I Dream of Jeannie predicted what may yet occur in 2017...

...with a tv-movie that aired on network only once, yet had an enormous impact on those who saw it!

In 2016, as in 1968...
We were engaged in an unpopular military action that spawned an ongoing protest movement!
Race relations were cratering!
The economy was doing well, but individuals thought, because they weren't personally doing well, the whole economy was collapsing!
The current President (a Democrat) was not on the ballot for the Presidental election!
With an less than popular Democratic candidate, a Republican who promised "law and order" and to "protect America from potential invaders" won the White House!
Sidney Sheldon, creator/producer of lightweight escapist entertainment like I Dream of Jeannie, Hart to Hart, and The Patty Duke Show, looked at what was going on around him and took a chance.
Screen Gems gave him carte blanche, probably expecting something in a similar vein.
He greenlighted a story by Nedrick Young, who had scripted The Defiant Ones (1958) and the screenplay adaptation of Inherit the Wind (1960).
Sheldon then selected an experenced, versatile director, Richard C Sarafian, with credits ranging from Dr Kildare to Batman!

The cast used both established pros like John Forsythe (against type as the villainous General Bruce, the Leader's trusted military commander) and Jackie Cooper (as the heroic, but doomed, Lt Col Davis), as well as up-and-comers like Gene Hackman and Carol Lynley in supporting roles.
(Trivia Note: one of the supporting characters, Lt Allen, is played by Jonathan Lippe/Jonathan Goldsmith, known today as "the Most Interesting Man in the World" in Dos Equis beer commercials!)
The protaganist, rebel leader Major McCloud, was played by Marc Strange in his only leading role.

The tv-movie, using concepts from both Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here and George Orwell's 1984, portrayed a near-future America where the President declared a national emergency and imposed martial law...but the undefined "emergency" never ended, and martial law quickly mutated into fascist repression!
But the Society of Man, an organized resistance group with people placed within the government, fights back as best it can against the overwheming military and technological might of the fascists.
Left open-ended, the movie practically begs to be continued as a mini-series, if not an ongoing series!

Airing on ABC during the Christmas season (December 4, 1968), it failed to garner decent ratings, and the potential series died quietly.

(Trivia Note: Kenneth Johnson proposed a similar concept called Storm Warnings to NBC in the early 1980s.
They turned it down, and Johnson, following in the steps of Rod Serling and Gene Roddenberry, revamped the concept with science fiction elements, making the fascists into reptilian aliens, and sold the concept as V, which ran as two mini-series and a brief ongoing series in the 80s and a two-season reboot in 2009-10.)

Never available on VHS, DVD or BluRay, the only way, currently, to see Shadow on the Land is right HERE.(video will open in new tab).
We reccomend you download it as well, since the flick is being deleted wherever it appears!
For example, it was available on YouTube...until last week!

This blog entry is part of

Please check out the other posts by clicking HERE!

Captain's Theatre THE GREEN HORNET "Bad Bet on a 459-Silent"

One of the problems pretending to be a criminal, as The Green Hornet does...

...is that you're as likely to be wounded or killed by police as by criminals!

And that's exactly what happens here!
Investigating the possibility that crooked police are looting crime scenes before their honest comrades show up, The Green Hornet is caught escaping from a break-in location, and shot by legitimately-responding cops. ("459-Silent" is police code in this city for a silent burglar alarm.)

He escapes, wounded, but can't go to a hospital since there's an all-points-bulletin out for a wounded Green Hornet, and even the Daily Sentinel's respected publisher would be hard-pressed to explain how he had a gunshot wound in exactly the same spot on his body where the legendary verdant villain was shot! (Plus, the bullet could be forensically-matched to the gun of the policeman who shot the Hornet!)
How will Britt and Kato...
1) Get medical treatment for the wounded hero while avoiding connecting Reid and the Hornet, and having CSIs expose the incriminating evidence (the bullet)?
2) Solve the problem of the criminally-inclined cops, and save reporter Mike Axford, who thinks the Hornet is responsible for the robberies, and plans to trap the wounded "criminal", not knowing that crooked cops...who won't hesitate to kill anybody in their way...are behind the break-ins?
The answer to #1 is rather ingenious, and solving #2 is made more difficult since Britt is almost-incapacitated and barely functioning! (Thank God for Kato!)

Tune in below for the exciting answers...

Side Notes:
More day-for-night photography.
Since the story involves break-ins at warehouses, a couple of 20th Century-Fox soundstage exteriors are used for the outside of the two different warehouses, but only one soundstage interior (redressed) is used for both interiors. (The Batman tv series used the same exteriors over and over for their "warehouse" and "alleyway" shots, too.)
Here's the 21st filmed and aired episode..."Bad Bet on a 459-Silent", which aired on Feb 10th, 1967.

Next Week: Will The Green Hornet Create an International Incident...and Why?