The Green Hornet': Seventeen Years of Radio History
"The Green Hornet" was something of a modern day version of "The Lone Ranger", using his fists and "knockout gas" rather than a gun to subdue the bad guys. In fact, the same man--George W. Trendle--created both shows, and the Green Hornet character was supposedly The Lone Ranger's great nephew.
In January of 1936, the first thirty-minute episode aired on WXYZ out of Detroit, Michigan and starred Al Hodge as Britt Reid, a newspaperman with the Daily Sentinel by day and the Green Hornet by night. With his powerful car, the Black Beauty, he pretended to be a villain while battling crime in the big city with his sidekick and lookout, Kato. Kato also drove Black Beauty and helped keep an eye out for the coppers. Because of his job at the newspaper, Reid was alerted of any new crime right away, which kept him one step ahead of the villains. Because he was a vigilante, The Green Hornet was declared by law enforcement officials as an outlaw, which inadvertently helped him slink along the underbelly of the city.
Originally, George W. Trendle liked the title "The Hornet", but because there was already a show with that name they faced copyright issues. The idea eventually came to insert a color into the name, and he and his writing partner, Fran Striker, threw out "blue" and "pink" before finally settling on the color green (how different would things have been in a world with "The Pink Hornet", I wonder?)
Fran Striker wrote all of the scripts for the Green Hornet until April 1944 (while simultaneously writing for "The Lone Ranger"). After that, several other writers were brought in to script the show.
Following Al Hodge, three other radio actors played Britt Reid. Donovan Faust took the role for the 1943 season. Robert Hall played the part from 1943 to 1946. Jack McCarthy finished the last years of the series from 1946 through 1952. On December 5th of that year, WXYZ aired the last
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