The Green Hornet, Episode 13: Doom of the Underworld

 "My job is finished..."

And so the serial ends... suddenly, within twenty minutes, but with finality. The Hornet rather efficiently foils the plot to blow up the offices of the Sentinel, and then foils the baddies entirely by using cunning to turn them against each other. It's all nicely done, incredibly cliched in the best possible way.

There is comedy, with Jenks and Axford, and Miss Case gets to finally meet her hero and, as we might expect, swoon over him. There is much banter at the end. And yet the end of the racket is unexpectedly brutal and violent, as movie serials can occasionally be.

This is, however, the end to a movie serial of the superior sort. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and shall be bavk for more before long.

The Green Hornet, Episode 12: Panic in the Zoo

 "I got the Hornet..."

I'll get to the episode in a minute- it is the penultimate one, after all- but, yeah, zoos in 1940. This zoo looks, on the one hand, like a lot of fun- rides, stalls and all that good stuff, but on the other hand... yes, it's obviously stock footage, but those poor animals in those horrible cages. The cruelty is obvious. It's all, quite blatantly, also a health and safety nightmare. The past is, sometimes, a very foreign country. And yet we're meant to approve of Britt trying to protect the zoo by not publicising the "jinx". Wow.

This aside... there's nothing to particularly indicate that this a penultimate episode. It's just another instalment- cliffhanger hets resolved, the racket is dealt and so we move on to a different bit of extortion. Interswsting, though, that the baddies should finally realise that silencing the Sentinel may well be in their interests, but not that the connection with the Hornet is as close as we know it to be.

How on Earth are they going to end all this in twenty minutes...?

The Green Hornet, Episode 11: Disaster Rides the Rails

 "Six months? Give me six days!"

It's incredible how close we are to the end. Next episode is the penultimate one.And yet still we have an episode of the racketeers being caught with one racket and moving on to another, with set pieces and car chases to pad things out... yet things are padded out so well. This is so much fun to watch.

Two interesting pounts to note, though. The vote rigging plot is wrapped up so quickly- if only Trump's criminal anticsat trying to steal the 2020 election across the pond could be so easily dealt with- and we move on. This is accomplished through narrative by newspaper front page... and one headline shows the word "armoured" spelled with a "u" as per this side of the Atlantic. Did Americans go through a phase of being less  pernickety about Noah Webster's linguistic diktats in 1940?

The second is that there's a random German baddie, in an American movie serial made in 1940 by an industry in which Jewish men were able to enjoy a rare exercise of power, alongside those in the comics industry. It would be nice to think this was political.

Away from such very weighty matters, though, this is fun. It will be interesting to see if the penultimate episode feels penultimate, though...

The Green Hornet, Episode 10: Bullets and Ballots

 "They are repeaters!"

Another episode and, after briefly pausing to resolve the cliffhanger, another racket: this time stuffing ballot boxes in order to rig an election, just like Donald Trump and his fellow vote riggers in today's USA, although their methods are of course quite different, more insidious, and more blaantly racist. Indeed it is, er, the land of the free.

This vote rigging, though, is very 1940, with the "repeaters" (very odd word, but Britt uses it in a newspaper headline so presumably it was current) driving around in cars with their hats and their guns, like a vote rigging Al Capone. It's all good fun.

And then the Green Hornet is driving a long a cliff edge and is blown off it. Bet they re-edit that a bit next episode.

This is all, as ever, just a succession of plotless set pieces. But what set pieces they are...