Re: Pulse Pounding Adventures - Pulp and Film Serial Discussion
Posted: Sun Oct 07, 2018 11:46 pm
I have a small used book store in my town, I will have Doc Savage on his look out list for me. That just sounds like so much fun.
Where everything is possible.
http://echoesofthemultiverse.com/
I have a small used book store in my town, I will have Doc Savage on his look out list for me. That just sounds like so much fun.
The Radio Archives site I linked you on pages 2 & 3 has a lot of those books and more, both in novel and audiobook form.RUSCHE wrote: ↑Sun Oct 07, 2018 11:46 pmI have a small used book store in my town, I will have Doc Savage on his look out list for me. That just sounds like so much fun.
Ares wrote: ↑Sun Oct 07, 2018 11:59 pmThe Radio Archives site I linked you on pages 2 & 3 has a lot of those books and more, both in novel and audiobook form.
Than you. Are they appropriate for younger readers as well? My youngest is 13 and this would interest him.
Hmmm. They don't include any overt sexual activity or generally a lot of gore, but the writer has a lot of fun with language, and include a lot of 1930s slang. But if you don't mind explaining some terminology to him occasionally, they should be fine.RUSCHE wrote: ↑Mon Oct 08, 2018 12:01 amThan you. Are they appropriate for younger readers as well? My youngest is 13 and this would interest him.
I am in the process of looking over of what to order. He is a leveled headed young man and I will obviously read them first. Thanks for you insight and help on this.Ares wrote: ↑Mon Oct 08, 2018 12:08 amHmmm. They don't include any overt sexual activity or generally a lot of gore, but the writer has a lot of fun with language, and include a lot of 1930s slang. But if you don't mind explaining some terminology to him occasionally, they should be fine.
Here's a link to the above book : https://www.radioarchives.com/Doc_Savag ... /ap092.htm
That’s funny- I wonder if Roy Thomas was referencing that when he put Merrano and others with the Nazis in his Invaders run.
Unfortunately not. Doc Savage: Phantom Lagoon was written in 2013. Will Murray writes modern era Doc Savage stuff, but set in the 1920s, 30s and 40s. Why does it have Kenneth Robeson on the cover? Because Kenneth Robeson was a pseudonym used by all of the Doc Savage writers, starting with his co-creator and main contributor, Lester Dent. It's become something of a joke/badge of honor that anyone who writes a Doc Savage story do so under the Kenneth Robeson name to keep up the "illusion" that Doc has only ever been written by one person.Jabroniville wrote: ↑Mon Oct 08, 2018 3:10 amThat’s funny- I wonder if Roy Thomas was referencing that when he put Merrano and others with the Nazis in his Invaders run.
Speaking of which Ares, here's another person's idea for an update of the Lone Ranger (this was written before the movie was released.)Ares wrote: ↑Thu Sep 27, 2018 6:28 pmAlexander?RUSCHE wrote: ↑Thu Sep 27, 2018 5:52 pm I took it personally with how The Lone Ranger movie was handled, He was always a hero of mine. I have a radio album framed on my living room wall. I hope they do Doc Savage justice. I fear they will not. I think the older Skarsgard brother( name is escaping me) would have been a better choice.
But yeah, I always liked the Lone Ranger as well, and it hurt to see what they did to the character in that movie, everything from turning him into this total joke to having the Silver Bullets being there to kill the villain who was a Wendigo, to Tonto being played by frickin Johnny Depp with that stupid bird on his head.
I just . . . the whole reason the Lone Ranger used Silver Bullets was two fold: to let everyone know who had fired said shot, and to be a constant reminder that, like silver, every human life is precious. The Longer Ranger went for disabling and disarm trickshots because he didn't believe that human lives should be taken needlessly. But instead of staying true to that, they turned it into a joke.
I felt the same way about the John Carter of Mars film, which captured the look and feel of Barsoom but none of the soul of any of the characters. The one bright spot was making Dejah Thoris less of a damsel in distress, but having her be some action scientist was a bit much. Still, the movie had so much potential that it completely squandered.
And it would have been dirt simple to make the general premise of the Lone Ranger film work. Have the LR come out west to help his brother out, but instead of a lawyer, it's because he was sort of a world traveler picking up different skills. His dad was a Texas Ranger and taught both boys how to shoot, but maybe the LR wanted to do other things. He used his gun skills to be a trick shooter, then worked on becoming an actor, but he felt a calling to do work as a lawman, but wanted to be smarter about it, so he traveled to France and studied under either Eugène François Vidocq (the father of modern detective/policeman, and a VERY interesting character), or under one of his men, learning the ins and outs of proper police work, how to blend in with criminal society, etc.
So when he comes back, he's got this eclectic collection of skills he can use to help his brother out, and he demonstrates it when he comes home, both in trick shooting and beating up some local toughs in a fist fight. But then the LR goes with his brother on the ambush that sees the brother dead and the LR saved by Tonto, who is in fact the LR's childhood friend and who his brother was often asking for advice on tracking down criminals.
From there, the LR recovers, finds his silver mine, and unironically makes his statement about the preciousness of life. He then employs his disguise skills around town to infiltrate the criminal elements, uses his detective skills to track them down, make it clear that Tonto is better at tracking, steal and close-in fighting, and once the round up the bad guys, make it clear he's going to keep fighting for actual justice in the west.
And don't get me started on what they did to the Lone Ranger's nephew with that damned Green Hornet film.
Well, the Indiana Jones movies (the first three, anyway) are probably the best Pulp films to come out of Hollywood in the last 30 years, though some of the Mummy films were entertaining enough on their own, the Rocketeer was good fun, etc. But yeah, it's amazing how bad they are at making a simple action/adventure period piece.
So the buzz around the internets is that Gore Verbinski will be remaking The Lone Ranger, with Johnny Depp playing Tonto. Let us leave aside the fact that despite Depp being generally pretty cool he is still bleach for the purposes of whitewashing a character, because every other site talking about this seems to have forgotten that Johnny Depp, despite some purported Cherokee ancestry, is still basically a white guy.
No, let us instead discuss the merits of a Lone Ranger remake, which has not received entirely kind press from the movie blogging community, mostly because the Lone Ranger seems sort of corny. Which is ridiculous, of course, because the guy has the finale of the William Tell Overture – one of the most exciting bits of classical music ever – as his theme, and no trailer with a lot of explosions and horse ridin’ and shootin’ set to the William Tell Overture is going to be boring.
If they asked me to write it, I’d go to the Mask of Zorro well and make it generational. Have the original Lone Ranger emerge out of the Bleeding Kansas period – Texas Rangers were known to occasionally cross into Kansas, and the possibility that a group of Texas Rangers could have been involved in something horrific involving escaped slaves – or at least allowed it to happen – and disillusion the Lone Ranger so much so that he would abandon his unit and become, well, the Lone Ranger? That seems entirely reasonable.
Now, if the Lone Ranger gets his start in northern Texas and Kansas, that means he’s not very far off from the historic stomping grounds of several of the Apache tribes. So let’s say Tonto is an Apache. The Apache were, frankly, some of the baddest asses of the southwest native tribes of the time – a lot of other tribes thought, not unfairly, that they were kind of crazy. And they didn’t like anybody.
So why the Lone Ranger/Tonto partnership? Well, in Apache legend, there’s a pair of heroes/demigods/myths (their exact status is unclear) named Child-Born-of-Water and Killer-of-Enemies. These two always work as a pair. Were the Lone Ranger – not yet the Lone Ranger yet, not really – to stumble into an Apache camp, half-dead from exhaustion and thirst, in such a way as to resemble many of the legends surrounding the beginning/birth/genesis of Child-Born-of-Water, perhaps the medicine men of the camp would suggest that he not be killed off in the usual way but watched closely, to make sure this was indeed a child of Usen. Sticking Tonto – antisocial even among his own, but with the Power that very few Apache have, to leave no tracks and know men’s thoughts – with him to make sure he didn’t die of eating the wrong snake. Eventually sending the two of them off together to defeat the enemies of mankind, as the legends demand that Child-Born-of-Water and Killer-of-Enemies do. And thus begins a partnership that lasts twenty years.
Twenty years later, with the Ranger and Tonto in their late forties, it’s a new era: the peak of the Wild West, and not coincidentally the sunset of the Apache nations. Mangas Coloradas was killed in 1863. Cochise is jailed in 1872, dies in 1874. His son Taza dies in 1876. Geronimo lasts until 1886, but by the 1870s he’s reduced to small-scale guerilla raids and escaping from the whites on a regular basis.
This is when the Lone Ranger dies, in the course of protecting innocents (as you might expect). Tonto tries to go home, but by this point there’s not really any home left for him to which he might return. And one of those people is a young man whose family was murdered by a rail baron relentlessly expanding west, who only wants revenge – but, as Tonto sees, for a second time a white man satisfies the legends of Child-Born-of-Water’s birth…
See? You’d go see that.