Summary: clickhere Visit the Radio America Store web site.Buy your 50 mp3 for &5.00 The Green Hornet was an American radio program that ran on WXYZ (Detroit), the Mutual Network and the ABC Blue Network from January 31, 1936 to December 5, 1952. Created by WXYZ's George W. Trendle and Fran Striker, who also created The Lone Ranger, the juvenile adventure series initially starred Al Hodge in the title role, followed by Donovan Faust (1943), Bob Hall (1944-51) and Jack McCarthy (1951-52). The radio show used Rimsky-Korsakov's "Flight of the Bumblebee" as its theme song, blended with a hornet buzz created on a theremin. The series detailed the adventures of Britt Reid, debonair newspaper publisher by day, crime-fighting masked hero at night, along with his trusty sidekick, Kato, a Filipino of Japanese ancestry. With the outbreak of World War II his Japanese heritage was almost completely dropped, leading to the common misperception that the character's nationality had been switched by the show's writers. (When the characters were used in a pair of movie serials Kato's nationality was inexplicably given as Korean.) Reid is a close relative of The Lone Ranger. The character of Dan Reid, who appeared on the Lone Ranger program as the Masked Man's nephew, was also featured on the Green Hornet as Britt's father. The Lone Ranger's name is often incorrectly stated to have been John Reid, an error first made in a volume called The Big Broadcast in the 1970s. In fact, however, writers for WXYZ never provided a first name for the character. In the original introduction of the radio show announcer Mike Wallace proclaimed that the Green Hornet went after criminals that "even the G-Men (FBI agents) couldn't reach". The show's producers were called by FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover who prompted them to remove the line implying that some crime fighting was beyond the abilities of the FBI. During World War II, the radio show's title was used as a codename for SIGSALY, secret encryption equipment used in the war.
