#street and smith

[cantsayidont]

August 1984. This won't change anyone's feelings about cult movie perennial THE ADVENTURES OF BUCKAROO BANZAI: ACROSS THE EIGHTH DIMENSION one way or the other, but if you're wondering what the hell the deal is supposed to be with Buckaroo Banzai and his team, the answer is, "It's an obvious pastiche of the pulp hero Doc Savage."

Launched in 1933, Doc Savage was one of the leading adventure heroes of the pulp magazines. Doc (whose full name was Clark Savage Jr.) was scientifically trained from childhood to the peak of human perfection, singularly adept in everything from mechanical engineering to medicine to martial arts. He had a secret headquarters called the Fortress of Solitude and a whole array of specially designed vehicles and equipment, but he was also a public figure, with offices in the Empire State Building. Doc had a team of eccentric, highly specialized aides — Monk Mayfair, Ham Brooks, Renny Renwick, Long Tom Roberts, and Johnny Littlejohn — who each had a particular skill and a couple of distinctive personality traits (for instance, Monk was a skilled industrial chemist, but also an "ape-like" brute with a ferocious temper). They were sometimes aided by Doc's cousin, Pat Savage, who was almost as capable as Doc, although he tried to keep her out of the fray because she was (gasp) a girl.

This was a fairly common pattern for pulp heroes. For instance, the pulp version of the Shadow (who was distinctly different from the radio incarnation) relied on a whole network of agents, some appearing only once or twice, some recurring across many of his published adventures. From a narrative standpoint, the agents and assistants had two principal purposes: The first was to offset the rather overpowered heroes — pulp heroes didn't necessarily have superhuman powers, but even those who didn't tended to be preternaturally skilled at nearly everything, so it was convenient to limit their direct involvement in an adventure to crucial moments, and let the assistants (who could be much more fallible) do much of the legwork. The second object was to beef up the characterization. Doc Savage was morally irreproachable as well as absurdly multi-talented, so there wasn't a lot to be done with him character-wise, while maintaining the mystique of a character like the Shadow required him to remain a fairly closed book.

Although the pulp heroes were a huge influence on early comic book superheroes like Superman and Batman, some of these conventions didn't translate well to other media: In a 13-page comic book story or half-hour radio episode, having too many characters was cumbersome (and expensive, where it meant hiring extra actors), and comic book readers normally expected to follow their four-color heroes quite closely, even before the breathless internal monologue became a genre staple. So, Superman inherited Doc Savage's Fortress of Solitude, but not his "Fabulous Five" assistants, while heroes like Batman and Captain America generally stuck with a single sidekick rather than a team of aides. Even the late Doc Savage pulp adventures (which ended in 1949) de-emphasized the assistants to keep the focus more on Doc himself. Ultimately, the pulp heroes didn't really have the right narrative center of gravity for visual media, which is why they've become relatively obscure, despite repeated revival attempts. The 1975 Doc Savage movie with Ron Ely, for instance, was a notorious commercial flop, and elements like Doc's childishly bickering assistants seemed odd and dated, even taking into account the film's nostalgia-bait '30s period setting.

What BUCKAROO BANZAI tried to do was to bring that old pulp hero formula into the modern era with a big infusion of '80s style and humor. Like Doc Savage, Buckaroo is a wildly gifted polymath (in the opening scenes, he rushes from performing brain surgery to test-driving his Jet Car through a mountain), so famous and important a personage that he puts the president of the United States on hold, and he surrounds himself with an array of brilliant, eccentric aides with silly nicknames who play in his rock band when they're not fighting crime or doing advanced scientific experiments.

Alas, judging by the poor box office returns, general audiences were no more amenable to the '80s version of this formula than they had been to DOC SAVAGE: MAN OF BRONZE nine years earlier, even with the 1984 film's extraordinary cast and memorably witty dialogue. Granted, even many of the movie's most diehard fans are baffled by the convoluted plot — a crucial expository scene where the leader of the Black Lectroids (Rosalind Cash) explains much of what's going on is nigh-incomprehensible without subtitles or closed captioning — but beyond that, THE ADVENTURES OF BUCKAROO BANZAI is essentially an extended riff on a particular slice of pop culture that had long since dropped out of the public consciousness, which is both part of its charm and also its commercial undoing, at least as mainstream entertainment.

(Also, if you're wondering, yes, the TOM STRONG series by Alan Moore and Chris Sprouse is also an obvious Doc Savage pastiche, although at least some of its plot and character concepts were probably retoolings of unused ideas from Moore's earlier Maximum Press/Awesome Comics SUPREME series, which was an extended pastiche of the pre-Crisis Superman.)

[driveintheaterofthemind]

Doc Savage

Art by Chris Mooneyham

[ghaas]

 "The Black Hush" The Shadow Magazine, Aug. 1, 1933

Painted by George Rozen

[pantalon-et-colombine]

Frank Xavier Leyendecker (American, 1876-1924)

1905

The Merry Tune and the Sad Heart, The Virtuoso

Frank Xavier Leyendecker, also known as Frank James Leyendecker, was an American illustrator. He worked with his brother Joseph Christian Leyendecker, in their studio, first in Chicago, then later in New York City and New Rochelle, New York.

He was born in Germany on January 19, 1876, as Franz Xavier Leyendecker. Frank Leyendecker and his sister Augusta lived for a period of time (though 1924) with their brother J. C. Leyendecker and the model Charles Beach in New Rochelle.

He studied for a time at the Académie Julian in France. He was known for his stained glass work as well as his illustrations for posters, magazines and advertisements. He also painted covers for Street & Smith pulp magazines, such as People's Favorite Magazine and The Popular Magazine, as well as for Fawcett's pulp magazine Battle Stories. His painting for Battle Stories was originally created as a WWI recruitment poster that Fawcett Publications posthumously reprinted as a pulp magazine cover in 1931. Leyendecker served as the judge in the first Strathmore Water Color Contest, sponsored by the Mittineague Paper Company of Massachusetts. His work was described as an "important feature" of the second exhibition of the Society of Illustrators at the International gallery in New York.

Leyendecker was suffering from depression and poor health due to his ongoing drug addiction, when he most likely committed suicide by morphine overdose on April 18, 1924, at the age of 48.

[contentabnormal]

This week on Content Abnormal we present William Johnstone in The Shadow adventure "Shyster Payoff"!

[sweetbunanarchy]

Put a little something for Black History Month with my favorite black characters❤️💚💛

[blueueee]

(forgot to post this here)

[huariqueje]

Paris at Twilight - Jeanne Rosier Smith , 2025.

American , b. 1966  -

Pastel , 12  x  8 in.

[botanynightmares]

[mayanhandballcourt]

Photographer Kelsey Smith

[nobeerreviews]

Getting lost is not fatal. Almost every time, it will make your world bigger.

-- Julian Smith

(Ribeauvillé, France)

[robinartblog]

[driveintheaterofthemind]

Doc Savage (Jan1938)

Art by Emery Clarke

Street And Smith

[girlvasectomy]

[michonnes]

She is a survivor.

[xosiren]

𝕊𝕥𝕪𝕝𝕖