POP-A-LOOZA: THE GREATEST RECORD EVER MADE! Al Hirt, "The Green Hornet Theme"

 

Another challenge for the Green Hornet, his aide Kato, and their rolling arsenal the Black Beauty. Each week, the pop culture website Pop-A-Looza shares some posts from my vast 'n' captivating Boppin' (Like The Hip Folks Do) archives. The latest shared post is a Greatest Record Ever Made! celebration of "The Green Hornet Theme" by Al Hirt.

This piece was prepared as a potential entry for my long-threatened book The Greatest Record Ever Made! (Volume 1), but is not part of that book's current blueprint. Another orphaned GREM! chapter will likely appear as our next shared Pop-A-Looza post. 

Today's Green Hornet GREM! follows last week's shared post about my origin as a Green Hornet and Kato fan, which gave me an opportunity to link to my own abortive attempt to write a 1966-set Green Hornet story: teaser blurb here, introductory script pages here. I could probably finish that story as something else, with original characters in place of the Green Hornet, Kato, Casey, and D.A. Frank Scanlon (and Mike Axford, who would have appeared in later pages). The other characters are my own, including the members of the rock 'n' roll group Ben Arnold and the Turncoats. In subsequent pages, we would have met a rock journalist called Miles Standoff ("It's a pseudonym," he'd say, adding that his real name is Micky Blessing, which is a tip of my hat to the Monkees). I could repurpose all of this, and maybe I will. But, if nothing else, it's difficult to let go of a flight of fancy that reveals Kato to be a fan of the Kinks. So for now, this remains a pipe dream of me writing the adventures of the Green Hornet and Kato.

And even pipe dreams need a proper soundtrack. A bouncy, jazzy Al Hirt number called "The Green Hornet Theme" serves as the latest Boppin' Pop-A-Looza.

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This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio with Dana & Carl airs Sunday nights from 9 to Midnight Eastern, on the air in Syracuse at SPARK! WSPJ 103.3 and 93.7 FM, and on the web at http://sparksyracuse.org/ You can read about our history here.

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