What happened to all those two-fisted pulp adventures?
I’m considering running a role-playing game in that vein, but I confess I don’t know the genre all that well. Roleplaying supplements are available for the curious: GURPS Cliffhangers and the FATE-powered Spirit of the Century, for example. But I also wanted to go to the source, so I went to my local library to check out a few books and/or vids to fit the bill. Research. The effort produced surprisingly small results. Admittedly, my search suffered in large part from this very ignorance, but…pulp adventures seem to be almost entirely absent from Montclair Public Library, and all the libraries in the area.
We all have a vague idea of what they were like: tales of daring-do from the inter-war period. They were either inheritors of the tradition of Victorian romances or the last gasp of that era, a time when the dark corners of the map were vanishingly small but writers could still pretend that faraway Tibet or the Sahara or the Amazon held lost cities and giant apes. Airplanes and zeppelins were thrilling, jazz a novelty. Whites still ruled the world, but WWI had tarnished the reputation of old Europe and its refined gentleman-adventurer, so into that gap stepped the American vision of the hero: talented, rugged, egalitarian, and ready to punch his way out of any danger, unconfined by class and misplaced propriety and the old nationalism. Pulp heroes were the model for Indiana Jones, and everyone knows Indiana Jones. Star Wars, too, paid tribute to the space opera of the era, the American frontier spirit translated to space. The pulp serials were what Sky Captain and the City of Tomorrow were supposed to imitate.
But who were the heroes that Indy and Skywalker imitated? Who were the actual two-fisted serial heroes?
Well, there’s Tarzan and John Carter. And Flash Gordon. But they’re kinda science-fictiony, not really what I’m after. And…uh…that guy who fought Ming the Merciless. No, Ming was Flash Gordon’s nemesis; I mean the guy who fought Fu Manchu. He must’ve had a name. And…um. Didn’t Valentino do some of that? Oh, oh! The Shadow! Okay, the Shadow. That’s one. And once I look up the guy who fought Fu Manchu, that’s two.
See my problem?
The pulp genre is loosely defined. On one border of the serials lie space opera and the early westerns, which share the spirit of the pulps but not the setting. On another border of the pulp genre lies the film-noir private detective, which shares the setting but not the spirit: one wallows in cynicism and sin, the other celebrates relentless optimism and purity of spirit. On another border lies the proto-superheroes, gadgeteers and mystery men like the very early Batman. Thanks to King Kong and his lost world origin, pulps share a short border with B monster movies. But the backbone of the genre, tales of two-fisted pilots dangling from airships, wrestling tigers, and taking on the whole Yellow Menace with nothing but two fists and righteous fury, have drifted from popular perception.
So I did some further research. Turns out that the pulp genre, and the serial movie genre, were never all that prominent in their pure state. The Saturday morning serials of which I’d heard so much existed largely as an intersection of things that adventure fiction of the era—space opera, hard-boiled detectives, westerns, mystery men—had mostly in common, rather than a single vision. To a large extent, I’m chasing something that never really was. Bummer.
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