Forgotten TV: The Adventures of Fu Manchu (1956)

Before there was Hannibal or Dracula getting TV Shows, one man beat them to the punch...

Yes, this popular Pulp, Film, Comics and TV fixture once headlined his own Show!

As a quick refresher/info dump, Dr. Fu Manchu is an evil Asian Man.
He's a Scientist, Doctor, Madman and all around would-be Dictator.

He faced off with many Heroes, including Sherlock Holmes (in a special), The Avengers (as copycat version Yellow Claw) and Shang-Chi, which was eventually retconned away in time for that Character's MCU Debut.

He's evil and Asian- that's all you need to know.

After a failed Pilot in 1952 (Starring John Carradine!), this Show came about.
I only have four of the 13 Episodes (the same cut together into a Film, as well), but I can cover this well enough.

So this is Fu Manchu...

No, an Asian Actor never seems to have played the character.  On one hand, do you blame them?

Glen Gordon plays him well-enough (he has natural presence), but his squinting and accent (He ah always ah pauses to ah sound foreign) are very dated!

He's always hounded by two Federal Agents that try to stop his various schemes.

Said schemes include stealing gold, ruining peace talks, killing various figures and, oh yeah, WORKING WITH HITLER!

Naturally, his attempts always fail...but he's also never caught.  His henchmen, like this guy, aren't so lucky.

By the way, falling from a fourth story window makes no blood come out of you- naturally!

Every Episode seems to end with him in his lair watching whatever just happened on a TV.  How and why he can do that are never explained.

Oh well, he'll get it right next time.  He doesn't.

 A weird TV experiment.  As I've mentioned in other Articles, TV was a new thing in the '50s and nobody was quite sure how it should work.  It's why early TV Shows feel like Plays...just filmed on Cameras.  This one was an early attempt to make a strong narrative centered on a villain.  It was one thing to make a Film about Fu Manchu (which had been done as early as 1929), since it was a one-off.  Likewise, reading Rohmer's Short Stories about him was a more natural thing, even if Books didn't tend to use repeated villains as the focal points.  Doing a Show around this guy was too controversial in 1952, but I guess it was fine four years later.  The actual Stories have *some* variety, but they only have so many ideas.  Two out of the four Episodes feature him using plastic surgery to make duplicates for various means.  The other two feature him using lackeys forced to work with him, but inevitably losing the will to do evil.  I'm guessing we got that a few more times, given the pattern so far.  I'd look more into the other Episodes, but IMDB is pretty sparse.  Only these four Episodes (below) are semi-full Pages, since, again, they were released as a Film too.  Fun Fact: Glen Gordon's last Roles were all on The Waltons- a far cry from being a yellow menace!  As for Fu Manchu, he'd return to Films...played by Christopher Lee and Peter Sellers (in his last Film).  His cultural impact- while not positive- is notable.  After all, who else has a kind of mustache named after him?  If nothing else, the Disc I have does come with a Cartoon, so all is right with the world!

I can't recommend this for the right reasons, but there are many wrong ones that will suffice.