AL HODGE Before And After Captain Video

Al Hodge was born in Ravenna, Ohio on April 18, 1912, and died alone on March 19, 1979, in New York City, in a small, shabby hotel room containing little more than a few Captain Video collectables... items that might be worth a small fortune today.

A report we haven't been able to confirm is that Al's father, Albert E. Hodge, was in his youth a rider with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Troupe. When Al was born, his parents ran a dry-cleaning business in Ravenna. Al graduated from Ravenna High School in 1930 and went on to Miami University, in Oxford, Ohio, where he majored in drama and was on the track team. Radio was where the action was in 1934, and Al found himself doing just about everything imaginable in early radio; in 1935 he was hired by Dick Osgood of WXYZ in Detroit to help Osgood write continuity for a huge number of live music programs being broadcast by WXYZ.

Osgood in his excellent book WYXIE WONDERLAND (Popular Press, 1981) describes Hodge in those days: "Over six feet tall, lean, hard and handsome, although when he smiled he showed poor teeth and seemed self-conscious about it." [This may explain why, in early CAPTAIN VIDEO publicity photos, he keeps his mouth shut, converting his attempt to smile into a strange grimace. Later, he evidently had his teeth fixed, and Captain Video then exhibited a broad smile featuring a row of perfect pearly-whites.] Osgood continues, "His complexion was florid, his eyes varied from grey through blue to bright green [depending on lighting]; his hair was brown and straight and thick."

Hodge arrived at the station at a crucial time. THE LONE RANGER, written by Fran Striker, and created by Striker and writer-director James Jewell, was a runaway hit, and station owner George W. Trendle was looking for yet another series to market to the networks. One of Trendle's idea-men suggested a series similar to Frank L. Packard's 1910-era crime novels about Jimmy Dale, the "Grey Seal." Dale was a rich playboy by day, but by night he cracked safes to gain evidence to quash criminals and their rackets, leaving behind as his calling card a grey gummed sticker! In brainstorming sessions, station management voted for a sort of imitation of the Lone Ranger, updated to the mid 1930s. Eventually, Striker and Jewell came up with Britt Reid, the GREEN HORNET.

Reid worked by day as publisher of a big-city newspaper, The Sentinel, but vanished early in the afternoon, never to be seen until the next morning no matter how many crises might develop in the meantime. When asked where he had been, he'd mention some frivolous social function that only a parasitic playboy would attend--- but in reality, rushing home he would don the outfit of The Green Hornet, a mysterious masked crime fighter, and with the aid of his faithful companion Kato, he would bust rackets and trap criminals for the police to find later. Kato was an oriental engineering genius who developed a super-powered car that could outrun anything else on the road, and a "gas gun" with which the Hornet could put adversaries harmlessly to sleep. Like the Grey Seal, he left a green hornet sticker as his calling card. To underscore the fact that the Green Hornet was an updated Lone Ranger, he was made a relative. The Ranger's brother Dan Reid Sr. was killed in the ambush that left the Ranger the sole survivor. Dan Reid's son, Dan Jr., was left an orphan when his wagon trail was attacked by indians and his mother was killed. Dan Jr. rode with the Ranger and Tonto on many radio adventures. What if, in later years, he had founded a great crusading newspaper, and his son Britt had made himself into a masked crime fighter without at first knowing he was following in the footsteps of an illustrious ancestor?

Who was to play Britt Reid/Green Hornet? Al Hodge auditioned and got the part! For Britt Reid he used a cultured mid-western voice similar to his own, while for the Hornet he used a deeper, rougher, tougher growl. His Hornet voice was so distinctive that for the first GREEN HORNET movie serial (1939), in which Britt Reid was played by Gordon Jones, Hodge went to Hollywood and dubbed all the Hornet's lines. [In the second HORNET serial, made in 1940, Reid was played by Warren Hull, who did the Hornet's lines as well as his own.] The Hornet's sidekick Kato was a Japanese engineer who masqueraded as Britt Reid's valet in the daytime. He was played by Tokataro Hayashi, aka Raymond Toyo. To make a slot in the radio schedule for the two-a-week Hornet broadcasts, Trendle cancelled two other Striker-scripted programs, retaining from them a popular character, an Irish cop named Michael Axford, played by Jim Irwin. On the HORNET, Axford became Britt Reid's bodyguard, and also doubled as a (very ineffective) reporter. There was a fairly large regular cast. The paper's star reporter was Ed Lowery. Britt Reid's secretary was Miss Case. The paper's editor was Gunnigan. Reid's father Dan was almost never heard from, but when he was, he was played by John Todd, aka Tonto! In each fast-moving program, first the newspaper crew and then the Hornet tackled some racket, and it was the Hornet who busted it. Crooks thought the Hornet was one of their own kind, a sinister and ruthless competitor. And the police considered the Hornet to be public enemy number one, but never quite managed to catch him, no matter how many traps they laid.

THE GREEN HORNET became a hit, and continued on the air until 1952. Unlike the LONE RANGER, however, it never managed to spin off successful versions in other media. Trendle was infamous for paying low salaries to performers and staff, no matter how profitable the programs they worked on were for the station. Al Hodge took the decisive action we'd expect from the future Captain Video, and organized a Detroit local of the newly formed American Federation of Radio Artists (AFRA) union. He remained very active in fighting for just compensation for radio and TV performers for the rest of his career. At WXYZ, Hodge also wrote and delivered the often sharply worded editorials on the daily local commentary program TOWN TALK , wrote ad copy, served as a disc jockey and MC for live shows, narrated football games, and worked as a producer. One of his most legendary achievements in radio occurred in 1942, when he was asked to make a live broadcast from a Ford Motor factory that was supposedly assembling B-24s. Something went badly wrong, because the radio crew was sent to an empty factory. Hodge as producer and the Ford public relations man were the only people present, other than the announcer, Bob Hite, and the man operating the remote broadcast equipment. Hodge showed the genius for improvisation that later served him so well when things went badly wrong on the live CAPTAIN VIDEO broadcasts. He and the PR man found some riviting guns and tables, as well as some sheet metal to throw around, and while Hite for the full half-hour improvised the completely imaginary details of planes being assembled, Hodge and the PR man threw metal around, rolled carts, rivited, shouted at one another, rattled crane chains, and did whatever else they could find to do that made plane-building-like sounds! In 1944, Hodge finally left WXYZ to serve as a Navy officer in WWII. Contracting plurisy, he was then confined to bed for a year!

Few details about Hodge's personal life are available. He was married three times; apparently he had only one child, Diane, the product of his first marriage. When Hodge was ready to resume his career, New York was the undisputed center both for radio and for the newly emerging medium of live TV. An old Detroit friend, Ernie Ricca, was directing many radio programs and gave Hodge plenty of work. Another director friend was Frank Telford, who later became one of CAPTAIN VIDEO's producers. Not many radio actors made the transition to TV; as Frankie Thomas notes, most radio actors never learned to memorize their parts, since radio broadcasts were done with the actors reading directly from scripts. However, Hodge's stage experience in college and immediately thereafter, touring with the Casford Players, had prepared him perfectly for the short rehearsals and stressful live performances of Golden Age TV.

In New York he appeared on a very wide range of postwar radio and TV series before being hired as CAPTAIN VIDEO, taking over the role apparently on Friday, December 15, 1950. Precisely how he got the part is not known, but James Caddigan must have been delighted to find an actor to play Captain Video who had played famous adventure heroes almost from the beginning of his broadcast career. It has been said many times that CAPTAIN VIDEO was the only consistently popular program that the DuMont network had to offer. By the spring of 1955, DuMont was reduced to only two sponsored network programs, CAPTAIN VIDEO, and an evening news broadcast. When the news program lost its sponsor, the network could no longer pay for rental of the coax cable required to reach its affiliates, and CAPTAIN VIDEO left the air. Even four years after the network show ended, when Hodge as Captain Video made a personal appearance at Macy's Department Store in New York, he drew the largest crowd in the history of the store.

Al Hodge as Captain Video appeared irregularly on the 6-hour local NY WABD children's program "Wonderama," during the 1955 - 56 broadcast season. He introduced showings of movie serial chapters, told stories, taught "science facts," and discussed various crafts and hobbies. His segments were popular enough that WABD gave him his own program, CAPTAIN VIDEO AND HIS CARTOON RANGERS, beginning in March of 1956 and broadcast weekdays direct from his "secret mountain headquarters," where he used the remote telecarrier to pick up various Paramount cartoons featuring Superman, Betty Boop and Little Lulu. This series continued until August 1957; the Captain (minus headquarters set) took more than a year to find a new home with New Jersey's WNTA, where he hosted the daily SUPER SERIAL SHOW, again showing serial chapters, only for a couple of months early in 1959. His last regular TV appearance was as himself, Al Hodge, on Al Hodge's SPACE EXPLORERS, for a few months in late 1961, on WOR-TV. A feud with station management over how much show time would be devoted to commercials caused Hodge to walk outof the show at the end of 1961. That was the end of Hodge's career on either network or local New York TV.

Because of his almost complete identification with the role of CAPTAIN VIDEO, Hodge found it nearly impossible to find work in the industry after 1957, at least in New York. He later said ruefully, "whenever I walked into an agent's office, they'd say, 'Hello, Video, what can we do for you?'" He did a few commercials for toothpaste, dressed as a dentist, then relocated to California where he quickly found work in such drama/detective series as ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS, MANNIX, TIGHTROPE and HAWAIIAN EYE. Apparently he was offered a continuing role on MANNIX as a police detective. Almost every one of Hodge's close friends was in radio and TV in New York City. The rest were in Detroit, Cincinnati and Chicago. In California, he had work, but nothing to do in his spare time. It's unclear just what happened, but Hodge's increasing problems with alcohol apparently played a large part in sending him back to New York, where he sold real estate for a while, then worked in an employment office, as a bank guard, as a security guard, and in many other increasingly lower-paid odd-job slots. His third wife, Jane Virginia, a former nightclub dancer, claimed to have completely lost track of him in 1975. His next-to-last public appearance was as Captain Video on the network talk show hosted by old friend Mike Douglas, in 1975, but sharp-eyed viewers were dismayed to see that the Captain was dressed in one of the Video Ranger's old uniforms, and looked terribly seedy. For the last few years of his life, he lived in a $63-a-week room in a rotting midtown Manhattan hotel, with a woman known only as Alice, both drinking heavily. Hotel staff reported no visitors. Alice died in March of 1979, and Hodge died a month later. As one Chicago newspaper reported at the time, "From a third-floor room in the George Washington Hotel, Albert Hodge could crane his neck out a sooty window and look north to Rockefeller Center and the nation's television networks. The networks never looked back."

A year before his death, Hodge had called a pathetic news conference to announce that he would soon be appearing as a CIA agent in producer Irwin Schiff's proposed movie, The Killing Season. The conference was probably intended to generate funding for the film, but nothing came of the plans. Hodge did remark during the conference that, even in 1978, he was frequently recognized on the street as Captain Video, and usually addressed as "Captain." Reporters noted that "Hodge maintains his fine physique, but his hair has greyed and his eyes show that the last 20 years haven't been easy ones."

Several commentators have remarked that if Hodge had been able to hold on a few years more, he might have found a new career of sorts. The STAR WARS, BATTLESTAR GALACTICA and STAR TREK franchises had helped to trigger nostalgia, science fiction and fantasy conventions all over the US, and many long-faded stars of 1940s and 1950s horror and science fiction films found guest appearances at these conventions to be a fairly steady source of income.

Al Hodge's years of performing as the Green Hornet are preserved in part on battered transcription disks. Cassette copies of these disks have been sold by "Old Time Radio" dealers for more than 25 years. His work as Captain Video is almost entirely lost. Only two half-hour episodes starring Hodge are currently in circulation on video tape. About 20 other episodes featuring Hodge are known to exist in various collections, together with perhaps 15 episodes featuring Richard Coogan. Those who saw Al Hodge on TV in the 1950s are today in their 60s, and it is sad to think that when the last of these fans is gone, Al Hodge will truly and finally die as well.

Some additional information about Al Hodge kindly provided by Ed Tassinari:

Al was a BMOC at Miami University. He maintained good grades, led his fraternity, was involved in class politics and elections, took part in student theatricals, and was the university's star high jumper.

Al was married three times, the first time on 10/30/36 to a woman named Elizabeth, with whom he had his only child, a daughter, Diane. He divorced Elizabeth in 1946 and married a woman named Doris, who had two young children, a boy and a girl, from a previous marriage. These two children are shown with Hodge in some publicity photos during his Captain Video days. He divorced his second wife in 1961 and married Jane Virginia Osborne, a former showgirl and dancer, sometime in 1961 or 1962. Hodge moved out on his third wife in 1975. She died in 1991 and is buried beside Hodge at Kenisco Cemetary in Westchester County, NY. According to wife Jane, the divorce of Doris involved a financial settlement which cost Hodge almost all his savings; this may have marked the beginning of Hodge's slide into dire poverty and increasingly menial jobs.

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