Monday 25 November 2024 10:42:12 PM CDT
Thursday 21 November 2024 12:41:40 PM CDT
Like the
Executioner
books I read some of the early
Destroyer
books on the school bus. I believe they began around the same time, the
Destroyer coming along a couple of years later. While the Executioner books were straight-up action-adventure with just a bit of
philosophy Murphy and Sapir made the books a running commentary on American society of the latter twentieth century. It runs along the
same lines as the Dirty Harry movies - commies are destroying the once-great Republic. The acerbic observations of writers Murphy and
Sapir are as much fun as the action.
Created, The Destroyer is the
origin story
as they say in comics which were still decent about that time. I read comics on the school bus too. Some of the kids read Mad Magazine
but I always felt as if innocent brain cells were dying a horrible death whenever I read it. Mad was funny at average IQ I suppose.
Anyhow Remo Williams is a Viet Nam vet that the spooks had their eye on since they saw him in action and tried to recruit him for spook
work. Failing to do so they him up to be framed for murder and apparently executed in the chair only they rigged the execution process
so it looked like they fried him but once they got his body out of the prison and revived it he was ready to be made into the ultimate
assassin. Much of the fun is Chiun constantly lecturing Remo on being sloppy and the decadence of the U.S.A. while one of the running
jokes is Chiun's addiction to
soaps.
Way back around 1985 or so there was a
film
that used the characters and that was about it. I liked Fred Ward better in the Tremors movies and Wilford Brimley was the best part of this
one. There was no way to do it even close to the books because it was made for a
Mad Magazine
level audience.
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But what would he inscribe? Advice? A note? To whom? For what? What
would he tell them? That you do your job, you're promoted, and one dark
night they find a dead dope-pusher in an alley on your beat, and he's got
your badge in his hand, and they don't give you a medal, they fall for
the frame-up, and you get the chair. It's you who winds up in the death
house - the place you wanted to send so many men to, so many hoods, punks,
killers, the liars, the pushers, the scum that preyed on society. And then
the people, the right and the good you sweated for and risked your neck for,
rise in their majesty and turn on you. What do you do? All of a sudden,
they're sending people to the chair - the judges who won't give death to the
predators, but give it to the protectors.
Created, The Destroyer
Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir
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