Who else thinks they should do a "serious" remake of the old "Doc Savage" pulp novels.?

Heaven forfend.

Some of us old pulp fans are also old movie fans. We are also QUITE familiar with the Ron Ely movie version. A "serious" revival of Doc Savage, in pulp or on film, is going to deal with a lot of the same issues that movie had to deal with because it was so cheap. People think they KNOW how to write an action hero. There is a code of conduct and everything.

Lester Dent was writing quickly. The sources say, Doc Savage was a rewrite of Philip Wylie's the Savage Gentleman. I've read that book recently. I've been a Wylie fan since I was a teenager. It was a typical Wylie satire with some adventure, and an insider's knowledge of power in the U. S. at the time. And I believe Doc Savage was an adaptation of it to the pulps. Even the misogyny -- which it was -- was taken from the Wylie book where it served a satirical purpose. What really made this thing work was Dent's energy and his willingness to tell a story. There have been revivals of the character. Some good, some bloody awful. The further you get from the original man of bronze the more you get warmed over warmed over Wylie. Doc Savage was perfect for the pulps. Period. Superman, which sources also claim was based on Wylie's Gladiator, was perfect for the comics. Except Simon and Schuster knew what they were doing even then -- Wylie's Hugo Danner is an anti-hero or a villain. Kal-el, or Clark Kent, is absolutely neither.

Doc Savage was not a "serious" creation. He was a GREAT creation, but not a serious one. A "serious" remake is NOT an auspicious idea.

EDIT: I still want to argue. Pulp writers like Frederick Faust, Lester Dent and Leigh Brackett were reasonably erudite people. And because of the marketplace they had a LOT of freedom that writers on franchises today don't. Not just Wylie but Robert Graves and others were cannibalized by people who actually knew that under the laws of the time this was fair use. Today franchises are so important these things are designed by committee and kept under tight control. You certainly could NOT confuse Doc Savage with its model. Nevertheless this model would never fly.

Fred Pohl said something like he never knew science fiction could be written without any thinking until he saw Star Wars. He was wrong. There is a LOT of VISUAL thinking in Star Wars. Not much else but it's still thinking. A lot of the thinking he meant went into both Wylie's book and Lester Dent's thrillers: Savage Gentleman because it was "literature", Doc Savage because Dent was allowed to. There was a whole level of sophistication in the pulps and early comic books which has been rigorously edited out of our popular culture because the Guardians of our Morals can't "control" it. And the less of Lester Dent's "funnin'" (my word) the stories contain, the less respectful they are of BOTH Dent and Wylie. I can't see a "serious" remake of a takeoff on a satire -- because it starred Ron Ely, poor guy.

Steven King and his adaptations have nothing to do with this.