By Chip Stone
One reason I love classic adventure is that I was born in 1963, the heart of the Space Age, and still very much a culture in touch with the days of serials. The original King Kong was released just thirty years before I was born. To put perspective on that, Star Wars first hit theaters just thirty-one years ago and has remained very much a relevant part of popular culture today. Many of the conventions, if not the actual works, of classic adventure were prevalent during my childhood, which is why Raiders of the Lost Ark was such an immense hit when it came out.
I am fortunate to be among a certain age demographic young enough to be a part of popular culture media of the past thirty years, but also to have grown up with the stuff now preserved and revered as ‘the golden age’.
Nothing represents that to me more than a weekly comic strip I recall vividly through my childhood: Terry and the Pirates.
Sure, in the late 1960s and early 70s, I recognized Terry and
the Pirates was old style – but it was there and active every week in the Sunday funny pages, in rich color. In fact, in our newspaper comics, Terry and the Pirates was the lead-off main feature, dominating the coveted front- page, above-the-fold position. In those days, I was exposed to Terry in both the style of creator Milton Caniff and his successor George Wunder. I was between five and nine years old and my parents could answer all my questions about that era, as they were born in it and experienced those years as children. It was accessible.
Probably the first moment I truly appreciated the impact Terry and the Pirates had on me was a summer day in 1980 when my friends and I paid a visit to a comic book shop in Upland, California. Honestly, I was never into comics as much as Brian and Scott, from whom I learned everything I know about comics. I have always loved cinema and gravitated toward magazines on movies, and on that day was perusing a magazine much like Preview and Cinefantastique combined.
Now, the summer of 1980 is my last magic summer. I use the present tense of the verb because I have always been able to close my eyes and return to those three months at will. It remains forever locked in time whenever I need to return and just feel the morning sunshine and the mystical starry nightfall of those days. It was the last summer of my childhood and the first summer of the adventure of life, thus a borderland. The Empire Strikes Back – a beautiful homage to golden age space adventure, and still the very best Star Wars movie ever made (those who would argue anything but the original 1977 chapter as a contender can kiss my ass; you’re ignorant), and we were a little less than a year before something called Raiders of the Lost Ark would sneak preview at the same theater the original King Kong previewed in 1933, when my father and I were two of only five people in the theater witnessing the greatest homage to the golden age ever.
What contributed to my desire to be at the theater for the sneak preview of Raiders?
The exotic charm of Terry and the Pirates and that article I had read in 1980 about it coming to the big screen in the wake of the Star Wars revolution. I recall the very title on the page and the imagery in my head inspired merely by the idea that it would be done.
In the article about a Terry and the Pirates movie was featured a double page painting that gave a glimpse of what a new Terry production might have felt like. The painting captured the very adventure, intrigue and exotic thrills that would soon be presented by the most successful high adventure film of all time – still unknown to me on that day. Terry and the Pirates was on that day, for me, the very representation of high adventure: flying machines, stalwart heroes, quirky sidekicks, the mystery of unknown corners of ‘the Orient’, and that icon of glamorous villainy, Dragon Lady.
As my friends marveled over Iron Man and the X-Men, I stood in a corner imagining how cool it would be to see this Terry movie. The unknown mystical past of the Orient to be found in ancient temples, the lure of lost riches waiting to be found, the intrigue in maneuvers of rival treasure hunters , the thrill of biplanes and oceanic crossings and gunfights and fisticuffs, and the sultry double-edged promise of tangling with scheming exotic women. It was all there against a backdrop of long enough ago that one was allowed the innocent pleasure of escape.
Of course, it never happened. Part of my interest in seeing this movie Spielberg had made after the dismal flop of 1941 was generated by that article I had read on a Terry and the Pirates movie. To this day, my favorite elements of the Indiana Jones movies are when Indy travels to exotic locales and is figuring out some mystery in a shadowy corner where his world and the past connect. They remind me of the feeling inspired by Terry and the Pirates.
So what’s the fuss that sparks so much personal nostalgia? I may never be able to explain that, but you can, perhaps, find the answer yourself through your own enjoyment of the Terry and the Pirates experience.
When the strip hit the papers in October of 1934, young American Terry Lee journeys to contemporary China with a tough journalist named Pat Ryan. They are on a quest for a lost gold mine, thus enters George Webster “Connie” Confucius, a local guide and interpreter. As the adventures progressed, Terry’s association with Pat and Connie leads to confrontations with assorted villains and pirates. Characters like Captain Judas, Chopstick Joe, Cherry Blaze, Cue Ball, Big Stoop and Dude Hennick populated the crudely drawn backdrops of smoky hideouts and sprawling landscapes. Among them moved the villainous ladies, Rouge, and Sanjak, who some sources point out had thinly veiled lesbian designs on Terry’s girlfriend April Kane. None of them made the lasting impact as did that image of beauty and treachery, Dragon Lady.
When World War Two broke out, the storyline had a grown-up Terry joining the Army Air Corps and focused on the war.
Connie and Big Stoop would show up as marines, but Terry adventures mostly involved flyers Flip Corkin and Hotshot Charlie. An interesting turn of events was that Dragon Lady led guerilla fighters against the Japanese thus making her an ally of Terry.
Caniff quit doing the comic strip in 1946, because it was owned by the paper and he wanted to have more creative control over his work. He started Steve Canyon in 1947 and it ran until 1988, after Caniff passed away. Canyon, a USAF pilot hero, also served as an AFOSI agent. (During editor Walter Bosley’s time as an AFOSI agent and active duty USAF officer, he recalls a life-size standing cutout of Steve Canyon in the hallway of AFOSI headquarters at Bolling AFB). With Caniff’s departure, artist George Wunder took over and Terry continued for twenty- seven years, finally discontinued in 1973.
The popularity of Terry and the Pirates resulted in a radio show broadcast between 1937 and 1948, including Agnes Moorehead (Citizen Kane, The Shadow, and Bewitched) playing Dragon Lady in several episodes. In 1940, Columbia Pictures released a serial that ran in theaters and is now available on DVD through VCI. I’ve carried my copy around the world, enjoying the classically produced episodes in many of the exotic locales I’ve ventured to, and they sure come in handy when you’re in places like Khartoum or Kabul. In 1953, a television series featured an adult Terry working with an air service in the Orient, this version focusing more on the sort of adventure that the storyline followed before the war, even bringing back the original characters. The TV series is also available on DVD.
Besides that brief promise in 1980, the recent attempt to bring back Terry was a 1995 comic updating featuring the art of the Hildebrandt brothers, but it lasted only a couple of years and was one of those misguided attempts to transplant a period piece to modern times. In the case of Terry and the Pirates especially, it just doesn’t work, and neither did this particular comic incarnation.
Following the enormous success of Raiders of the Lost Ark, movies and television were populated with knock-offs also
inspired by the classic era of adventure. Yet, no Terry and the Pirates film was made. In recent years, comic books have finally made their great presence on the big screen in a huge way, but we still have yet to see a Terry and the Pirates feature film. Perhaps it’s because the interest levels and attention spans of youth are at the most shallow in our cultural history, or perhaps the right cinematic visionary hasn’t come along yet. Whatever the reason, a Terry and the Pirates big screen adventure is long overdue.
In the meantime, we’ll just have to enjoy the serial on DVD and relive the original thrills and intrigue at the source. Available at or through your local bookstore are multiple hardcover volumes of The Complete Terry and the Pirates, a collection to cherish in an adventure fan’s library. Hopefully, a filmmaker out there is reading them right now and we’ll finally see Pat Ryan and Terry fight their way through the robots and guys in tights to appear on the big screen.
Dragon Lady demands it!
— Chip Stone
Sources: Old Time Radio (otr.com), Internet Movie Database (imdb.com) Wikipedia
