Why so much hype?

Awesome Movie

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

The movie is based on Doc's first adventure, The Man of Bronze, with elements from several other stories. It's remarkably faithful to the source material, unlike so many of the 1970's (and even today) adaptions. From Doc's Fabulous Five (Monk, Ham, Renny, Long Tom and Little Johnny), which would go on to inspire superhero teams and the Hong Kong Cavaliers, to his Fortress of Solitude (which inspired Superman's), Mink's pet pig, Doc's gadgets and more, there is so much taken from the original pulp stories.The hard part of the film comes from how campy it gets, from patriotic theme songs dedicated to Doc with lyrics telling us how great he is to him having an animated twinkle in his eye. The TV Batman style died hard in Hollywood. Witness 1979's Legends of the Superheroes TV movies.The movie opens at Doc Savage's (Ron Ely, Tarzan) Fortress of Solitude, where our hero learns his father died under a cloud of mystery. While he looks at his father's papers, a Native American assassin with red fingers and a tattoo of a Mayan god tries to kill him. Doc gives chase, but his would-be murderer falls to his death.When he gets back to his apartment, his father's notes have been destroyed.Throughout the film, Captain Seas tries to kill Doc and his friends. Of note, Long Tom is played by Paul Gleason, Richard Vernon from The Breakfast Club. Meanwhile, Doc finds out that his father received a land grant in the interior of Hidalgo from the Quetzamal, a Mayan tribe that has disappeared. Despite government corruption, Mona Flores offers to lead Doc and his friends to the land.It turns out that Captain Seas is using the Green Death, an airborne plague, to keep the natives under his control (and he also used it to kill Doc's father). Most of the bad guys get covered in molten gold, while the chief of the natives offers the gold and land to Doc, who pledges to use it for the cause of justice.Unlike other pulp heroes, Doc doesn't kill. He rehabilitates with acupuncture and education, a fact that we see in action as Doc finds Captain Seas and his henchwomen ringing the Salvation Army bell for charity.As Doc gets back home, he gets a message that he's needed. He rushes out for his next adventure, which was to be titled Doc Savage: The Arch Enemy of Evil.Oh yeah — Michael Berryman (The Hills Have Eyes) shows up here as a coroner!As helmed by Michael Anderson (Logan's Run, Orca, Around the World in 80 Days), this is a big, bombastic film. It flopped hard when released, though Norma Dent was said to have loved the film. How much you'll enjoy it depends on your love of silliness, John Phillip Sousa and the superheroes of the past. Me? I have a spot in my heart for this film and dreamed of having a shirt like Doc's that would be all ripped and cling to me when I sprung to action. However, I was a chubby six-year-old and had no villains to battle outside of the bullies who routinely kicked my ass. That said, as I grew older, I gave them all acupuncture, forgiveness and education, just like Doc Savage taught me!Read more at http://bit.ly/2i8sPNM

It's 1936. After his father's death in South America, Doc Savage returns from the Arctic Circle to New York City. He and his friends, The Fabulous Five, are attacked by a native warrior who slips off a skyscraper. They set off to solve his father's death. The quest leads to the criminal Captain Seas and a long lost Mayan tribe.Doc Savage is a pulp magazine adventurer starting from the 30s. He continues into the modern age and this tries to give this character his 30s adventure. The production is not good enough to dress up the outside street scenes to fit the times. There are too many modern locations. It's all rather sad and cheap. It is better off staying away from anything close to modern. It is unwieldy and clunky old style. The lead Ron Ely is a stiff old Hollywood B hero with his bright teethy smile. The special effects consist of glowing cartoon snakes that attack. They're not anything good. This is not campy and fun like Flash Gordon. It certainly doesn't have a good soundtrack. Its backbone is stiff and none of it is fun. It's not even so bad that it's funny. It's just old and stiff and tiresome.

The 1930's was the heyday of Tarzan, the Lone Ranger, the Shadow, the Spider, the Green Hornet, Captain Midnight, Gene Autry, Flash Gordon, and eventually Superman and Batman. A great pantheon of pop culture heroes flourished in pulp magazines, comic strips, radio shows, and movie serials. The 1960's gave us Adam West as Batman, Derek Flint, Maxwell Smart, 007, and many other hero spoofs(not to mention the theater then unfolding in the socio-political realms); the concept of the hero emerged from this period battered and shaken. The early 1970's saw the emergence of a new type of rather angry anti-hero: Dirty Harry, Shaft, Billy Jack, Superfly, etc. Producer George Pal had accurately predicted the sci-fi craze of the 1950's, and so he produced the first picture of that cycle as well as producing the classic and best versions of 'War of the Worlds' and 'The Time Machine'. George Pal correctly understood that by the mid-1970's the collective unconscious of America was hungry for a return of the old school hero, 1930's style. George Pal knew that to make an adventure of this sort with a hero like Doc Savage that you had to somehow acknowledge the absurdity of it all. Unfortunately, while Indiana Jones and the Rocketeer gave the audience the equivalent of a knowing wink, Doc Savage's director stopped just an inch short of having Doc Savage slip on a banana peel. This film, then, is an uneasy mix of authentic 1930's style pulp magazine adventure and ham-fisted attempts at camp. The single worst thing in this film is the soundtrack, a creative but ultimately dreadful batch of John Phillip Sousa marches, including a custom Doc Savage lyric, which is especially loathsome. It is indeed fortunate that a good many parts of this film managed to escape this score. Negatives aside, this film will be mildly enjoyable to fans of pulp magazines, old comics, radio and serial heroes, etc. Fans of Doc Savage should be mollified by the many elements of the source material which were faithfully realized, and that compared to more recent super-hero flicks, the writers took relatively few liberties. Overall, the cast is pretty good, and Ron Ely looks exactly like the vision of Doc Savage on the covers of the original pulps. I think he pulls off the role pretty well. And there are old style cars, airplanes, clothes, and fight scenes, so it's a pretty fun ride. George Pal might have missed the mark here, but not by much. Just a year after this film came 'Star Wars,' which was basically a retooling of the old Flash Gordon serials. In 1978 came 'Superman, the Movie.' Two years after that came the 1st Indiana Jones flick, set smack dab in the 1930's, just like Doc Savage. All of these latter productions, however, benefited by taking their source material or inspiration just a little bit more seriously than Pal did. But since 'Doc Savage,' more1930's throwback films have flopped than succeeded, at least commercially: 'The Legend of the Lone Ranger,' 'The Phantom,' 'The Rocketeer,' 'The Shadow,' and 'Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.' All of these were big budget affairs. For some reason, certain persons amongst us are irresistibly drawn to that long lost decade, when imagination populated the world with mythic heroes. Too bad these heroes usually remain one step beyond our reach.

Having read many Doc Savage adventures before first seeing the film, I found the film a disappointment. The basic story is akin to the original adventure, but George Pal decided to camp up the film. I read where he was disappointed by the reaction of Doc Savage fans, who indicated that they didn't like its treatment.That aside, Ron Ely was an excellent choice for Doc. He had a credible look for The Man of Bronze, and didn't overplay the role.IMHO, the choice of Sousa marches detracted from the film. Like the opening scenes with Doc's invention of a fishing rocket, and the labeling of the fighting styles near the end of the film, the music pushed the envelope.At one point, Doc leaps to the running board of a car driven by Long Tom, and cries out, "Do a Barney Oldfield, Long Tom." Now Barney Oldfield was a racecar driver of the period, but Long Tom drives the car at no more than 35 miles per hour! Couldn't they have at least undercranked the camera? However, it is the only film ever done on Doc Savage. Among the current crop of actors, can't think of one who would make as good a Doc as Ron Ely, but wouldn't it have been nice to have gotten a Ridley Scott or John Woo style treatment instead of a George Pal production?