The Microfilm of Death is a Green Hornet adventure from 1952 that I’d somehow overlooked, even though it features one of my favorite Daily Sentinel reporters, photojournalist Cicker Benny, and a case of international intrigue. (It’s 1952 and of course there are bad guys named Ivan and Igor in the plot! Wait until The Green Hornet says, “I’m going to go in and surprise those commies!”)

After Clicker (on the society beat in this story), Lenore Case, secretary to publisher Britt Reid, and reporter Michael Axford are the next staff members to appear in the opening scene, with Axford fumbling his way around the first evidence of a big story on his way into Reid’s office. Just as star reporter Ed Lowery phones in from the scene of a fatal auto “accident” and possible kidnapping …

Maybe the main lesson for today’s journalism students is that back then a newspaper was a team production, compared to today when staffs have shrunken and reporters can write, photograph, shoot video and upload to a website from a smartphone at a coffee shop.

This may be the fastest-paced opening of any Green Hornet episode I’ve listened to, especially in the way it introduces so many of the newspaper staff members. Not much of a lesson for journalism students, unless you count being aware that accidents and coincidence can get a news story moving much faster than investigative reporting.

If only Michael Axford were smarter and more curious! (But if you follow the Green Hornet series, which ran for more than a decade, you know that he’s really a former policeman Britt Reid’s father put on the staff mostly as a bodyguard to keep an eye on the young publisher.)

That Hornet series overview page linked in the previous paragraph is much in need of an update. Among other things, someone with the handle “Extraordinaire_Comics98” has uploaded a collection of more than 300 Green Hornet episodes to the Internet Archive, where they can be streamed one at a time or downloaded as a ZIP file. Commercial CD collections of The Green Hornet have been issued over the years by Radio Spirits and may include all or most of this Internet Archive set. The uploaded MP3s include related material, particularly the late radio historian and host Richard Lamparski‘s c. 1968 interview with Al Hodge, the first actor to play the Hornet in the 1930s. By the time of this 1952 “Microfilm of Death” episode, Jack McCarthy was playing the Hornet, and Hodge was playing “Captain Video” on a new medium, DuMont Network television! For more information, see Martin Grams’ article at the Old Time Radio Researchers group, which preceded his book about the Hornet’s career in radio, TV and film.