#Renny Renwick

[krinsbez]

BT-ify Pulp Heroes: Doc Savage (Worldbuilding/Storybuilding)

So, this one is a bit different.

I started profiling Pulp Heroes and their supporting casts, and asked people to come up with BT-ified versions. Well, initially I asked what Mech they would use, but for many, things got very detailed.

Some of these (notably the ones I discussed in the poll months ago) got beyond this, but there are plenty who didn't. So, what I am going to do is start posting what the folks on the forumboard came up with, and see:

What you think of what was come up.

See if y'all have ideas to refine, enhance, or improve what they came up

Come up with ideas for stuff to do with these BT-ized versions of the characters.

And with all that taken care of, let's start with one of the most important, iconic, and archetypical Pulp Heroes...Doc Savage (and his aides)

(profiles via forumposter Starfox05)

Doc:

Doc Savage was project of the Society to produce the ultimate human - the pinnacle of genetic engineering, mating nature and nurture. A genius in a perfect body, raised from birth with all the knowledge available to humanity. Destined to lead the Society to victory. He's as tall as an Elemental, as quick as a 'Mechwarrior. Unfortunately - for the Society - he was so smart and eager to learn, he did study privately in addition to what his tutors taught him, and soon discovered knowledge they were not meant to teach him - amongst them philosophies and teachings abandoned by the Clans long ago. As he was a scientist through and through - questioning everything and never accepting anything on blind faith. So, he saw through the Society's stated aims, realised how wrong they were, and decided to abandon them to help humanity. Having ditched the Clan way for the same reasons, he gathered a few prisoners/experimental subjects he liberated and guards/tutors he turned as well as his young "cousin", a female version of him sharing most of his genes, stole a dropship and jumpship from the society and all the tech and supplies he could manage, and made his way to the Inner Sphere. He can pilot, repair, modify and construct anything - tank, 'Mech, Aerospacefighter, Battle Armour, dropship or jumpship. If he has to fight, he fights to disable, and he likes to switch and customise his ride, usually an Executioner OmniMech he heavily modified, to the task at hand. Unlike most Clan Warriors, he likes melee combat, often using his 'Mech's mass to wreck lighter enemies without harming the pilot, and often uses experimental weapons and even construction tools in any battle as well as the environment. Even though he and his group are nominally mercenaries (and hid their origin once they reached the Periphery) they often work pro bono, relying on selling new technology and Doc's services as a polymath to finance their excursions, in addition to a Germanium Mine he received from a grateful periphery planet's population whose water filters and fusion generators he restored and improved. He has started to acquire a small fleet of merchants whose jumpships and dropship he repaired for them, and who pay him back by a share of their profits. He and his group live on a special dropship, a former Collossus, that he modified into a flying base and research lab.

Ham:

A former Star Colonel who failed to die in battle or earn a bloodname, [Ham] was an eccentric Diamond Shark, keeping both a pet and an antique blade ready during his career. He was targetted by the society for his skill at logistics and was kidnapped when he was transferred to solahma unit so they could pick his brain for military tactics. He has an old rivalry with [Monk] dating back to a few clashes during trials. He pilots a Lancelot, the last 'Mech assigned to him by his Clan.

Monk:

[Monk], another talented warrior who never got a bloodname (though he tried numerous times), and he switched to the scientist caste when he aged out, and was recruited by the Society after starting an affair with one of their members. He soon fell out with the Society's leadership, though hid his true thoughts, and managed to teach Doc not merely science but also a few other tricks and unarmed fighting.

Johnny:

Another of Doc's original tutors, [Johnny] was responsible for most of his scientific training, after suffering the loss of an eye and having trouble with the implant that replaced. He was not very respected in the Society since he didn't specialise but kept "widening his horizons" as he called it - and since he often paid more attention to history and the past as a former Goliath Scorpion than the Society found tolerable.

Long Tom (admission, the entire reason for this series of projects was cuz of him):

[Long Tom} was a Naga-pilot turned bondsman turned tech, and mostly ended up in the Society's hand because they wanted to find out if his peculiar appearance and excellent health could be useful for their experiments. He went along with the others when Doc broke out and has been working on restoring a Long Tom artillery piece they picked up on a border planet (and modifying it so he doesn't need crew to use it).

Renny:

An Elemental working for the Society and serving as a link to the Dark Caste, Renny committed many crimes for which he is ashamed before he had a change of heart helping Doc. If Doc had not convinced him to atone by helping others, he would have killed himself long ago.

Pat:

Patricia was meant to be Doc's counterpart, and she has the skills, smarts and drive to prove it. What she doesn't have is his experience - she is younger than him and still learning, and sometimes a bit too eager for her own good. She pilots a Gargoyle if she takes the field, sporting a prototype rotary autocannon with six barrels.

And as a bonus, the closest thing Doc has to a nemesis...

John Sunlight:

A survivor of the Society, John managed to escape and determined to lead humanity to salvation whether it wants to be saved or not. Armed with the knowledge of his old organisation he plans to rebuild the Star League in his image, so to speak. He blames Doc for abandoning the Society and for wasting his talents helping others instead of leading them as the genetically superior specimen he should, in John's opinion.

So, what thinkest thou, BT and Pulp Fans of Tumblr?

[chernobog13]

Doc Savage and his Fabulous Five (plus cousin, Pat) by the late, great John Casaday.

[cantsayidont]

August 1984. This won't change anyone's feelings about cult movie perennial THE ADVENTURES OF BUCKAROO BANZAI: ACROSS THE EIGHTH DIMENSION one way or the other, but if you're wondering what the hell the deal is supposed to be with Buckaroo Banzai and his team, the answer is, "It's an obvious pastiche of the pulp hero Doc Savage."

Launched in 1933, Doc Savage was one of the leading adventure heroes of the pulp magazines. Doc (whose full name was Clark Savage Jr.) was scientifically trained from childhood to the peak of human perfection, singularly adept in everything from mechanical engineering to medicine to martial arts. He had a secret headquarters called the Fortress of Solitude and a whole array of specially designed vehicles and equipment, but he was also a public figure, with offices in the Empire State Building. Doc had a team of eccentric, highly specialized aides — Monk Mayfair, Ham Brooks, Renny Renwick, Long Tom Roberts, and Johnny Littlejohn — who each had a particular skill and a couple of distinctive personality traits (for instance, Monk was a skilled industrial chemist, but also an "ape-like" brute with a ferocious temper). They were sometimes aided by Doc's cousin, Pat Savage, who was almost as capable as Doc, although he tried to keep her out of the fray because she was (gasp) a girl.

This was a fairly common pattern for pulp heroes. For instance, the pulp version of the Shadow (who was distinctly different from the radio incarnation) relied on a whole network of agents, some appearing only once or twice, some recurring across many of his published adventures. From a narrative standpoint, the agents and assistants had two principal purposes: The first was to offset the rather overpowered heroes — pulp heroes didn't necessarily have superhuman powers, but even those who didn't tended to be preternaturally skilled at nearly everything, so it was convenient to limit their direct involvement in an adventure to crucial moments, and let the assistants (who could be much more fallible) do much of the legwork. The second object was to beef up the characterization. Doc Savage was morally irreproachable as well as absurdly multi-talented, so there wasn't a lot to be done with him character-wise, while maintaining the mystique of a character like the Shadow required him to remain a fairly closed book.

Although the pulp heroes were a huge influence on early comic book superheroes like Superman and Batman, some of these conventions didn't translate well to other media: In a 13-page comic book story or half-hour radio episode, having too many characters was cumbersome (and expensive, where it meant hiring extra actors), and comic book readers normally expected to follow their four-color heroes quite closely, even before the breathless internal monologue became a genre staple. So, Superman inherited Doc Savage's Fortress of Solitude, but not his "Fabulous Five" assistants, while heroes like Batman and Captain America generally stuck with a single sidekick rather than a team of aides. Even the late Doc Savage pulp adventures (which ended in 1949) de-emphasized the assistants to keep the focus more on Doc himself. Ultimately, the pulp heroes didn't really have the right narrative center of gravity for visual media, which is why they've become relatively obscure, despite repeated revival attempts. The 1975 Doc Savage movie with Ron Ely, for instance, was a notorious commercial flop, and elements like Doc's childishly bickering assistants seemed odd and dated, even taking into account the film's nostalgia-bait '30s period setting.

What BUCKAROO BANZAI tried to do was to bring that old pulp hero formula into the modern era with a big infusion of '80s style and humor. Like Doc Savage, Buckaroo is a wildly gifted polymath (in the opening scenes, he rushes from performing brain surgery to test-driving his Jet Car through a mountain), so famous and important a personage that he puts the president of the United States on hold, and he surrounds himself with an array of brilliant, eccentric aides with silly nicknames who play in his rock band when they're not fighting crime or doing advanced scientific experiments.

Alas, judging by the poor box office returns, general audiences were no more amenable to the '80s version of this formula than they had been to DOC SAVAGE: MAN OF BRONZE nine years earlier, even with the 1984 film's extraordinary cast and memorably witty dialogue. Granted, even many of the movie's most diehard fans are baffled by the convoluted plot — a crucial expository scene where the leader of the Black Lectroids (Rosalind Cash) explains much of what's going on is nigh-incomprehensible without subtitles or closed captioning — but beyond that, THE ADVENTURES OF BUCKAROO BANZAI is essentially an extended riff on a particular slice of pop culture that had long since dropped out of the public consciousness, which is both part of its charm and also its commercial undoing, at least as mainstream entertainment.

(Also, if you're wondering, yes, the TOM STRONG series by Alan Moore and Chris Sprouse is also an obvious Doc Savage pastiche, although at least some of its plot and character concepts were probably retoolings of unused ideas from Moore's earlier Maximum Press/Awesome Comics SUPREME series, which was an extended pastiche of the pre-Crisis Superman.)

[buzzdixonwriter]

Doc Savage

For two generations of young readers — the original pulp fans of the 1930s and 40s followed by the reprint fans of the 1960s and 70s — Doc Savage remains not only an iconic figure but a template for all adventure heroes who came after.

Doc and his team — the ape-like chemist Monk Mayfair, his rival attorney Ham Brooks, construction engineer Renny Renwick, electrical engineer Long Tom Roberts, archeologist / geologist Johnny Littlejohn — inspired such diverse teams as Captain Future and his crew, the Challengers of the Unknown, the Fantastic Four, the crew of the Enterprise, Buckeroo Banzai’s Hong Kong Cavaliers (many of whom, we must be fair to observe, executed the formula fair more successfully than Doc and his crew), and Team Venture.

Doc also proved a direct inspiration (read “rip off”) of several key concepts later popularized by Superman, including “the man of bronze” vs “the man of steel” and first use of an arctic Fortress of Solitude for those times when he just needed a break from adventuring.

There have been radio serials, comic books, movies (one by producer George Pal, another by teen fans in the 1970s), and a heart-breaking number of announced but never made media projects, including a serial (eventually rewritten as Fighting Devil Dogs) and abortive TV projects (including a proposed animated series by Ruby-Spears that went so far afield of the original concept that it’s a blessing it got shelved after early development).

So what makes the character so fascinating?

He represents an ideal embodiment of the ultimate of humanity abilities.  Unlike Superman (born or another planet) or other superheroes (either mutants or enhanced by some form of magic or super-science), Doc’s abilities are the result of his father’s relentless training regimen for him since birth.  He’s a brilliant polymath in all sciences (a legit doctor with and MD plus a plethora of PhDs), a fluent linguist in virtually all languages including ancient Mayan and American Sign Language, a skilled mimic and disguise artist, an expert martial artist and judo master (this at a time when martial arts were virtually unknown in America), plus a pilot / sailing master as well as a world renown philanthropist.

The only thing he isn’t is genuinely human, and from the very beginning there’s an unspoken yet nonetheless present undercurrent in all his adventures that his frantic activity is pretty much a defense against admitting he really has no inner personal life.

Over the next several months (probably years) I’m going to recap the Doc Savage novels as re-published by Bantam Books in the 1960s. Their covers by James Bama probably did more to cement Doc’s iconic appeal than the stories themselves, creating the look that every succeeding interpretation has followed. While Bantam eventually reprinted all the original pulp stories, they didn’t do so in order of publication; I will add that to help you understand the development of the character and series.

© Buzz Dixon

[meteorologistaustenlonek]

The Doc Savage Oath

[thisdayincomics]

January 12

Doc Savage was a hero originally published in American pulp magazines during the 1930s and 1940s. The heroic-adventure character would go on to appear in other media, including radio, film, and comic books, with his adventures reprinted for modern-day audiences in a series of paperback books. The Doc Savage Magazine was printed by Street & Smith from March 1933 to the summer of 1949 to capitalize on the success of the Shadow magazine and followed by the original Avenger in September 1939. Though he would eventually have his own comic title, the Doc Savage comic strip debuted in Shadow Comics #1 (January 12, 1940). Street & Smith Publications executive Henry Ralston and editor John Nanovic wrote a short premise establishing the broad outlines of the character they envisioned, but Doc Savage was only fully realized by the author chosen to write the series, Lester Dent. Dent wrote most of the 181 original novels, hidden behind the "house name" of Kenneth Robeson. Doc Savage's real name is Clark Savage, Jr. He is a physician, scientist, adventurer, inventor, explorer, researcher, and a musician. A team of scientists assembled by his father deliberately trained his mind and body to near-superhuman abilities almost from birth, giving him great strength and endurance, a photographic memory, a mastery of the martial arts, and vast knowledge of the sciences. Doc is also a master of disguise and an excellent imitator of voices. "He rights wrongs and punishes evildoers."

[pulpfest]

Reed Richards — AKA Mr. Fantastic — is an inventor and scientist like Doc Savage. He also likes to use big words, similar to Johnny Littlejohn. The counterpart of the gorilla-like Monk Mayfair is, of course, The Thing. But just like Renny Renwick — who enjoyed smashing his large fists through doors — Ben enjoyed “Clobbering time.” But then, Monk also relished a good fight. Beautiful and glamorous like Doc’s cousin Pat Savage, Sue Storm — AKA The Invisible Girl — is Johnny Storm’s sister. She’s also a great asset to the group. The Human Torch shares a first name with Doc’s archeologist/geologist Johnny Littlejohn. Additionally, under “Littlejohn’s gaunt appearance burns a strength and fire unbelievable." And then there’s The Fantastic Four’s secret headquarters — The Baxter Building — which shares more than a passing resemblance to Doc Savage’s 86th floor of Manhattan’s tallest building. https://www.instagram.com/p/Bwsno8CBEy3/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=17njjviqlkone

[dean-boese-universe]

Power Item of the Day - Col. John 'Renny' Renwick's ability with engineering powered by study. (at Retcon Studios) https://www.instagram.com/p/CRB5zR2ArQy/?utm_medium=tumblr