CASTING DOC

To date, only one man can lay claim to having portrayed  Doc Savage on the screen. That man is, of course, Ron Ely, who was one of the few good things about George Pal's otherwise disappointing 1975 film version of the Man of Bronze. As of this writing, no one knows who will play Doc in the recently announced film to be written and directed by Shane Black. And in a recent post, I wrote about how Chuck Connors almost became Doc in 1966. But what about other actors in other decades playing Doc? What if Doc Savage movies had been made on a regular basis beginning in the 1930s? Who would have played Doc in those imaginary films? Here are some of my choices.

 Joel McCrea, pictured above with the lovely Fay Wray, in a scene from the pulp adventure classic film THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME (1932).

Randolph Scott

Buster Crabbe

Steve Holland, who really was Doc Savage. Holland was a model/actor who posed for artist James Bama for his cover paintings of the Doc reprint paperbacks published by Bantam.

Race Bannon. If there had been a Saturday morning Doc Savage cartoon show in the 1960s, Hanna-Barbera already had the character design in Race Bannon from the dearly beloved JONNY QUEST animated series. Heck, JQ was a Doc Savage cartoon show!