Ha!
Do I win a cookie?
Doc’s voice on my wire recorder answering machine?
I was back at the same used book store this past weekend and thought I’d give Doc Savage another try. I had wonderful memories of “The Fortress of Solitude” so I got it.
The cover was beautiful but the gears ground to a halt before chapter 3. Nice memories from my teenage years but not going to read another one. :(.
I DO enjoy reading science fiction short stories from the late 30’s and 40’s and up to the present.
Which one did you read?
As mentioned, Dent cranked one of these out every month along his other writings, so to say he was hit-and-miss is rather badly to understate the case.
Some of it is good, some is bad, all is formulaic. The Spook Legion and Land of Always Night are fun; Mystery Under the Sea is frivolously bad, but they are all about the same things.
Like Stephen King says about Stand By Me/The Body - it appeals to the interests of almost-adolescent boys who have not yet developed an interest in girls to the exclusion of almost everything else. Unlimited money, unlimited time with your buddies, mountains of cool toys, and the sense at all times that Doc, with whom you identify, is never at a loss and has it all figured out. And Monk and Ham to act out the bickering with your little brother as a sort of counter-point.
It’s pulp. It doesn’t need to be any better than it is.
Regards,
Shodan
The Sargasso Ogre was the first one I read. Strong memory of the page and a half fight between Doc and the bad guy. Stuck with me all these years. Land of Always Night was one of my favorites but I’m not going to reread it. Let the memories stay the way they are. 
You’re right about being young with no girlfriend yet. Good memories of being at the lake reading Doc Savages one after another. I started to read them when there were 17 books out so the summer just zoomed by.
Fans may well be aware that the series of double novel ‘magazine’ reprints continues from publishers Pulp Heroes. Now at approx #75 or #76!
And an 8-issue comic series from Dynamite has just concluded. I’d assume there will be a collected edition some time. And a spin-off 6 issue mini-series called Justice, inc. is about to begin…
Doc is still alive and kicking.
I started reading Doc Savage in about 7th or 8th grade. I remember Bantam was releasing a paperback about every month or two and I think were up around #80 when I started. I’d buy them if I had the money, otherwise I’d get them from the school library or public library. I probably read 35-40 of them before I finally grew out of them.
I’d love to see a Doc Savage movie done right. I was sooo disappointed in the Ron Ely movie. Have we had a “Let’s cast the Doc Savage movie” thread? That might be fun.
I am a huge Doc Savage fan. Which is why I refuse to re-read any of the originals. I don’t want my glowing bronze memories to be tarnished.
I could never get into Doc Savage. I read the first story in its Bantam reprint, but it didn’t interest me enough to read any of the others. In the 1970s, Marvel tried turning it into a comic book, updated to the 1970s (just as they’d turned pulp hero Conan the Barbarian into a comic book), but it didn’t work. The title didn’t last very long, and it was weird to see someone using an autogyro in the 1970s.
A few years later, George Pal made his infamous Doc Savage movie. If you can track down a copy, you should watch it – it’s hilariously bad – a ripe topic for MST3K. (They never did it, but for years there was a website with MST3K-ish comments you could shout during specific parts of the film, now sadly gone.) It’s hard to believe, but Pal evidently thought the film wasn’t over-the-top camp, and claims that he, not the Indiana Jones films, started the 1930s hero revival in film.
As noted above, Doc was an influence on Superman, but it went beyond the Man of Bronze/Steel thing. The ads in the pulp magazines for Doc Savage were headlined “Superman” in big letters (long before the comic came out), and he was described as a physical and mental superman who owed a lot to his father. Doc also had a Fortress of Solitude in the Arctic, which Superman didn’t get around to stealing until the late 1950s.
I can’t imagine a contemporary Doc Savage. It would be like a contemporary Conan.
His office is in a thirty five story skyscraper, is it not? 
It can only be done right if they keep the corrective-brain-surgery thing. It’s essential to the character, he’s a control freak.
Eighty sixth floor. Never mentioned by name, but obviously in the Empire State Building.
Unless I have been whooshed, it’s the 86th floor. I think it is hinted that it is in the Empire State Building, and when I was in NYC I was mildly disappointed that there was nothing on that floor in memorial. It was like finding a gas station at 221B Baker Street.
Regards,
Shodan
Marvel did that, too. They published at least two issues (not in the regular Conan series) where his character gets transported to modern Manhattan. Not surprisingly, he becomes a gangster leader.
In fact, before they ever issued the first Conan comic, they did a trial story with al all-but-the-name Conan character who finds himself in present-day New York, before getting yanked back to his quasi-Hyborian age. It appeared in one of their then-innumerable horror/fantasy anthology series. The positive response to the story convinced them to start up a separate Conan comic.