I was struck by some inspiration a couple of weeks ago and I need to get it out of my head. I came up with a viable idea for adapting Doc Savage to film. It seems so simple to me; I’m surprised I never heard this concept voiced before.
As a little background, Doc Savage was the original Superman. When pulp magazine publishers Street and Smith struck gold with publishing The Shadow, their first time publishing a single character title in a generation, they ran with the idea of creating another character and concocted Doc Savage, then hired Lester Dent to flesh out the character in 1933. Doc is a true renaissance man. Born with a genius intellect, his father raised him to be a scholar, a scientist, and a medical doctor. From the moment he could walk, Doc, or his birth name, Clark Savage Jr., was trained physically so that by the time he grew into manhood, he was at a near superhuman peak of athleticism. His father pushed him to do all of this as an experiment to ultimately make him a benefactor of mankind. With these various abilities, Doc Savage, as he came to be known, became a hero to anyone who needed his assistance. On any given day, he was developing new technology or medical techniques, occasionally secreting himself in his Fortress of Solitude in the arctic so he could devote his time to study and research. Whenever he set out to face a supervillain, enemy spy, dictator, or to save the world in general, he is aided by his best friends, his five Men of Iron: “Monk” Andrew Blodgett Mayfair, a squat, simian-looking guy, who is one of the world’s leading chemists; “Ham” Theodore Marley Brooks, top-notch attorney; “Renny” John Renwick, leading industrial engineer; “Long Tom” Thomas Roberts, ace electrical engineer, and “Johnny” William Harper Littlejohn, expert geologist and archaeologist.
Doc Savage has been a source of immense inspiration to pulp fiction and comic books since his inception. Before we had Clark Kent, aka Superman, aka The Man of Steel, we had Clark Savage, the Man of Bronze. Stan Lee acknowledged getting inspiration from Doc Savage when creating superhero times like the Fantastic Four. With this being said, Doc has only one movie to his name, Doc Savage: Man of Bronze, starring Ron Ely, which was released in the 70s and isn’t well-regarded. I enjoyed it but the movie has some issues, particularly its campiness. People have made numerous attempts to bring him back to the big screen, but no dice. With no further ado, here are my thoughts:
Film 1: Men of Bronze: a young Clark Savage, tired of the rigorous and constant pressure from his dad, runs away from home and joins the military at the time of WWI. This is a good way to hook modern audiences. Sell this picture as a war movie or historical/alternate history fiction, and then insert the superhero elements. As detailed in Philip Jose Farmer’s biography Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life, and his novel Escape from Loki, Clark Savage is captured and taken to a POW camp. I need to reread the biography and get around to reading the novel for more detail, but the idea is that Loki is a unique POW camp that could have a massive effect on the war if Clark doesn’t do something. He soon meets the five men who will become his trusted aides. As a matter of fact, according to the pulps Johnny has a bad eye from a war injury, so it makes sense to me to introduce Clark Savage to the group by having him volunteer to help a wounded Johnny who was recently captured. Without medical supplies, the best he could do was dress the wound and create a makeshift compound to prevent infection.
Recognizing him as a prodigy, the men at the camp start calling him Doc. They are quickly drawn to him. Seeing their unique abilities as thinking and fighting men, Doc teams up with the other five and forms a plan of escape and eventually shutting down the camp as well. For humor, we can throw in some petty squabbles between Monk and Ham as we see in the pulps. Renny has a habit of destroying doors with his bare fists, so it’s easy for me to imagine him discovering he enjoys doing this while working on breaking out of the camp during the climax. With the realistic backdrop of the war, combined with the distinct personalities of Doc and his men, and throwing in some science fiction elements on the part of the bad guys to ramp up the stakes, this really could establish a Doc Savage film franchise. At the end of the film, we see Doc return home and finishes his training as a wiser young man, who will be the leader of a group of heroes to protect the world.
P.S. The WWI backdrop is the perfect excuse to throw in some pulpy Easter Eggs. G-8 and His Battle Aces served in the war as well as Richard Wentworth (AKA The Spider), so it wouldn’t hurt to throw in references or cameos of them. Kent Allard (AKA The Shadow) was known as the Dark Eagle during the war, a Red Baron of sorts, who fought for the allies and became a spy and specialized in liberating POWs, therefore it would be cool to catch a glimpse of him too.
Film 2: This leads into the first novel The Man of Bronze, in which Doc sets out to find his father’s murderer, which eventually takes him into central America. I was thinking of combining the element of finding his father’s murderer with the plot of The Land of Terror, in which he searches for a villain who uses a weaponized substance called The Smoke of Eternity that can dissolve anything. This pursuit leads him to a subterranean jungle filled with dinosaurs. Combine the human interest of Doc wanting to avenge his father with the high stakes and backdrop of The Land of Terror and we have an ideal sequel.
Film 3: I’m already way ahead of myself by thinking up the basis of two films, let alone three, but this brainstorming has been particularly active. Now that Doc’s world is firmly established and the audience is learning what to expect from his stories, this seems like a good time to introduce the plot of the novel The Fortress of Solitude, in which Doc’s only recurring villain John Sunlight stumbles across Doc’s arctic base and steals the high-tech weapons that Doc had placed there for safe-keeping, and threatens the world as a result.
The theory behind a good sequel is to ramp up the stakes with each film. While measuring stakes may be subjective to some degree, you can at least say that the stakes, while high in each story, keep changing in complexity. This may have been a pointless exercise on my part, but it was a lot of fun and proves, if anything, that Doc is a goldmine for filmmakers at a time when creativity in the industry has stagnated.
Written by Nicholas Montelongo

Doc Savage has been a source of immense inspiration to pulp fiction and comic books since his inception. Before we had Clark Kent, aka Superman, aka The Man of Steel, we had Clark Savage, the Man of Bronze. Stan Lee acknowledged getting inspiration from Doc Savage when creating superhero times like the Fantastic Four. With this being said, Doc has only one movie to his name, Doc Savage: Man of Bronze, starring Ron Ely, which was released in the 70s and isn’t well-regarded. I enjoyed it but the movie has some issues, particularly its campiness. People have made numerous attempts to bring him back to the big screen, but no dice. With no further ado, here are my thoughts:
Film 1: Men of Bronze: a young Clark Savage, tired of the rigorous and constant pressure from his dad, runs away from home and joins the military at the time of WWI. This is a good way to hook modern audiences. Sell this picture as a war movie or historical/alternate history fiction, and then insert the superhero elements. As detailed in Philip Jose Farmer’s biography Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life, and his novel Escape from Loki, Clark Savage is captured and taken to a POW camp. I need to reread the biography and get around to reading the novel for more detail, but the idea is that Loki is a unique POW camp that could have a massive effect on the war if Clark doesn’t do something. He soon meets the five men who will become his trusted aides. As a matter of fact, according to the pulps Johnny has a bad eye from a war injury, so it makes sense to me to introduce Clark Savage to the group by having him volunteer to help a wounded Johnny who was recently captured. Without medical supplies, the best he could do was dress the wound and create a makeshift compound to prevent infection.

Recognizing him as a prodigy, the men at the camp start calling him Doc. They are quickly drawn to him. Seeing their unique abilities as thinking and fighting men, Doc teams up with the other five and forms a plan of escape and eventually shutting down the camp as well. For humor, we can throw in some petty squabbles between Monk and Ham as we see in the pulps. Renny has a habit of destroying doors with his bare fists, so it’s easy for me to imagine him discovering he enjoys doing this while working on breaking out of the camp during the climax. With the realistic backdrop of the war, combined with the distinct personalities of Doc and his men, and throwing in some science fiction elements on the part of the bad guys to ramp up the stakes, this really could establish a Doc Savage film franchise. At the end of the film, we see Doc return home and finishes his training as a wiser young man, who will be the leader of a group of heroes to protect the world.
P.S. The WWI backdrop is the perfect excuse to throw in some pulpy Easter Eggs. G-8 and His Battle Aces served in the war as well as Richard Wentworth (AKA The Spider), so it wouldn’t hurt to throw in references or cameos of them. Kent Allard (AKA The Shadow) was known as the Dark Eagle during the war, a Red Baron of sorts, who fought for the allies and became a spy and specialized in liberating POWs, therefore it would be cool to catch a glimpse of him too.
Film 2: This leads into the first novel The Man of Bronze, in which Doc sets out to find his father’s murderer, which eventually takes him into central America. I was thinking of combining the element of finding his father’s murderer with the plot of The Land of Terror, in which he searches for a villain who uses a weaponized substance called The Smoke of Eternity that can dissolve anything. This pursuit leads him to a subterranean jungle filled with dinosaurs. Combine the human interest of Doc wanting to avenge his father with the high stakes and backdrop of The Land of Terror and we have an ideal sequel.

The theory behind a good sequel is to ramp up the stakes with each film. While measuring stakes may be subjective to some degree, you can at least say that the stakes, while high in each story, keep changing in complexity. This may have been a pointless exercise on my part, but it was a lot of fun and proves, if anything, that Doc is a goldmine for filmmakers at a time when creativity in the industry has stagnated.
Written by Nicholas Montelongo
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