For every Charlie Chan, there’s a Mr. Moto... and for every Mr. Moto, there’s a Mr. Wong.
Hollywood hasn’t changed much. Sure, nowadays it’s all remakes, rip-offs, and mash-ups, but even in the golden days of Tinseltown, it was the same story (literally). It didn’t matter how new or original the idea (or character) was or who starred in it — sooner of later, the idea would be recycled to death, the character would become a shell of its former self, and the film would eventually be remade with a newer, fresher face. Yes, even back when Hollywood was young and gay, plagiarism was already rampant.
Monogram Pictures, one of the “poverty row studios” is widely considered to be one of the biggest culprits in the Plagiarism Department. Personally, I tend to disagree (as a matter of fact, I’ll take a Monogram Bela Lugosi quickie over a Columbia Boris Karloff film any day), but when it comes to the Mr. Wong series, well… there isn’t a jury in the land that wouldn’t say “Umm, now hold on a minute here…”
Boris Karloff kind of hit it big when he appeared as The Monster in James Whale’s Frankenstein in 1931 and Universal had found its new King of Horror (never mind that Lugosi guy) and continued to cast him in the lead of several more horror flicks. But, by 1936 the popularity of horror films had started to dwindle and nobody wanted to see scary movies anymore: critics, audiences, and outside markets alike (in particular Karloff’s native England) were fed up with monsters -- they wanted mysteries.
Earl Derr Biggers’ popular Charlie Chan character had become a huge hit on the big screen with Warner Oland playing the ultra-smooth Chinese detective (Karloff himself appeared as a suspect in Charlie Chan At The Opera) that Fox (the company behind the Chan films) started up another Asian sleuth series in the guise of Mr. Moto. Based on the character created by J.P. Marquand and portrayed by Peter Lorre, Moto was a Japanese detective whose status as kosher would become somewhat limited when that whole World War II thing happened and the Japanese became “the enemy.”
Since horror films were no longer in demand, Karloff found his own popularity and career in question, and scribbled his signature on a six-picture contract with poverty row studio Monogram Pictures to play James Lee Wong, another fictional Asian detective that was printed in Collier’s magazine (and was the brainchild of writer Hugh Wiley).
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