The Green Lama

A Wealthy American Who Came Back Different

Each episode of The Green Lama opened and closed with the same chant — "Om manipadme hum!" — which told a 1949 radio audience right away that this would not be the usual summer mystery. Jethro Dumont was a wealthy young American who had spent ten years in Tibet and returned with what the show called "curious and secret powers." He chose green as his color because it was one of the six sacred colors of Tibet, symbolizing justice. He never carried a gun, on the principle that doing so would make him no better than the people he fought.

The character came out of the pulps. Kendell Foster Crossen, writing as Richard Foster, had created the Green Lama in 1940 for Double Detective magazine, where the Frank Munsey company wanted a competitor for The Shadow over at rival Street & Smith. Crossen wrote fourteen Green Lama stories across three years, and the character was partly inspired by the explorer Theos Bernard, nicknamed "the White Lama." A comic-book version followed at Prize Comics and then in an eight-issue self-titled run, where the Lama gained super-strength and the power of flight. The radio scripts went back to the pulp version — a disciplined adept, not a flying superhero.

The People Behind It

Paul Frees played Jethro Dumont. It was one of his few starring roles in radio, and he brought the calm, slightly otherworldly quality the part needed; the four-octave range and the impressionist's ear that would later make him Boris Badenov and Disneyland's Haunted Mansion Ghost Host were already in place. Ben Wright played Tulku, the Green Lama's faithful Tibetan servant. Jack Kruschen turned up in many roles across the run, and the supporting bench drew from Hollywood's deepest radio ranks — Georgia Ellis, William Conrad, Gloria Blondell, Lillian Buyeff, Lawrence Dobkin, Harry Bartell, Laurette Fillbrandt, Nestor Paiva, Herb Vigran, with Parley Baer, Howard McNear, and John Dehner also appearing. Several would reassemble within a year or two on Gunsmoke under the same producer-director. Larry Thor announced. Richard Aurandt composed the music.

That producer-director was Norman Macdonnell, working with James Burton, and Crossen himself was on the writing staff alongside William Froug. Crossen had met Macdonnell earlier in 1949 while adapting Graham Greene's Confidential Agent for Escape — Ben Wright was in that episode too, months before he became Tulku. Variety reviewed the premiere as "a little fanciful" but adequate for a summer mystery, commending Frees, the supporting cast, the writing, and the episode's "exotic atmosphere." Later assessments by OTR researchers called it "a sleeper" and "a rather easygoing adventure" — scripts judged below par, but Macdonnell's direction credited with above-average production values.

Eleven Episodes and No Sponsor

The show ran on CBS as a sustaining program — no commercial sponsor — beginning June 5, 1949 in the Sunday 5:30 p.m. Eastern slot vacated by Broadway Is My Beat. Effective July 16 it shifted to Saturdays at 7:00 p.m. for the remainder of the run, finishing August 20 after exactly eleven half-hour episodes. A CBS inter-office memo from July 15 noted that a New York insurance company had expressed interest in sponsorship, but only if the program moved to a later timeslot to escape the growing parents' campaigns against "blood and thunder" radio. The sponsor never signed. CBS Television briefly considered a 1950 adaptation, and as late as that October the network still held the option, but the proposal never received a green light.

The first eight episodes featured continuity carrying over from week to week. For the final two broadcasts, Gene Levitt and Bob Mitchell were brought in to co-write under Crossen's supervision. Surviving titles include the premiere, "The Man Who Never Existed" — a professor of antiquities murdered, the trail leading to Mexico and priceless Mayan relics — and "The Last Dinosaur," set on a Hollywood movie lot around a mechanical dinosaur built for a motion picture, with radio columnist George Fisher appearing as himself. Four broadcast episodes survive, along with a separate audition recording of the premiere that runs about eight minutes longer than the aired version, with different music cues and dialogue. The scripts themselves are preserved in the Kendall Crossen Collection at Boston University's Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, with additional copies at the Library of Congress.

What It Left Behind

For a show that ran eleven weeks and never found a sponsor, The Green Lama left more behind than most summer fill-ins. Crossen had retained all rights to the character from the start, which is part of why the Green Lama — unlike many heroes from smaller publishers of the era — never fell into the public domain. The pulp stories have been reprinted in full by Altus Press, the Spark comics by Dark Horse, and Moonstone Books became the licensed publisher of new Green Lama fiction in the 2010s, including Adam Lance Garcia's novel The Green Lama: Scions. In 2012 the character even turned up in an aerial performance at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York, as part of an exhibit called "Hero, Villain, Yeti."

The radio series itself sits at a particular crossroads. It treated its Tibetan framework with more care than radio adventure usually managed — the chant, the sacred colors, the refusal of firearms, all drawn straight from the pulp characterization. It gave Paul Frees one of his rare leading parts. And it quietly assembled, three months before Gunsmoke would begin its own audition cycle, much of the cast and the producer-director that would soon define one of radio's great Western ensembles. Eleven episodes was not enough to build an audience. It was enough to leave a trail.