The Phantom Rides Again With A New TV Series Announced

Lee Falk’s classic action hero The Phantom is getting the live action treatment from director Reginal Hudlin.

We’re getting a TV series based on The Phantom, the venerable comic strip hero created by Lee Falk all the way back in 1936. That’s news that will be greeted by shrugs of polite indifference from many international readers and roars of approval from Australians, the Ghost Who Walks being waaaaay more popular here than in his native United States. No one knows why; he’s also huge in Scandinavia.

Variety broke the news, revealing that House Party and Candy Cane Lane director Reginald Hudlin will direct and produce the TV series, which being developed at King Features. Hudlin has some comics experience, having written Black Panther for Marvel from 2005 to 2008.

For those who came in late, the Phantom is Kit Walker, the latest in a long line of masked heroes dedicated the fighting evil wherever it is found – and it’s usually pirates, smugglers, evil warlords or what have you, the character being firmly in the two-fisted pulp tradition. Operating out of the fabulous Skull Cave in the fictional African country of Bangalla, he’s considered immortal by the superstitious natives, because it was the 1930s and if we’re being honest some of this stuff has aged poorly. But he’s a square-jawed, good-hearted, milk-drinking stand up sort of guy, by and large.

The Phantom has graced out screens before, of course, most notably in the fairly decent 1996 live action movie directed by Australian filmmaker Simon Wincer and starring Billy Zane and Catherine Zeta-Jones. There was also the great, cyberpunk-flavoured animated series Phantom 2040 in 1994, which featured wonderfully bizarre character designs by Æon Flux‘s Peter Chung, as well as the less-than-great, best forgotten 2009 Syfy miniseries, which featured… nothing I can remember. Seriously, it’s a complete blank.