Kato

Kato is a fictional character from The Green Hornet franchise. This character has appeared with the Green Hornet in radio, film, television, book and comic book versions. Kato is the Hornet's assistant and has been played by a number of actors. On radio, Kato was initially played by Raymond Hayashi, then Roland Parker who had the role for most of the run, and in the later years Mickey Tolan and Paul Carnegie. Keye Luke took the role in the movie serials, and in the television series, he was portrayed by Bruce Lee. Jay Chou played Kato in the 2011 Green Hornet film. Character history Kato is Britt Reid's valet, who doubles as The Green Hornet's masked driver and partner to help him in his vigilante adventures, disguised as the activities of a racketeer and his chauffeur/bodyguard/enforcer. According to the storyline, years before the events depicted in the series, Britt Reid saved Kato's life while traveling in the Far East. Depending on the version of the story, this prompts Kato to become Reid's assistant or friend. In the anthology book, The Green Hornet Chronicles from Moonstone Books, author Richard Dean Starr's story "Nothing Gold Can Stay: An Origin Story of Kato" explores the character's background and how he ends up living in America, suggesting that Kato met Britt Reid on a later trip back to his homeland while in search of his mother. Radio program and nationality George W. Trendle, the owner of radio station WXYZ in Michigan first created and produced "The Green Hornet" show in 1936, with the scripts being written by Fran Striker. The show became so popular it ran for nearly two decades and spun off at least two films. This was Trendle and Striker's second big radio hit; their first was "The Lone Ranger". In the 1936 premiere of the radio program, Kato was presented as being Japanese. By 1939, the invasion of China by the Empire of Japan made this bad for public relations, and from that year until 1945 "Britt Reid's Japanese valet" in the show's opening was then simply identified by the announcer as his "faithful valet". The first of Universal's two movie serials, produced in 1939 but not released to theaters until early 1940, referred in passing to Kato being "a Korean". By 1941, Kato had begun to be referred to as Filipino. A long-standing, but false, urban legend maintained that the switch from one to the other occurred immediately after the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor.