It’s a question I was wondering about when writing this weekend’s story on the upcoming superhero movie. Does the average view even know the who the Green Hornet is?

The Hornet has really faded from view in the last couple decades. His last big pop culture moment was a TV series way back in the 1960s. (It was short-lived, I might add.) Since then, it’s not like he’s been on countless lunchboxes, kid’s pajamas and disastrous Broadway shows, like more well-known superheroes, such as Superman, Batman and Spider-Man. I’d guess he’s even less famous than another pulp hero of the era: The Shadow.

So the question is, what kind of value, if any, does the Hornet brand have? It’s difficult to say.

I asked Brendon Connelly from comics and news site Bleeding Cool if his readers cared about the Green Hornet, and he insisted that they did. He says that whenever the site posted a story on the movie or the current Kevin Smith comic, interest was high.

But did these people have prior knowledge of the Hornet brand, or are they just Kevin Smith fans or people who think the Seth Rogen movie looks fun? My guess is, it’s the latter, and that Seth Rogen could have written basically the same script he did, but with an invented masked hero, and gotten almost the same result at the box office. The die-hard Green Hornet fans out there probably wouldn’t fill a single theater.