Once upon a time, there was pulp. Pulp was a style of writing that emerged onto the scene in the 1920s, featuring a variety of stories printed on cheap paper (hence "pulp"). Back in the day, pulp content ranged from the Cosmic Horror Stories of H. P. Lovecraft to the noir pieces of Raymond Chandler and from the over-the-top action of Doc Savage to the Heroic Fantasy of Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian and even the Raygun Gothic of Hugo Gernsback's Amazing Stories. At the same time, a similar type of adventure fiction was playing on theatre screens in the form of the Film Serial, thrill-a-minute short films that told an overarching story, and with each chapter typically ending in a Cliffhanger. The pulp era died down by the late '50s, when the leading distributor of pulp, the American News Company, went bankrupt, and television largely replaced the serial format.
There was a resurgence in The '60s and The '70s in three forms. The first was simple reprints of the older material: a lot of classic pulp writers were being rediscovered at the time, and being given their first printings in paperback form, with lush new covers by artists like Frank Frazetta or Boris Vallejo - often creating covers that ended up being far more iconic than the original meagre illustrations in the magazine printings.
The second was children's entertainment: creators who had grown up reading pulps and watching the serials wanted to recreate those same thrills for a new generation, and a lot of children's cartoon and comics (especially those aimed at boys) of the mid-20th Century reflect a very pulpy sensibility, albeit one cleaned up for younger viewers.
Finally, while the kids were thrilling to the adventures of Jonny Quest, their dads were reading the Darker and Edgier "men's adventure magazines", which straddled the line between pure pulp adventure and ostensibly-true Lurid Tales of Doom, often with confessional-style titles ("I Escaped from East Berlin!", for example), and always with a Rated M for Manly aesthetic. Technically, these were not pulp because they were printed on better-quality paper, but the two-fisted spirit was definitely there. These are today best-remembered as things to read at the barber shop while you waited for your turn, and were a regular fixture of the magazine rack up until the mid-1970s, when relaxed censorship laws in the U.S. gave rise to the porno magazines, and a lot of the men's adventure stuff went Hotter and Sexier in order to stay relevant. This move proved disastrous, as it not only failed to bring in the smut crowd, but it also alienated the readers who preferred the (relatively) clean adventure content they were used to. This magazine format, too, was thoroughly dead by 1980.
Nostalgia is cyclical, so it was only a matter of time before people started looking back fondly on pulp once again, and when they did, they usually locked onto the over-the-top stories of Proto-Superhero characters like The Shadow, Doc Savage, and The Phantom. Many point to Raiders of the Lost Ark and the sequel Indiana Jones movies, which took 1930s pulp adventures as an inspiration, as the keystone of the post-1980 pulp resurgence, but whatever kicked it off, pulp has recaptured the heart of many a geek.
Two-Fisted Tales refers to stories told in a style that reflects fondly on the old pulps. This usually means the story will be set in the '20s or '30s, and focus on square-jawed, clever men (and women) of action. Other elements thrown in for flavor include:
- Attack of the Killer Whatever: The men's adventure subgenre had a lot of "man versus wilderness" narratives, in which Action Survivor heroes were tormented by animals ranging from the usual culprits like bears, big cats, sharks, and the like, to the truly improbable and harmless, as in the infamous Man's Life story "Weasels Ripped My Flesh!" note
- Proto-Superhero motifs
- Space Opera or Planetary Romance, where people get around in Retro Rockets and other Shiny-Looking Spaceships, and everything is smooth-lined and chrome-plated. You may also find Green Skinned Space Babes or outright Human Aliens, and the possibility of Boldly Coming is rarely far off. Combine this with the above Proto-Superhero and you get Captain Space, Defender of Earth!.
- Mad Science and/or Weird Science. Popular experiments for the those dabbling in these fields include a Man-Eating Plant, mucking about with Evolutionary Levels, or a Brain Transplant with a Killer Gorilla.
- Bold Explorers discovering lost civilizations, usually including a Nubile Savage Jungle Princess, Living Dinosaurs, and maybe a Temple of Doom or two. These are usually located either in a place considered "exotic" by western readers, such as a Hungry Jungle, Thirsty Desert, Mysterious Antarctica, or in a Fantastic Underworld.
- Fanciful depictions of actual civilizations are also fairly common. Ancient Egypt, Darkest Africa, The Shangri-La, and Mystical India have all been popular subjects. Expect a lot of Values Dissonance here, too: most of these stories (though not all) take it for granted that the world is a playground for white heroes to have adventures in. If the Evil Colonialist does show up as a villain, the emphasis will be put on his personal cruelty, rather than any systemic critique of colonialism itself. Odds are also good that he'll be from a country other than that of the assumed readers, thus drawing a distinction between the "bad, cruel" colonialism of the rival powers and the "good, humane" colonialism that we're doing (whoever "we" are)
- Gangsters (not to be confused with ganstas), usually of the type that wear pinstripe suits, call each other by crazy nicknames, and wield Tommy guns.
- The Yellow Peril, usually including a Dragon Lady. Can overlap with the above gangsters in the form of The Triads and the Tongs.
- The occult. A lot of ideas from actual occult, pseudoscientific, and theosophical lore found their way into pop culture via pulp science fiction (and more than a few started off in pulp fiction before getting mixed into the Conspiracy Kitchen Sink), so tropes like Landmark of Lore, Ancient Astronauts, a Sunken City, and the Hollow World fit right in here. Pulp is also the home of the Occult Detective. Also expect to see the occasional sinister cult, typically of the kind that perform Human Sacrifice, wear face-concealing robes, and are assumed to be simply evil; don't expect a serious exploration of how cults maintain control over their members or anything like that.
- Plenty of Nazis to be punched out. Most of them will be the source of, exploiting, or trying to exploit either Mad / Weird Science or the Occult. In later material, Dirty Commies (often overlapping with the above Yellow Peril) would sometimes take their place.
- Ace Pilots, either flying a Cool Plane, or, if it's a Space Opera, a Space Fighter
- Cool Airships were very big in the '30s, and turn up occasionally in pulp literature and film serials of that era (though not as often as you'd think), but have really found their niche in later Genre Throwbacks, where they became a shorthand for fanciful worlds where the pulp adventures never stopped. However, due to their associations with Germany, airships are far more likely to belong to the bad guys than the heroes.
- Adventurer Outfits
- During the War: Stories about military life or important battles were very popular, especially in the men's adventure era. They'd usually emphasize the horrors of war, while at the same time celebrate the bravery of those who had endured it. Given when these magazines were being published, it was safe to assume most of the male readers were themselves veterans, so unflattering depictions of the boys in uniform were right out; this also meant these stories needed to be unusually well-researched when it came to military hardware or the day-to-day details of life in the service.
- Chandler American Time: The pre-war thirties is a popular time frame. As noted above, lots of this stuff was still being published well into the '70s, but even by then it had a very retro-'30s or '40s sensibility, as evidenced by the fact that Nazi villains remained a staple, whether the stories were period pieces set During the War or not.
- Our Cryptids Are More Mysterious: Especially in the post-war pulps. The men's adventure subgenre in particular is often credited with bringing cryptids from the fringes of science and into mainstream pop culture. Bigfoot, Sasquatch, and Yeti were particularly common.
- Wild Wilderness: The men's adventure pulps were often seen as the "outdoors" equivalent to the more "sophisticated", indoors magazines like Playboy. Their heroes were typically rugged, outdoorsy Working-Class Hero types living in small communities on the edge of the wilderness or leading safari tours into the Savage South, shipwrecked sailors in lifeboats or on some Deserted Island, or other varieties of tough guy on some kind of Robinsonade. This was the perfect environment to meet the improbably violent animals and cryptids mentioned above, though some of these stories would temper the carnage with a Green Aesop.
As stated above, Two-Fisted Tales don't often attempt to recapture the varied feel of all the old pulps; it's very rare you'll see someone trying to overlay the Doc Savage feel onto a Cthulhu story (not that it's impossible). Usually, it attempts to focus on the thrilling heroics, not that that's a bad thing.
While most works in the genre are not set during the interwar "pulp era" (though the occasional one, such as The Treasure of the Sierra Madre [1948], is), The Western could be considered an inherently pulpy genre, thanks to it frequently featuring heightened reality, an exotic historical setting (often nostalgically rendered), double-fisted machismo, a sensationalistic tone, plenty of action and/or adventure, print-the-legend storytelling, larger-than-life mythmaking, and fairly clear lines of morality. There were also a lot of pulp magazines devoted specifically to publishing western fiction, so there is, at the very least, plenty of overlap.
Related to Diesel Punk and Jungle Opera. Often the subject of a Genre Throwback. See also Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot, Twice-Told Tale which requires a specific tale. Also see Sword and Sorcery for a similarly campy style of adventure narrative that was popular around the same time.
If you're an author; see Write a Jungle Opera
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- The Big O is a noir-influenced series with a jazz age/Art Deco aesthetic, and a Doc Savage-esque Renaissance Man hero, though being an anime, it also features Humongous Mecha and Kaiju.
- A Centaur's Life's backstory includes a Lost World populated with snake-men, a modern Aztec empire, mass UFO sightings and neo-Nazis: not your average Slice of Life setting (even if you ignore the centaurs).
- JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Battle Tendency takes place just before World War II, with a wisecracking Guile Hero protagonist taking on Nigh Invulnerable super-vampires known as the Pillar Men. In an odd inversion, Those Wacky Nazis are actually on the heroes' side in trying to take out the Pillar Men (and one of them is transformed into a cyborg through NAZI SCIENCE!)
Comic Books
- Adventureman features an Expy of Doc Savage passing on his powers to a single mom and her sisters.
- In Astro City, the Astro-Naut's adventures are of this nature, featuring an Ace Pilot waging Space Opera battles, fights against The Mafia, and Planetary Romance with the Green-Skinned Space Babe Xalzana, all exploring a thousand worlds in a sleek silver Proto-Superhero costume.
- Atomic Robo:
- Much of the series is a more modern-day take on this. The titular character is a snarky robot who has fought Nazi mad scientists, Lovecraftian horrors, and an intelligent dinosaur, visited different dimensions, and encountered the ghost of Rasputin.
- In-universe, Robo is a fan of Dirk Daring, the Daring Doer of Derring-Do, a radio program that is best enjoyed at certain (i.e. loud) volumes.
- The DCU:
- Adam Strange has significant pulpy elements, namely that the title character is an archeologist who becomes a hero on an alien planet while romancing the daughter of the scientist who brought him there. Raygun Gothic design elements, and a Planetary Romance concept (that is clearly inspired by John Carter of Mars) make Adam one of the pulpiest of DC's heroes.
- DC Comics Bombshells puts the leading ladies of the DCU in World War II, fighting both Those Wacky Nazis and Eldritch Abominations.
- First Wave (DC Comics) is a Two-Fisted Tales and Diesel Punk universe that includes Doc Savage, The Avenger, The Spirit and Rima the Jungle Girl, as well as DCU characters who fit the paradigm like Batman (who in this world is The Shadow, complete with twin guns) and Black Canary.
- In 1997, DC Comics had a "Pulp Heroes" event, in which all their annuals were written in the style of the pulps. Ones that particularly fitted the Two-Fisted Tales paradigm were under the banners "My Greatest Adventure" and "Tales of the Unexpected". "Suspense Detective" also fitted to an extent, although that was more the Private Detective trope. "Young Romance" and "Weird Western Tales" were based on very different pulp genres.
- Five Ghosts is a deliberately pulp adventure comic whose protagonist, Fabian Gray, is possessed by — and shares the abilities of — the ghosts of Miyamoto Musashi, Merlin, Sherlock Holmes, Dracula and Robin Hood. The covers often emulate EC Comics and other Golden Age titles, though the series itself is far less "meta" than Tom Strong or Planetary.
- The Goon is sort of a cross between this and supermarket tabloids. The Goon himself and his sidekick Franky are a pair of gangsters straight out of an old newspaper comic, who keep their city safe from zombies, mad science, Eldritch Abominations, sparkly vampires, and a whole Fantasy Kitchen Sink worth of weirdness.
- Hellboy features elements of Two-Fisted Tales, with Nazis, evil monkeys, Weird Science, and the Golden Age crime-fighter Lobster Johnson. A spin-off series featuring Lobster Johnson has taken these elements and cranked them up to eleven.
- Marvel Universe:
- Dominic Fortune, a 1930s "Brigand for Hire" created by Howard Chaykin.
- The Captain America (1968) story arc "The Bloodstone Hunt" is essentially this — Captain America has to travel around the globe to exotic locations to get the five fragments of the Bloodstone before Baron Zemo can. Each location is essentially a pulp location in itself.
- The Immortal Iron Fist is mostly a kung fu book, but features strong elements of pulp as well (especially with Orson Randall, the World War I-era Iron Fist).
- As part of Secret Wars (2015) is Where Monsters Dwell featuring the Golden Age character the Phantom Eagle, a Cool Plane, Amazons, and an Island of Mystery full of dinosaurs. It being another Garth Ennis piece, it's also a Deconstructive Parody, as the Eagle is a send up of these kinds of heroes; sexist, cowardly, and completely incompetent. It's The Not-Love Interest Clemmie who does all the heroic stuff (and who gets to have lots of sex with the Amazons).
- Many Wolverine stories that aren't focused on more traditional superheroics are instead pulp-style adventures. In fact, the first 20 or so issues were almost all exclusively pulp stories, with Logan traveling around the seedier parts of the world and fighting supernatural villains. He also spent little time in his iconic costume, not even wearing it at all for the first two arcs.
- Planetary features Axel Brass, one of the universe's "Century Babies" and a Captain Ersatz of Doc Savage, who once headed up an entire secret society of Captain Ersatzes based on the pulp heroes of the era. His adventures and dealings with Elijah Snow are regularly chronicled.
- The Rocketeer is a celebration of all kinds of 1930s and '40s tropes including this one, and so was the 1991 film adaptation.
- Garth Ennis's run on The Shadow is a full on Genre Deconstruction of Two-Fisted Tales. A romantic view of the pre-war 1930s is only possible by intentionally ignoring the heinous war crimes committed by the Axis Powers, especially the Nanjing Massacre. A character in the series lampshades this, saying he expected more of "rip-roaring" adventure in the Japanese-occupied China.
- Parodied in Tales Designed to Thrizzle with Two-Fisted Poe ("Quoth the raven — Lights Out!!!") and The result of a confusing memo: Two-Tailed Fists! (with a pair of confused gangsters attacked by giant fists with tails).
- Tom Strong is Alan Moore's Reconstruction on everything that made those stories fun and noble.
- The EC Comics title Two-Fisted Tales began with stories of this genre but soon became a (much better) war comic.
Fan Fiction
- The Many Secret Origins of Scootaloo: The version of Daring Do in the eighth chapter is this trope. It centers around the sale of a legendary diamond in a mafia-owned cabaret, complete with gunfights and a young street urchin who helps out the heroes.
Films — Animation
- The Adventures of Tintin (2011) is based on three Tintin stories: The Crab with the Golden Claws, The Secret of the Unicorn, and Red Rackham's Treasure. Pulpy elements include high adventure, manic action, pirates, exotic locales, lost treasure, and an intrepid hero.
- Missing Link is a throwback to the earlier pulps, in the final days of what would eventually be called Steampunk. A Gentleman Adventurer, the widow of his old rival, and a sasquatch go on a Around the World in Eighty Days-style globetrotting adventure to the Himalayas in search of the yeti.
- Porco Rosso is a downplayed example, with a plot revolving around an Ace Pilot who hunts Sky Pirates during The Great Depression, while on the run from the Italian Fascist government. However, this being a Studio Ghibli movie, the tone is a lot more introspective and pensive than you might expect for this sort of story.
Films — Live-Action
Examples by creator:
- Amicus Productions made four Edgar Rice Burroughs-inspired movies in the mid to late '70s, staring Doug McClure and featuring big rubber monsters, lost worlds, and insanely gorgeous women. Three of these — The Land That Time Forgot, The People That Time Forgot, and At The Earths Core — are straight adaptations of Burroughs novels (see below under Literature), while the fourth, Warlords Of Atlantis, was an original story that nonetheless nicely captured the tone of a Burroughs novel.
- Hammer Films films got in on this with movies like:
- The Abominable Snowman, one of their first feature films, which sends an expedition on a mountaineering adventure into a somewhat fanciful depiction of the Himalayas in search of the Yeti. However, the film definitely celebrates Peter Cushing's quiet, intellectual Englishman over Forrest Tucker's brash, two-fisted American.
- The Lost Continent (adapted from Dennis Wheatley's novel Uncharted Seas), a movie about the crew and passengers of a ship getting stuck in the Sargasso Sea, and encountering sea monsters and a lost civilization descended from Spanish conquistadores.
- One Million Years B.C., a joyfully-silly cavemen-and-dinosaurs movie featuring probably the single most iconic Nubile Savage in pop culture history, being menaced by an entire menagerie of Ray Harryhausen beasties.
- Hammer's development process for these movies seemed to start by designing a really cool poster, and then trying to write a movie around it. One movie that, alas, never got past the poster was the simply-titled Zeppelin v. Pterodactyls
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Examples by work title:
- The Abominable Dr. Phibes is a horror-comedy version of this, with its Mad Scientist title character lurking in a spectacular Art Deco mansion and terrorizing 1920s London, alongside his band of clockwork musicians. Taken even further in the sequel, Dr. Phibes Rises Again, where Phibes travels to Egypt and gets into a race with an Adventurer Archaeologist to find an ancient tomb that can grant eternal life.
- The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension is a purposeful Homage to Doc Savage.
- Aquaman (2018) and its sequel, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, draw on the old-school fantasy of the comics to create a kind of Flash Gordon (1980)-esque Planetary Romance, except set in an Awesome Underwater World. The movies are episodically structured, suggesting an old film serial, with every stopover promising action set pieces, sea monsters, Lovecraft Lite themes, and essentially every pulp adventure trope they could squeeze in.
- The original Aztec Mummy trilogy of Mexican films, consisting of The Aztec Mummy, Curse Of The Aztec Mummy, and The Robot vs. the Aztec Mummy, revolving around the run-ins between the undead warrior Popoca and a wide cast of characters including Adventurer Archaeologists, a Mad Scientist, his gangster henchman, a robot, and a variety of luchadors (including an El Santo stand-in called El Angel).note They would receive later semi-reboots in the form of The Wrestling Women Vs The Aztec Mummy and the much-later Genre Throwback Mil Mascaras Vs The Aztec Mummy in 2007, both of which feature different Aztec mummies pitted against pro wrestlers.
- Batman (1989) largely falls into this style with its pulp-noir aesthetic. The film, about the superhero Batman fighting to prevent the clown gangster the Joker from terrorizing Gotham City, is set in an Ambiguous Time Period with some The '40s-style touches in the costumes and architecture. The sequel, Batman Returns, mixes in some 1920s German Expressionism stylings, with a few aspects of Gothic Horror.
- In The Batwoman, a bat-themed luchadora moonlights as a detective to stop a Mad Scientist from creating a race of Fish People.
- The action-adventure-western Blowing Wild (1953) is about a group of oilmen (Gary Cooper, Anthony Quinn, and Ward Bond) struggling to survive in bandit-infested territory in South America. It's presumably set about the time of its release and has pulpy thrills and macho content.
- Captain America: The First Avenger features gung-ho hero Cap and a group of Badass Normals fighting HYDRA, a splinter group of Those Wacky Nazis with Weird Science death machines powered by Asgardian magic.
- Arnold Schwarzenegger starred in two fantasy-action-adventure movies based on the pulp character Conan the Barbarian (originally created by Robert E. Howard): Conan the Barbarian (1982) and Conan the Destroyer (1984). These two Heroic Fantasy films, set in a prehistoric dark age, feature hyper-macho heroics, sadistic villainy, and wild action. The intro to the 1982 film, voiced by Mako, even promises to "tell you of the days of high adventure".
- Creature from the Black Lagoon edges into this trope, with a jungle expedition running afoul of a very lonely fish-man. By contrast, the first sequel, Revenge of the Creature, is a fairly by-the-numbers Escaped Animal Rampage story. The second sequel, The Creature Walks Among Us, however, amps the strangeness back up with more Weird Science and elements of Film Noir.
- Dillinger (1973) is much more grounded than many other pulp works (no fantasy elements here), but it's a highly pulpy gangster actioner that tells a print-the-legend version of the biography of iconic Great Depression-era bank robber John Dillinger. It has over-the-top shootouts, tough-talking dialogue, an interwar setting, and storytelling that greatly amplifies the excitement of the John Dillinger story.
- The Final Sacrifice is a low-budget attempt at creating this kind of story, with the son of an Adventurer Archaeologist teaming up with a [Dark and Troubled Past tormented]] drifter to battle an evil cult and find the ruins of a lost civilization in rural Alberta.
- Flash Gordon (1980) is a very tongue-in-cheek and campy sci-fi adventure with a Raygun Gothic aesthetic, tons of very hammy acting (including a career-definingly loud performance from BRIAN BLESSED), and a kickin' Queen soundtrack.
- Gangster Squad is a pulp gangster-actioner, although it's not as outrageous as some works of pulp fiction. In it, an off-the-books group of Los Angeles police officers must take down the crime empire of Mickey Cohen. It has Coleman Harris impaling a drug-pusher's hand to a wall with a thrown knife (and killing a bad guy later in the similar manner), a Wild West lawman named Max Kennard who brings a single-action revolver to his shootouts with the mobsters (despite this being set in the The '40s), and other over-the-top details.
- The Indiana Jones movies, about an Adventurer Archaeologist traveling around the world, outwitting Nazi villains and excavating ancient temples, with some aspects of Diesel Punk. The runaway success of these movies is often credited with repopularizing the pulp aesthetic, and most examples made after Indiana Jones take some inspiration from it.
- The Pre-Code classic Island of Lost Souls (1932) could be considered one of the quintessential pulp horror movies (though it also has a fair amount of pulp adventure, as well), being about a shipwrecked sailor who finds himself trapped on a South Seas island ruled by Mad Scientist Dr. Moreau. Based on the book The Island of Doctor Moreau, it's a still-chilling example of the scarier side of pulp fiction with its lurid horror and exotic locales.
- Jumanji is all about a sapient magical game based on a Jungle Opera setting from exactly this kind of genre. The second film takes this even further, with every player sucked into the game and given new avatars based on five stereotypical heroes from a jungle-exploring two-fisted tale.
- The landmark Pre-Code action-adventure movie King Kong (1933) is an important work of pulp, being about a giant ape who's discovered by a film crew on an uncharted island. It's got the over-the-top action, awe at the exotic, and fearless adventuring associated with pulp fiction. The much later MonsterVerse movies continue this pulp tradition in their portrayal of Kong; see below.
- The Librarian is a modern day pulp adventure spanning, to date, three films and a series.
- The Lost City, which is almost a Whole-Plot Reference to Romancing the Stone (described below), is another such paperback-influenced Romantic Comedy version of a pulpy Jungle Opera story. The heroine, once again, is a romance-adventure novelist who gets roped into such an adventure, and the hero is the model who appears on her book covers.
- The Pre-Code adventure-horror-thriller movie The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932) fits this aesthetic, being about a mad Chinese doctor bent on world domination. It has archaeological adventure, a death ray, overly-complicated torture devices, and lots of Yellow Peril racism.
- The MonsterVerse movies continue the pulp tradition of King Kong (1933) in their portrayal of Kong:
- Kong: Skull Island is a Lost World adventure set in The '70s. However, it cleverly manages to deconstruct a lot of the colonialist tropes associated with lost worlds in fiction.
- In Godzilla vs. Kong, the big ape travels to an even lost-er Fantastic Underworld, where he finds a gigantic axe that basically turns him into a 335-foot tall Barbarian Hero.
- Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire continues to explore the Hollow Earth, introducing a lost race with mysterious crystalline technology. Meanwhile, Kong discovers a kingdom of his own kind, ruled over by an Evil Overlord whom he attempts to overthrow, in an arc resembling an old Heroic Fantasy story. It ends with Kong becoming king by his own hand.
- Based on the short story of the same title, The Most Dangerous Game (1932) is a Pre-Code fusion of pulp action-adventure and pulp horror about a shipwreck survivor who finds himself trapped on a remote island controlled by a mad count who's taken game-hunting to the next level. It has heroic action and sensationalistic horror.
- The Mummy's Hand and its sequels codified the trope of a mummy as a shambling, mute Implacable Man who likes to strangle people with their recurring villain Kharis and his repeated run-ins with a family of Adventurer Archaeologists.
- The Mummy Trilogy is exactly this kind of story, being largely an action-adventure series with the supernatural giving it more of a horror element than most. Taking its title and most of its plot cues from The Mummy (1932), it has more in common tonally with The Mummy's Hand (see above).
- Overlord (2018) is probably the closest thing we'll ever get to a Wolfenstein movie. It's a pulp take on World War II, with square-jawed American paratroopers infiltrating a German-held fortress full of gruesome Nazi science.
- In the Mexican film The Panther Women, an El Santo knockoff called El Angel teams up with a detective and two luchadoras to fight shapeshifting witches.
- The silent gangster movie The Penalty (1920) is about mobster Blizzard, who unnecessarily had both of his legs amputated as a child, and now plots his revenge on the mistaken doctor and the city of San Francisco as a whole. While not a pulp film of the rock-'em-sock-'em action-adventure variety, it's still a crime-drama-thriller with sensationalistic elements, like the main character's secret lair, complete with an arsenal and operating room, that's accessible through a secret entrance in a fireplace, and a lurid, morbid plot.
- The Phantom Creeps is a 1939 movie serial about a Mad Scientist (played by Bela Lugosi) using an arsenal of strange inventions to try to Take Over the World. There are lots of chase scenes, twists and turns in the plot, and fist fights, and every episode ends in a Cliffhanger.
- The Primevals is a very overt Genre Throwback, revolving around an expedition into the Himalayas to find the yeti, and stumbling on an entire Fantastic Underworld and the remnants of an ancient alien colony. All the creature effects are done with deliberately antiquated-looking Stop Motion.
- Pulp Fiction, as evidenced by the name, is designed as a Genre Throwback to this sort of magazine, specifically the ones publishing meandering crime stories.
- The Rocketeer is another affectionate homage to the two-fisted tales of yesteryear, starring an adventurous pilot, an experimental jetpack, and Those Wacky Nazis.
- The films of El Santo are often referred to as "pulp Mexican cinema''. Via their Genre Roulette format, they would pit their Masked Luchador hero against vampires, cowboys, Martians, Mad Scientists, gangsters, Aztec mummies, ghosts, spies, Wicked Witches, and more. There was no problem so great that Santo couldn't suplex it. El Santo's films were at the forefront of a wave of low-budget pulp action adventure movies (often with horror elements) coming out of Mexico throughout the '50s, '60s, and '70s, some of which you can read about across this page. Due to the success of the Santo movies in particular, many of these films from about 1961 onward would be about luchadors.
- Romancing the Stone is a variation, being based more on pulp paperback romance-adventure novels — the kind with ripped shirtless dudes embracing beautiful heroines on the cover — than their magazine counterparts. In fact, the heroine of the movie is a successful writer of that exact type of novel, and finds herself unexpectedly pulled into just such a Jungle Opera action-adventure story. Naturally, it mixes in a heavy dose of Romantic Comedy.
- The Seventh Curse is a Hong Kong Horror Comedy take on this, with a practicing MD who moonlights as a badass action hero getting sucked into a jungle adventure involving Blood Magic, Human Sacrifice, and demons. It plays out like a mix of Indiana Jones and The Evil Dead (1981), but with more martial arts.
- Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is a gleefully silly Diesel Punk adventure full of mad science, daring aviators, and globetrotting adventure.
- Star Wars was inspired by elements of the pulp series Flash Gordon and was in fact originally intended to be a film adaptation of it. The "episode" titles for each film, as well as the Opening Scroll filling you in on the backstory, are clearly meant to invoke the feel of an old serial.
- The Tarzan movies starring Johnny Weissmuller are certainly very pulpy, especially the first two, Pre-Code ones — Tarzan the Ape Man (1932) and Tarzan and His Mate (1934). They're full of exotic locations, heroic derring-do, and high adventure.
- While not as over-the-top as some stories of the pulp aesthetic, The Untouchables (1987) checks many of the boxes for its inclusion here, being a heightened, action-oriented, exciting, and somewhat exaggerated take on a team of lawmen trying to take down the Chicago crime empire of Al Capone during Prohibition.
- Zathura exchanges the jungle setting from its spiritual predecessor Jumanji (see above) for a Flash Gordon-style Raygun Gothic atmosphere. Both are based off of books by Chris Van Allsburg; in fact, the Zathura book was a direct sequel to the Jumanji one.
Literature
Examples by creator:
- The work of Edgar Rice Burroughs, providing some of the definitive examples of some of this trope's subgenres.
- Tarzan, his most famous character, is one of the definitive pulp heroes, practically defining the Jungle Opera subgenre: Tarzan is a man raised by apes to become king of the jungle — basically what you'd get if Mowgli were an action hero. His stories are full of lost cities and grand adventure.
- The Land That Time Forgot and its sequels tell a classic Lost World tale of dinosaurs, feuding tribes of cavemen, volcanic eruptions, and a square-jawed American hero (played by Doug McClure in the movie) who must sort it all out.
- The Pellucidar series is basically a pulp adventure take on Journey to the Center of the Earth, with a subterranean Lost World full of good-looking primitive humans, diabolical monsters, plenty of dinosaurs, and a different square-jawed American hero (though one also played by Doug McClure in the movie) who must sort it all out.
- The John Carter of Mars novels are classic Planetary Romance works, with a richly-drawn world of trackless desert, proud warrior race guys, Weird Science, daring escapes, heroic rescues, airship battles, sword fights, and a square-jawed American hero (whom, sadly, Doug McClure never got to play) who must sort it all out.
- Publisher and editor Robert Deis (and a rotating crew of co-editors) has released a whole series of anthology books collecting stories originally published in men's adventure magazines. They include such attention-grabbing titles as:
- Weasels Ripped My Flesh!: A grab bag of multiple subgenres.
- Cuba: Sugar, Sex, and Slaughter: All stories that involve Castro and the Cuban Revolution.
- Cryptozoology Anthology: Stories and articles about cryptids.
- I Watched Them Eat Me Alive!: Animal attack stories.
- Maneater: More animal attack stories, but specifically Threatening Shark stories.
- Atomic Werewolves and Man-Eating Plants: When the men's adventure stuff overlapped with weird fiction, bringing us the occult, Hollywood Satanism, more cryptids, robots, and aliens, as well as a reprint of H. P. Lovecraft's Gothic Horror nightmare "The Rats in the Walls".
- The Naked and the Deadly: A collection of stories by Lawrence Block, most of which skew towards Detective Fiction and the noirish.
- Handful of Hell: All stories by prolific writer Robert F. Dorr, nearly all of which are war fiction.
- He-Men, Bag-Men, and Nymphos: Stories by Walter Kaylin, ranging from the noirish to Nazisploitation to Spy Fiction, but all of them extremely over-the-top, violent, and horny.
- Philip José Farmer's long writing career is marked by his great love of the pulps, and he devoted great energy to his many Two-Fisted Tales. Even his works which aren't in the genre are often informed by it. Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life provides a biography of the pulp era hero and links him to other period heroes.
- Kim Newman's Dr. Shade... sometimes. Some of the stories featuring him are celebrations of the pulps and others (most especially "The Original Dr. Shade") are Deconstructions. Also by Newman but not featuring Dr. Shade: the Diogenes Club story "Clubland Heroes" (definitely a Deconstruction).
- Manly Wade Wellman was a prolific writer of pulp fiction, who wrote for a wide range of weird fiction magazines, particularly Weird Tales. He's best remembered for the Silver John series of Fantasy Americana stories, though he also wrote ghost stories, prehistoric fiction, and one of the Captain Future novels.
Examples by work title:
- "Adventure Story" by Neil Gaiman is narrated by the son of a WWII soldier who had this type of experience post-war.
- Andrew Doran: Andrew Doran is a Doc Savage-esque Genius Bruiser and square-jawed hero, even if he's more obnoxious and prideful than the majority of pulp heroes. He's up against Nazis, evil cultists, and monsters. The books are done in a deliberate episodic pulpy style reminiscent of older serialized fiction.
- Baccano!, a Prohibition-era story with gangsters, serial killers and immortal alchemists, told in Pulp Fiction-style Anachronic Order.
- The Bagman, a former gangaster turned masked protector of the innocent in 1930s Chicago.
- The Bernice Summerfield novel Down by Lawrence Miles features "Mr. Misnomer, the Man of Chrome", who Benny knows for a fact is a fictional character from 24th century "pulpzines". It also features a hollow world full of dinosaurs, a Nazi villain, a mad computer and all the usual stuff. Turns out to be a deconstruction.
- Biggles had a few adventures that dabbled in this genre between the wars. It looked as though he were going to end up doing the same thing again after World War II, but instead he got a job offer from a comrade in arms who'd gone back to his prewar career as a police inspector, and spent the next decade or so being Biggles of the Yard instead.
- Mark Stephen Rainey's Blue Devil Island featuring the Blue Devil Squadron facing off against an Eldritch Abomination in the South Pacific during World War II.
- The Books of Cthulhu series takes a very pulp hero version of the Cthulhu Mythos, with protagonists that are unafraid to oppose the various cultists as well as forces threatening the world. Occasionally subverted where the protagonists Broke Your Arm Punching Out Cthulhu.
- The Captain Riley series by Fernando Gamboa, featuring a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits on a Cool Boat fighting (who else?) Those Wacky Nazis.
- Paul Malmont's pulp-homage novel The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril has the authors of Doc Savage and The Shadow looking into the murder of H. P. Lovecraft and uncovering a global conspiracy.
- The Ciaphas Cain books follow this style, with the added twist that the narrator protagonist keeps insisting his acts of daring-do are misinterpretations or just what was necessary to survive.
- In a more lighthearted variant, the Doc Wilde series. Doc even brings his kids along on his adventures.
- The novel Gods of Manhattan, in the Pax Britannia series of Steampunk novels, features two-fisted adventurer Doc Thunder (Doc Savage, with elements of Hugo Danner and Superman), and killer vigilante Blood Spider (The Spider, with elements of The Shadow), amongst others.
- Lagadin's Legacy features elements of the Indiana Jones-style adventure story, with elements of thriller, mystery, and satire.
- Lost Horizon (1933) is an adventure novel in which the crew of a crashed airplane are stranded in the Himalayas. It is generally credited with popularizing the trope of The Shangri-La.
- Zach Parsons specifically called his book My Tank is Fight! an example of "two-fisted pulp history", with a title taken from a punk rock song by The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets. It describes the development and hypothetical use of various super-strange World War II weapons that never quite made it past the prototype stage (if they made it that far at all).
- The Takers is an Indiana Jones-style homage novel by Jerry Ahern, about an action-adventure novelist and his Love Interest — an Intrepid Reporter who investigates wacky UFO and occult stories — who team up to investigate the murder of a CIA agent, and the log of a 19th Century expedition searching for Atlantis. It manages to work in Pirates, Ancient Astronauts, Mysterious Antarctica, Flying Saucers, Those Wacky Nazis, a Diabolical Mastermind and his Psycho Knife Nut daughter, and a nuclear submarine!
- In the Wax and Wayne series, interludes in the book parts have snippets of the in-universe "broadsheets" featuring headlines, advertisements, and bits of pulp fiction stories. The most recurring being the (heavily embellished) real life adventures of "Allomancer Jak".
Live-Action TV
- Danger 5 brings more of a '60s flavour to this, pastiching the goofy Pulp Magazines of the decade. Despite its very '60s aesthetic, however, it's set during World War II and features a very silly Adolf Hitler as its Big Bad. The second series carries it further with an over-the-top neon-lit Cannon-esque version of The '80s, with every episode ending in a toy commercial — except that it's actually set during the '60s, with figures like Perron, Kruschev, and Skorzeny running around.
- Doctor Who has this as one of its stock Genre Roulette settings, especially during the Classic series. Many of the William Hartnell-era stories harken back to boy's adventure stories of the '30s and '40s, from "The Daleks" (which has a heavy Dan Dare vibe) to "The Smugglers" (pirates and swashbuckling). Seasons 13 and 14 (the Gothic Horror period) are a particularly good period to find them in — there's a Raygun Gothic detective story ("The Robots of Death"), a Fu Manchu Expy ("The Talons of Weng-Chiang"), and a Who Shot JFK? conspiracy thriller ("The Deadly Assassin"); a Darker and Edgier, Bloodier and Gorier, slightly Hotter and Sexier and more 'pastiche-y' tone; and the introduction of a sexy jungle-girl companion inspired by 1900s pulp. Some show up earlier and later than this — bizarrely, "City of Death" was intended to be one, but then someone got the bright idea of asking Douglas Adams to write it.
- Tales of the Gold Monkey features Ace Pilot Jake Cutter and his adventures in the South Pacific in 1938.
- The X-Files: The episode "Triangle" has elements of this, especially the big ballroom punch-up between British sailors and Nazi goons, not to mention Scully as a glamorous 1930s spy in a red dress.
Podcasts
- This is Decoder Ring Theatre's entire schtick, with both of their main series, Red Panda Adventures and Black Jack Justice, being heavily influenced by this style.
Tabletop Games
- Achtung! Cthulhu is taking all the World War II and post-war pulps about punching Those Wacky Nazis and disrupting their wicked schemes and gives them a ride through the Cthulhu Mythos country.
- Crimefighters is a pulp-themed, role-playing tabletop game from 1981. It emulates the quests of popular Crime and Detective pulp characters (such as Doc Savage, the Shadow, and Agent X-9) against criminal masterminds. The game presents three character classes: the Defender, an in-universe Lawful Good that fights crime and gains experience by capturing, not killing, offenders; the Avenger, an in-universe Chaotic Good with a penchant for vigilantism and therefore gains experience points by killing criminals; and the Pragmatist, in-universe Neutral Good, that usually abides by the law but is willing to break it in order to bring villains to justice.
- Crimson Skies, later adapted into a series of PC and Xbox games, focuses heavily on the Zeppelins and Sky Pirates aspect of pulp.
- d20 Modern: The Pulp Heroes setting in d20 Past, full of dashing aviators and mad Nazi science.
- Dungeons & Dragons: While the base game certainly can fit this trope (typically with a strong Heroic Fantasy flavour), a few campaign settings in particular stand out:
- Dark Sun is directly based off of old pulp fantasy classics like Conan the Barbarian, as well as Planetary Romance works like the John Carter of Mars novels, and Dying Earth fiction like the works of Jack Vance.
- Eberron basically codified what we would now call Dungeon Punk, and is deliberately structured to give opportunities for noirish mystery, Jungle Opera, or espionage storylines. The game world is recovering from a massive war, and another one may be looming on the horizon — very much replicating the climate of the 1920s and '30s.
- Fists & .45s was created by dredging out few cardboard boxes of old pulps and then trying to work them out into a game. Unlike most cases, this game is heavy on the actual content of the pulps, rather than their aesthetics alone, only adding to the craziness.
- In Fortune and Glory, players take on the roles of pulp archetypes — an Ace Pilot, an Intrepid Reporter, a Mad Scientist, a Great White Hunter — in a globe-trotting adventure to recover mystical artifacts before a Nebulous Evil Organization (In addition to Those Wacky Nazis, we have The Mafia and a Religion of Evil) gets them first.
- Gear Krieg is very much this at heart, with heavy Diesel Punk trappings.
- Genius: The Transgression gives detailed instructions on how to create a pulp tale in the sourcebook.
- GURPS is generic enough to handle the setting, as seen in GURPS Cliffhangers and GURPS Thaumatology: Age of Gold.
- Hollow Earth Expedition is made of this, to the point its mechanics were build from ground-up toward larger than life heroes doing crazy stunts and simply powering through lesser or trivial obstacles. Large section of the core rulebook is dedicated to explaining in detail how to recapture the feel of a Film Serial in your own scenario, too.
- Many adventures had by the Sons of Ether in Mage: The Ascension, whose Tradition is chock-full of people with names like "Doc Eon" and "the Crimson Claw". Taking an appropriately two-fisted nickname seems to be standard even if you don't use it often.
- Pulp Cthulhu does this to the parent game Call of Cthulhu, turning the fraidy investigators to pulp heroes by tweaking the game rules, and adding Weird Science in mix with the traditional Lovecraftian setting, resulting a setting where insane adventurers are bad news... for the adversaries!
- Rocket Age is intended to have a pulpy, heroic play-style, in a Raygun Gothic Space Opera setting. It even has a story point system to let you manipulate the plot and pull off almost impossible stunts and bluffs.
- If Savage Worlds can be said to have a "default setting", it's this. One of the first supplements was a Pulp Toolkit, another supplement/source book is named Thrilling Tales, and the whole system's emphasis on "Fast Furious Fun!" leads to a very pulpy game experience.
Video Games
- Bulletstorm embraces this demeanor, down to the unlikable but heroic lead.
- The Cliffhanger: Edward Randy is an arcade game starring a dashing whip-wielding protagonist. You do things like fend off enemies on speeding motorboats, run away from huge demolition trucks and fight a boss on the wings of a plane.
- Earnest Evans: The titular Evans is a clear Indiana Jones homage (though despite the name, Evans is only playable in one game in the trilogy,) and the series has the cast dealing with Roaring '20s-era gangsters, ancient magic, plenty of globe-trotting to ancient ruins, and a plot to resurrect Hastur.
- Pathway is set in North Africa and Middle-East during the 1930s, where you lead a multinational team of adventurers whose goal is to prevent Nazi occultists to gain archaeological treasures.
- Pulp Adventures is a total conversion Game Mod which changes Freedom Force vs. The Third Reich into a Homage to pulp stories, with a brand new campaign featuring "Nazi punching! Dinosaur wrangling! Two-fisted action galore!", and a roster of 25 available heroes such as Doc Savage, Indiana Jones, The Rocketeer, Tarzan, Dick Tracy...
- Strange Brigade is all about the eponymous Brigade, a group of larger-than-life adventurers and soldiers of fortune, trying to stop the return of an evil mummy queen from the dead. Set in the 1940s (based on the available weaponry) and complete with a Lemony Narrator straight out of pulp-era radio shows.
- Parodied in Team Fortress 2 with Saxton Hale, a pulp protagonist who owns the company that makes all of the characters' weapons.
- Ultima: The Worlds of Adventure spin-offs, Worlds of Ultima: The Savage Empire (based on Lost World and Jungle Opera fiction) and Martian Dreams (Planetary Romance).
- The Uncharted series is set in modern times, but all the elements are there: Indiana Jones-esque hero, lots of bad guys to fight in the middle of a war, exotic locations to visit, women to rescue (and be rescued by), betrayal, and the overall theme. It's essentially the playable form of a pulp hero story.
- Valiant Hearts deconstructs this by placing it in the real-world context of World War I. The early game focuses on the Ragtag Bunch of Misfits tracking down a Diabolical German Baron who has kidnapped Anna's Reluctant Mad Scientist father and used his genius to engineer devastating super-weapons in the name of German Imperialism. However, even once the apparent Big Bad is defeated, the War itself continues on and the game shifts focus to the Gray-and-Grey Morality of the situation and the extreme personal toll of the war on the protagonists.
- The Wolfenstein series has elements of this. You're a One-Man Army during World War II, stopping Those Wacky Nazis from taking over the world with either hi-tech weaponry or the supernatural to their advantage. The third game even has a final level on a zeppelin.
Webcomics
- Girl Genius is based strongly off pulpy stories of juvenile adventurers like Tom Swift and Jonny Quest. In-universe, the Heterodyne stories, (often exaggerated) tales about the adventures of heroes Bill and Barry Heterodyne, are enormously popular.
- The currently comatose "Modern Pulp" webcomic site, especially Sprecken, about a 1930s crimefighter (who used to go by "Mr. Midnight") relocated to the 2020s.
- Semi-Auto Semla seeks to emulate the genre and the tone, complete with the gratuitous numbers of damsels in distress and heavy-duty action.
Web Originals
- The semiprozine Cirsova Magazine was specifically conceived as a place for good ol' pulp-style sci-fi and fantasy stories.
- The Mirror of Amun-Ra is an affectionate Genre Throwback to the Indiana Jones films, The Mummy Trilogy, and other such Adventurer Archaeologist stories.
- Pulpcovers.com is a blog that posts the cover art — and sometimes interior illustrations — from pulp magazines and old paperbacks. Sometimes they include a link to a pdf of the original magazine, too.
- Reddit: r/Pulp is a subreddit devoted to the creation of modern pulp fiction, juicy taglines and lurid covers included.
- Wormwood: A Serialized Mystery is a pulpy horror story centering around the mysterious northern Californian town of Wormwood.
- The YouTube channel Mutant Museum features dramatic readings of - among other things - stories from old pulp magazines. These are largely divided into three main series: True Dread! (horror stories), True Wonder! (fantasy and science fiction), and True Excitement! (general adventure, mystery, or romance content).
Western Animation
- The Adventures of Tintin (1991) is a part of the Tintin franchise that has the titular hero-reporter (and his dog, Snowy) setting off on highly pulpy globetrotting adventures.
- Archer Danger Island takes the characters of parent series Archer and dumps them, in one of Archer's Adventures in Comaland, into 1938 on the titular Danger Island: a tropical, French-colonial island with cannibal natives, Nazis, volcanoes, Archer trying to pilot a crude plane, and all sorts of wild adventures.
- Batman: The Animated Series has many elements of pulp-noir, with masked superhero Batman battling supervillains and gangsters who threaten Gotham City. "Dark deco" aesthetics are prominent, and the storytelling is moody and heightened.
- The protagonists of DuckTales (1987) solve mysteries and rewrite history every episode. The revival show takes it up a notch.
- Clutch Cargo was a Lighter and Softer instance of this, with each adventure broken up into serial instalments. However, it's probably best remembered for its infamous Syncro Vox animation technique.
- Jonny Quest contains elements of this, focusing on globe-trotting adventures, monsters, action, and a Cool Plane. Another kid-friendly example, though it does take itself a lot more seriously than most of Hanna-Barbera's other output at the time.
- My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
- The Daring Do series of Books Within a Show, which is heavily based on Indiana Jones, in the episode "Read it and Weep".
- As does wherever the hell in Equestria the plot of "Daring Don't" takes place, which reveals all the stuff she writes about actually happens.
- The Secret Saturdays (ostensibly based on Hanna-Barbera cartoons such as Jonny Quest) is what happens when the heroes of Two-Fisted Tales settle down. Weird Science, exotic locations, and the patriarch of the family is even named Doc (and could pass for Savage in the right light).
- TaleSpin transposes characters from The Jungle Book (1967) into this kind of adventure setting, with Baloo as an Ace Pilot in a 1930s-inspired World of Funny Animals.
- The Venture Bros. often parodies this genre, since it is a parody of (among other things) Jonny Quest. It is the story of a single-dad former Kid Hero, his own teenage sons, and their bodyguard, battling a supervillain Arch-Enemy and travelling to far corners of the globe, though due to the Deconstructive Parody nature of the show, the focus is often more on the characters' interpersonal drama and their various inadequacies than on them actually achieving anything.
