TV Sherpa: The Deacon

Here's another installment in the "TV Sherpa" series by the splendid Kabuki Katze. Our subject this time is the Deacon. I chose to resurrect the name of the the Deacon due to the character's in-story connections with Cat-Man and Kitten. I thought it would make a perfect companion series to the mythical Cat-Man show.

The trouble arose in the Deacon's original design. If you look at it, you'll see it's about as boring as possible. My initial idea was to riff on the Green Hornet and have the Deacon wearing a white mask in the style that Van Williams wore for the Hornet show. But that was before Kabuki unexpectedly became infatuated with lucha libre images I had been reblogging on Tumblr. During the course of our back and forth on this series, she said, "Now I'm wondering where the next two are going . . . are wrestlers involved?"

Well, no, they weren't...at that moment. But her inquiry got me thinking. I had been musing weeks earlier that one of the great missed opportunities in B-movie history was that no one sought to emulate Mexico's wrestler movie genre in the United States. The Destroyer was based out of Los Angeles for years, even holding the WWA World title on a few occasions. Wouldn't it have been great to see a movie where the Destroyer had to fight monsters or other baddies?

As the wheels kept turning in my brain, I recalled that the most famous luchador in history is El Santo. El Santo's name is Spanish for "the Saint". And I was working with a character named "the Deacon." HMMMMMM.

In the end, I granted Kabuki her wish and the Deacon was reincarnated as a masked wrestler fighting for justice. He's still a natty dresser, because really, that makes him even more awesome. He's not quite a luchador, since he's not of Mexican descent. Still, that doesn't diminish the pure goodness of this concept.

Oh yes, the name of the fictional actor. I went through many different permutations before deciding on "Reed Ganza" as the thespian charged with portraying the man under the hood. This surname is a big of an allusion to Santo's real name, but I'll let you discover that one for yourself if you so desire. Meanwhile, the Deacon can also be sighted at deviantArt!