Tales of the Gold Monkey (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As I said already, we’ve got very little pulp on the telly, these days.
So I went back to the old DVD collection, and dusted off my copy of Tales of the Gold Monkey.

For those who missed it, Tales of the Gold Monkey was a short-lived series, produced in 1982 (yes, thirty years ago) by Donald P. Bellisario, of Magnum P.I., Quantum Leap and JAG (among others) fame.

The show features a lot of stuff – this is somewhat a standard in pulp-themed material, and as I mentioned before, it is not really a bad thing.
But more on that later.

The set-up: we’re somewhere in the late 1930s on the island of Bora Gora, out in the Pacific. Here, former Flying Tiger Jack Cutter (Stephen Collins) is a bush pilot and all-around adventurer, trying to make ends meet.
In the pilot episode, he gets to save a plucky USA OSS agent (Caitlin O’Heaney), and recover a golden idol from an island inhabited by aggressive big apes and neolithic natives.
Nice and smooth.
The mix also includes Jack’s alcoholic mechanic, his one-eyed dog, a French guy managing a bar in the jungle, a false priest that’s actually a Nazi and a bad & sexy (well, bad & sexy for 1980s TV standards) Dragon Lady with a samurai for a bodyguard.

Quite a nice set-up, all things considered.
And one that was refreshingly different, in 1982 – and yet also familiar… as in Indiana Jones-style familiar.

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