The New Adventures of Charlie Chan The New Adventures of Charlie Chan The New Adventures of Charlie Chan is a British-American crime drama series that aired in the United States in syndicated television from June 1957, to 1958. The first five episodes were made by Vision Productions in the United States, before production switched to the United Kingdom under ITC Entertainment and Television Programs of America. The series, consisting of 39 half-hour monochrome episodes, follows the investigations of the fictional detective Charlie Chan, created by Earl Derr Biggers in 1925. The series follows the convention, established in the Charlie Chan movies, of having the Asian character
Charlie Chan such as Fu Manchu, while simultaneously emphasizing supposedly Chinese characteristics such as impassivity and stoicism. Biggers wrote six novels in which Charlie Chan appears: The first Charlie Chan film was "The House Without a Key" (1926), a ten-chapter serial produced by Pathé Studios, starring George Kuwa, a Japanese actor, as Chan. A year later Universal Pictures followed with "The Chinese Parrot", starring Japanese actor, Kamiyama Sojin, in the starring role. In both productions, Charlie Chan's role was minimized. Contemporary reviews were unfavorable; in the words of one reviewer, speaking of "The Chinese Parrot", Sojin plays "the Chink sleuth as a