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Date Posted: 09:45:26 08/29/12 Wed
Author: SWC
Subject: The End of the Glory Era of TV Westerns

(This finishes my series on the Glory Era of TV Westerns, from the premiere of Wyatt Earp, Gunsmoke and Cheyenne in 1955 through the attempts to revive Maverick a quarter century later.)

The End of an Era: 1970-81

The western started to fade not because of a lack of popularity and not even because of excessive violence, which was the reason usually given for canceling them, (many were replaced by even more violent cop shows), but because the Nielsen company began looking at demographics, not just counting heads. The networks had sponsors who wanted to attract a younger, more urban audience than westerns and rural comedies tended to attract. So the networks found reasons to get rid of them, despite high ratings. But there were several attempts to revive the genre, which took a long time to completely disappear from the airwaves. Ten more new westerns came out in this period, but most of them didn’t last very long. Overall, the emphasis turned away from lawmen and powerful ranchers to pioneers and the history of the west.

ALIAS SMITH AND JONES

This was inspired by “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”. It was said that Ben Murphy was chosen because resembled Paul Newman but his “Kid” Curry is closer to Robert Redford’s “Sundance Kid” than to Newman’s “Butch Cassidy”. Peter Duel played “Hannibal Hayes”, who was more like Butch. Hayes and Curry were “amiable” bank robbers who wanted to go straight and were promised a pardon by the Governor if they could stay out of trouble for a year, (a rather progressive view). They were thus “blade running”: from episode to episode, to avoid situations they’d be blamed for but being constantly drawn into them by pretty girls, sympathetic characters and assorted bad guys.

Here is the 74 minute premiere episode:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YQomR5xJ_Y
Earl Holliman, who plays “Wheat”, played “Sundance” in the “Hotel DeParee” a decade before. James Drury appears as a Sheriff, shortly after “The Virginian” ended it’s run. The Marshal on their tail is John Russell of “Lawman”.

Shockingly, Peter Duel, (I’ve also seen it spelled “Deuel”), who played Hannibal Hayes shot himself on December 31, 1971 after a drinking spree. He was replaced by Rogers Davis, a Henry Fonda sound-alike who had been the narrator of the show, (but not in the premiere.). They didn’t create a new character for him. They just had him play Hannibal Hayes. I remember thinking he was just as good as Duel but most fans preferred the original. The show last three seasons. Here’s a clip from a show with Davis in the role, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6nJCjaXSOA


HEC RAMSEY

Richard Boone returned to series TV after a sojourn raising his son in Hawaii, (he was offered the role of McGarrett in “Hawaii 5-0” but turned it down and Jack Lord, who had played the bad guy in the premiere of “Have Gun Will Travel” got the job), with this series, which was a spoke in the wheel called the NBC Mystery Movie. It only lasted for ten episodes. Hec Ramsey was an old-time lawman who decided to get involved in the 20th century with new law-enforcement techniques, such as finger prints. But Boone preferred to describe Ramsey as “an older and fatter Paladin”. Here is the beginning of the premiere, (the rest is not on U-Tube).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lQbY_p3Yv4

KUNG FU

Perhaps the most memorable TV western of the 70’s was a sort of eastern western about a multi-racial man from China who had learned oriental philosophy and the art of self-defense in a monastery in China. All western heroes have to be searching for something and his quest was to find his closest relative, an American brother. He encountered the usual dramas and adventures, tinged with racial -prejudice along the way. David Carradine, who had played Shane in that short lived show a few years before, played the hero. Instead of the speeded-up action of Kung Fu movies, this series often went in the other direction and showed the action in slow motion.

Maybe the best thing about the show was that every Asian character actor in Hollywood seemed to get work in it and, after years of playing inscrutable villains or subservient characters, they could play more well rounded and sympathetic types in the many flashbacks to Kwai Chaing Caine’s life in China. Among them: Keye Luke, (Chinese, a former Charley Chan son), Philip Ahn, (Korean but born in LA)), James Hong, (who was actually from Minnesota), Victor Sen Yung, (from San Francisco, another former Charley Chan son and “Hop Sing” on “Bonanza”), Richard Loo, (from Maui), Khigh Dhiegh, (actually Kenneth Dickerson from New Jersey, of Eqyptian ancestry and McGarrett’s famous nemesis, Wo Fat), Benson Fong, (of Sacramento, also a Charley Chan son), Soon Tek-Oh, (Japanese but raised in Korea), James Shigeta, (Hawaiian), and many other recognizable faces.

Here is the 1972 pilot for the show:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOV_CulhC7c
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KogjTl2oJoA
Like the “Hey Boy’s Revenge” episode of “Have Gun, Will Travel”, it’s an interesting look at the way Chinese laborers were exploited in the building of the western railroads.


LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE

After Bonanza ended, Michael Landon produced and directed this adaptation of the novels of Laura Ingalls Wilder about the struggles of a young family in Kansas and Minnesota in the 1870’s. The show avoided the violent confrontations associated with previous westerns in favor of a family drama. The problem, when they went beyond the family, usually had to do with economic and weather conditions, illnesses and other challenges. The series proved there was a wide audience for this sort of down to earth drama and, just as a generation had grown up with Michael Landon as Little Joe Cartwright, now another generation grew up with him as Charles Ingalls. The show lasted 8 years and 205 episodes. The eight other westerns that premiered in the 70’s produced a total of 195 episodes.

It all started here, with the 1974 pilot:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDaoVX2hUbQ
“Little Joe” finally has a wife and a family! But this isn’t exactly the Ponderosa.


THE BARBARY COAST

This somewhat bizarre series combined elements of “Mission: Impossible”, (and used it’s writers), and “The Wild Wild West”. It was also William Shatner’s first TV series after Star Trek. It was also a mess. Shatner played a government agent partnered with gambler Doug McClure in San Francisco’s titular red light district. All I remember of this short-lived show, (13 episodes), was that Shatner tried to do what Ross Martin did on TWWW- be a master of disguises and accents. And he was terrible at it.

All I could find on U-Tube was this ten minute segment of clips. It’s probably all you need to see:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RPR5bgBvZ8

THE QUEST

“Bonanza” was cancelled in 1973 and “Gunsmoke” in 1975 and the Glory Era of the Western on TV seemed to be coming to an end. But the very next year there was an announced attempt to revive it with this series, starring Tim Matheson and Kurt Russell as two bothers searching for their sister, who is held by the Indians. The family had been raided eight years before and the parents killed. Russell and the sister were taken. He’s escaped and joins up with Matheson, now a doctor, to try an find their sister and see what adventures they can find along the way. It was a decent show but it was on opposite the hugely popular “Charlie’s Angels” and only lasted 15 episodes. But the western wasn’t quite dead.

Here’s the pilot/premiere:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6z9zrHxzN0
I was actually more interested in the plight of the young woman they “rescue” from the Indians. She had acclimated herself to the Indian life and had a son by the chief. But her band was wiped out in the ‘rescue’ and other bands saw her with the soldiers afterwards and had to assume she was one of them. She had little choice but to return to white society where she and her child viewed with suspicion and even contempt. She’s going to somehow have to find a life and future for the two of them. How about doing a series about that?

HOW THE WEST WAS WON

You’d think James Arness might have been ready for retirement after playing Matt Dillon on Gunsmoke for 20 years. But he went right into this series, beginning with a 1976 TV movie called “The Macahans”. Big Jim, after watching all manner of gravely-voiced mountain men wander through Dodge over the years finally got to play one. The show took place in the Civil War era and Ol’ Zeb took responsibility for the children of his brother, killed in the war and led them in a covered wagon all the way from Virginia to Oregon. Now there’s a trip! The series only lasted two years and 26 episodes here but became very popular in Europe, (most of the reviews and comments on the IMDB are from there).

Here is the two hour pilot, “The Macahans”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=5uQvoLaJUoY
I found the Civil War sequence to not be very credible. They’ve left Virginia to avoid the war and on the assumption that the grandparents would not be subject to violence because of their age. They get to Nebraska, 1600 miles away, (they say 700 in the show) and hear that the war has broken out and Timothy Macahan, (Richard Kiley), decides he has to go back to see how the grandparents are doing. He abandons his immediate family in their single wagon in Indian country to check up on them. He gets back to Virginia, is captured by Union force and conscripted and winds up dying in the Battle of Shiloh in Tennessee. This makes no sense to me at all.

The narrator at the beginning is radio’s Matt Dillon, William Conrad. Arness often said how much he enjoyed playing Zeb Macahan and when he came back in the 1980’s with a series of Gunsmoke TV movies, he seemed often to be playing Dillon as if he were Zeb Macahan. (I prefer the old straight-laced version myself.)


THE OREGON TRAIL

Clearly ’inspired’ by “How the West Was Won”, This was the second western to take on “Charlie’s Angels”- and the second to be KO’d. They filed 13 episodes but it was cancelled after 6. Rod Taylor led his family on a trek from Illinois to Oregon but they never got there, at least not on the network, (the full 13 episodes are available on DVD). The only evidence of the show on U-Tube is as part of this vintage NBC Wednesday Night promo:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BokuRxzS4g

CENTENNIAL

A new form of series came on the scene in the late 70’s: the mini-series, usually the adaptation of a novel into a series of episodes not intended to become a permanent series and often with an all-star cast. One of the first big hits was based on James Michener’s “Centennial” about Colorado in the era the mountain men and the miners. This one starred, among others, Raymond Burr, Richard Chamberlain, Robert Conrad, Barbara Carrera, Richard Crenna, Timothy Dalton, Sharon Gless, Andy Griffith, Mark Harmon, Gregory Harrison, David Janssen, Alex Karras, Brian Keith, Sally Kellerman, Stephen McHattie, Lois Nettleton, Donald Pleasence, Adrienne La Russa, Lynn Redgrave, Clive Revill, Robert Vaughn, Dennis Weaver, Anthony Zerbe and Stephanie Zimbalist.

Here is the first segment of the opening episode, the first of 26:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iS45CkopbGY


YOUNG MAVERICK and BRET MAVERICK

The Glory Era came to an end with two attempts to revive a classic series, Maverick. The first one was “Young Maverick“, featuring Charles Frank and his real-life wife Susan Blanchard, who had gained a measure of stardom in the soap “All My Children“. ‘Ben’ Maverick was supposed to be the Harvard educated son of “Cousin Beau”, the character Roger Moore had played late in the original series. Moore, who was now playing James Bond, didn’t show up for this show but James Garner and Jack Kelly briefly put in an appearance in the pilot and their appearance made one which they had just brought back the old show.

Two years alter, they did, sort of. James Garner returned as Bret Maverick in a show titled after his character, (both names this time). One difference, (besides the extra chin Garner had) was that this show took place in one location: Sweetwater, Oklahoma, where Maverick set himself up with a ranch and a saloon. It was a pretty good show but perhaps a little too different than the old one. Roy Huggins who created the original, complained that it all took place in the same location whereas the different locales of the original benefited the story-telling, (I remember feeling this way as well). Jack Kelly, who showed up in one episode, complained that they had him playing a con man when the original Maverick characters were gamblers. They could run a sting on someone who deserved it but they didn’t make their money conning people. In the pilot, Maverick is found to have no less than 10 guns of various types on his person. He out-guns Paladin. In the original, he was no hand with a gun and avoided violence.

It just wasn’t quite the same and went off after one season. But nothing was quite the same for the Western moving into the 80’s. It ceased to be part of the TV schedule as people had been convinced that they were old fashioned by the sponsors and TV executives who wanted young, urban audiences watching their programs. There was a brief revival of the Western on TV a decade later after the success of “Lonesome Dove” but that is another story.

U-Tube has just the opening credit sequence for “Young Maverick”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsfaHaMNrzM

It has several episodes of “Bret Maverick”. Here is the two hour pilot, “The Lazy Ace”, (the first segment: each is 15 minutes)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9A2IHg4uVSk

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Replies:

[> Re: The End of the Glory Era of TV Westerns -- Jarrod, 07:11:51 08/30/12 Thu [1]

A good follow-up would be the revivalist period of the television western in the 80s and 90s, with programs like THE YELLOW ROSE, GUNS OF PARADISE, YOUNG RIDERS, DR. QUINN MEDICINE WOMAN, etc. Also, it could be argued that primetime sudser DALLAS, with its share of cowboys and ranch scenes, was a hybrid western.


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[> [> I'll let you do that one -- SWC, 08:43:56 08/30/12 Thu [1]

The football season is about to begin and I won't have time for other projects!


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[> [> [> Re: I'll let you do that one -- Jarrod, 10:30:10 08/30/12 Thu [1]

Gee, thanks. :) I think Pernell appeared in Young Riders, so there is some continuity for sure. Television westerns did not just die when 'Gunsmoke' went off the air.


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[> [> [> [> Re: I'll let you do that one -- Rick, 18:05:47 08/30/12 Thu [1]


What about Western feature films? LOL.





Rick :)


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[> [> [> [> Last year -- SWC, 18:39:19 08/30/12 Thu [1]

I did the epsidoes of other TV westerns in which the Bonanza cast appearred. One of them was that "Young Riders" episode.

My intent was to cover the "Glory Era" of TV Westerns, which did end in the 70's. The alter westerns were interesting and semi-successful but they weren't part of the era I was talking about.


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