TV and Me: Serials to Cereals

 

Television and I grew up together.  This is our story.  Second of a series.

They were called television channels.  Programs flowed down them from broadcast stations into our eager eyes.  But for the producers of those programs they were river channels of time—of hours to be filled, from early morning to increasingly late at night.

 As it geared up to produce original programs, early television often relied on the ready-made: the stories already on film.  But the motion picture studios were not going to feed the competition if they could help it.  Major studies kept the movies that they owned under lock and key, until at least the middle years of the 1950s. 

 That left the old stock of lesser studios and independent productions, plus the expendable properties that nobody was going to pay to see in theatres: old short subjects and one-reelers, silent era comedy shorts, cartoons from the 1930s and 40s, old serials and some B movies—notably, westerns. 

 They all appeared on early TV. Even the most popular serial of all—the Buster Crabbe Flash Gordon—was reedited for 1950s TV.  But western serials and B features were particularly adaptable.  There were no old cars or obsolete technology or fashions of an earlier era, to tell viewers this was yesterday’s news.  

Westerns existed in their own time—a time created by Hollywood, beginning in the silent era of the 1920s.  By the 30s and 40s, mostly smaller studios specialized in them, turning them out by the hundreds.  They were rarely more than an hour in length, and were often shown at Saturday matinees. And they were popular. So they were perfect for filling those channels of TV time.

 We watched them all, after school and especially on Saturday morning: Johnny Mack Brown, Hoot Gibson, Tex Ritter, Gene Autry (and other “singing cowboys”), Whip Wilson and Lash LaRue, Tim McCoy and Tom Mix, an occasional Roy Rogers or an early John Wayne.  My mother marveled that through breakneck gallops and barroom brawls, the cowboys’ hats never fell off. That was by design: all the main characters wore hats so their stunt doubles could pass for them—their hats were essentially glued to their heads so you couldn’t see their faces.

 How these serials and movies were shown—sliced into half-hours or fifteen minute segments, surrounded by commercials, etc.—was mostly up to local stations that ran them.  So it happened that a silver-haired gentleman named William Boyd approached a local station in Los Angeles, offering them some western movies he owned.  He also happened to be the star of these movies.  He played Hopalong Cassidy.

 Bill Boyd was a lead actor in silent films in the 1920s, but as he approached 40 years old—and with his hair turning prematurely white—he wasn’t getting prime roles.  He heard about an independent producer planning a series of westerns, and lobbied hard for the lead role. In 1935, he became Hopalong Cassidy—in more ways that one.

 The character by that name in series of pulp novels by Clarence E. Mulford was a hard-drinking troublemaker, but Boyd pitched a new concept for him in the movies: he was clean-living, noble and heroic, and won the day with his intelligence as much as his fists and his six-gun.  This transformation of the character was the first of Boyd’s amazingly good decisions. Another was realizing that he needed to support the character’s image by toning down the wilder side of his own nature.  He made himself into a role model, on and off screen. 

The classic Hoppy is pretty much there—maybe a little meaner-- from the beginning of what turned into a series of 66 films. No attempt is made to hide his silver hair.  In fact, it was accentuated by his black outfit and hat.  This was against the Hollywood western cliche—the bad guy wore the black hat.  But Hoppy didn’t go too far: his horse (Topper) was white.

 The Hoppy films were a cut above the usual serial or B movie western.  Movie theatre owners noticed and began playing some as features.  Boyd cajoled studios into spending more, and took pay cuts to finance better quality stories and production.  These movies excelled in cinematography and the scenery where they were typically shot, at Lone Pine, California, in the foothills of Mt. Whitney.  It all seemed to pay off: in surveys of the most popular western stars in the late 30s and early 40s, Hopalong was in the top three, along with Gene Autry and Roy Rogers.

 But in 1943 the film series producer decided the Hoppy series was played out. Then Bill Boyd made his next brilliant decision.  He spent everything he had and could raise to buy both the rights to the character and the old films.  He made twelve more Hoppy features for theatres between 1946 and 1948, with smaller budgets.  That’s when he offered his old films to an NBC affiliate in Los Angeles, to run on TV.

 The Hopalong films quickly became popular, but Bill Boyd and NBC had another idea: Hopalong Cassidy would be the first western hero to make the transition to a television series.  It began airing on June 24, 1949, just days before my third birthday. 

 By the time I was four, Hopalong Cassidy was a national sensation, and I was hooked. William Boyd became the first national television star. Hopalong was on the cover of Life Magazine, Look and Time. 

That following Christmas, when I was four and a half, my most prized gifts were an authentic Hopalong gun and holster set, plus a less than authentic Hopalong suit and hat. (That's me in the top photo, defending my almost one year old sister Kathy.) Eventually I would have a Hopalong toy chest, a Hopalong record, and probably other items. In total there would be some 2600 different Hopalong-themed or endorsed products. (Hoppy lunch boxes started a lasting trend.)  Radio and film heroes and perhaps one or two other TV heroes at that time generated products and “premiums,” but nothing like this.  This started it all. 

So I wasn’t the only one with a Hopalong Christmas.  It was so common that the classic song, “It’s Beginning to Look A Lot Like Christmas,” written by Meredith Wilson in 1951 and originally recorded by Perry Como and Bing Crosby, includes the lyrics: “A pair of Hopalong boots and a pistol that shoots/ is the wish of Barney and Ben...” 

 Hoppy was so ubiquitous that he was the subject of my grandfather’s Italian/English pun.  A common greeting among my grandfather and his friends was, “Che si dice?” pronounced K-sa-deech. It’s the equivalent of, “what do you say?”   When I was in my Hoppy phase as a child, my grandfather would greet me: “Hey, Hopalong Che si dice!” 

Contradictory sources make the actual broadcast history of Hopalong Cassidy a little hazy.  But there seem to have been only 52 half hour episodes made, though they likely ran repeatedly until at least the mid-1950s.  Twelve of these were edited down from the  last dozen theatrical films Boyd made.  Then he added 40 new half hour television episodes.

 By the time the first 12 shows had aired, Boyd knew exactly who his audience was: me, and children more or less my age. So to the new episodes he appended a brief coda.  Arrayed in his Hoppy outfit, appearing to be reading a book or writing at his desk, he offered brief homilies to his “little partners.”  Judging from the subjects—wash your ears, go to bed when you’re told to, and above all listen to your mummy and daddy—he judged the majority to be at the lower end of the four to twelve years age group.  (Hoppy also promised parents that he only endorsed quality, safe products, and this has been reported to be true—Bill Boyd personally reviewed all offers.  He also refused to make very popular personal appearances if children were charged admission.)   

Hoppy appearance in Denver 1954

Watching these episodes now, digitally cleaned up for DVD, it isn’t entirely clear why we loved them at such a young age.  Their stories were often fairly complex.  Hoppy was mostly more of a detective using his brain than a gunslinger. He might casually deck a bad guy with his fists, and he sometimes shot one, though that became increasingly rare as the series progressed. 

 There were always action sequences—but action in the 1950s sense: horseback chases, runaway buckboards and stage coaches, frequent gunfights with cowboys shooting at each other from a distance—and Hoppy arriving in the nick of time.  I’m sure we found these exciting.

 Mostly I think it was Hoppy himself.  There was something magical about the tall lanky man in black, and the way he carried himself.  Seeing these again, I recalled the neckerchief he wore with the steer head clasp (I probably had one.)  But above all I remembered his voice and his laugh.  I remember trying to imitate the Hoppy chuckle.

 His age never registered (Boyd was in fact almost as old as my grandfather.)  But something paternal probably did.  He could look mean (Boyd’s sneer was more prominent in the movies) and he could be sarcastic with his sidekicks, but he could also be gentle and generous.  He smiled a lot.  From the start of the new episodes, Hoppy was often coming to the rescue of an adolescent or child.

 How much of these stories could I understand at four or five?  In cutting down movies from more than 60 minutes to under 30, Boyd used extensive voice-overs to summarize missing elements of the story.  He refined this technique for the television episodes, so that Hoppy was often shown merely looking, or thinking, while that silvery voice talked only to us. This allowed for more complex stories in the allotted time, so they hold up pretty well.  But I wonder how much we understood.

 The stories often involved Hoppy coming to the aid of victims of the unscrupulous.  As often as not, the bad guys were bankers and men of position.  Hoppy championed the unprotected, and even if I couldn’t follow financial details and so on, I probably got that much.

Duncan Rinaldo and Bill Boyd

 Hopalong Cassidy was the first film to television western series, and also the first made for television western.  Seeing its success, other networks got interested.  Very quickly, ABC aired The Lone Ranger (1949), starring Clayton Moore, and The Cisco Kid, starring Duncan Renaldo, went into syndication (1950.) They were the epics of our early childhood. (Moore, Renaldo and Boyd were all friends. Moore even dropped the mask to appear in several Hoppy episodes, once as a villain.)

 The Cisco Kid was based on an O. Henry character, and called the Robin Hood of the West.  Pancho (played by Leo Carrillo, who unlike Boyd and others was actually an accomplished rider) was Cisco’s comical sidekick (“Let’s went!”) and they eventually had a conversation at the end of their brief adventure which they ritually ended by saying, “O Pancho!”  “O Cisco!” and laughing. 

The Lone Ranger was very popular on radio, and Clayton Moore as the masked rider of the plains deepened his voice accordingly.  Jay Silverheels as his Indian companion Tonto played the part with unfailing dignity—he was just about the only sidekick who wasn’t comical.  They also championed the weak and oppressed.  

(What everyone of a certain age remembers is the opening narration to The Lone Ranger.  Oddly, none of the available episodes use the whole thing. It didn't appear until after the first season or two, and apparently later syndicated episodes cut it back.)

 While it’s true that among the Western movies that made it to TV were enough “cowboys and Indians” scenes to make that a cliche of the form, but it seems less recognized that Hopalong Cassidy and other early television westerns mostly did not take the same attitude.  In every Hoppy episode featuring American Indians, they are the victims of unscrupulous whites.  The same is true of The Long Ranger.  In fact, that’s the theme of both of the original Lone Ranger feature films. 

Guy Madison as Wild Bill

Other western movie stars also got themselves television shows, notably Gene Autry (1950) and Roy Rogers (1951.).  And the floodgates opened for new TV westerns, such as two of my favorites, The Range Rider and The Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok (I especially liked their fringe jackets) both in 1951.  Most of them wound up being sponsored by breakfast cereal companies, and so memories of Guy Madison’s Wild Bill Hickok arrive flavored with Sugar Pops.

 Non-Western movie serials also made the transition to TV cereal (Buck Rogers, for example, and a weird postwar German-made Flash Gordon with an American actor as Flash and Germans as the villains.) One that featured the same lead actor in both film and TV was Dick Tracy, starring Ralph Byrd in 1950-51. 

Watching a specific episode of this series is actually one of my early memories, at five years old or so. In the story, the bad guys got the drop on Tracy and took away his gun.  But he outsmarted them because he had a second gun they didn’t find.  I remember leaving the room, thinking about this clever ploy.

 But stories that already existed on film alone could not completely fill up those channels of time. Most of that time in early television was taken up by something that made it unique, and yet also related to past forms.  It is an element that television rarely relied on again, and today’s viewers almost never see.  Because most of early television was live.

 What time is it, kids?  Next time.