TV and Me: Disney (part 2) The Crockett Grin

 TV and I grew up together.  This is our story.  Eighth in a series.

Once he’d made several animated feature films, Walt Disney wanted to try live action features.  World War II intervened, but at the same time, unexpectedly gave him the impetus and means to make his first live action films immediately after the war.

 The financial success of Disney animated films depended on the addition of international audiences, particularly in Europe.  Once the war started, his movies couldn’t be shown in the battlefield that was western Europe, except in England, where they became a cherished relief from the war. But the British government impounded the profits until war’s end, and even then, Disney could spend that money only in the UK. 

Richard Todd, Glynis John in Rob Roy

So the Disney Studios used those funds to make their first live action films in England.  Just as his animated features mostly adapted well-known fairy tales and other existing stories, Disney chose classic British adventures for these movies.  His first was a live action version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, released in 1950.  It was followed by The Story of Robin Hood (1952), and in 1953, The Sword and the Rose (an Arthurian era story about knights) and Rob Roy, the Highland Rogue.

 These theatrical films all were presented on Disneyland, as Disney’s anthology TV show was called in 1954. They were all divided into two hour-long shows (with Walt Disney providing historical and other background) on consecutive weeks.

  Treasure Island appeared in two parts in January 1955, during the show’s first season.  Robin Hood was  shown in the second season, during November 1955.  The following January (1956), The Sword and the Rose appeared under the original title of its source book, “When Knighthood Was In Flower.”  Rob Roy got the two successive episodes treatment that October, early in the third season.

 I remember Robin Hood the best. Richard Todd played Robin as a young energetic upstart (a yeoman rather than a noble.) This Disney movie has the distinction of being the only version of Robin Hood to have filmed in the actual Sherwood Forest.  I may have seen it before I saw the Richard Greene TV series.

 Knighthood and Rob Roy kind of blended into Robin Hood, since they also starred Richard Todd.  I remember his romantic interest in Knighthood, Glynis Johns –I’m now surprised to see she wasn’t Maid Marian. She was however, the female lead in Rob Roy. With her distinctive voice and gaze, she had a long career in British and Hollywood films. 

On the other hand, I didn’t take to Treasure Island.  I found Long John Silver (memorably played by Robert Newton) uncomfortably scary, especially in his relationship with Jim Hawkins, a boy more or less my age (Bobby Driscoll again.)  (For reference, I was eight when Disneyland went on the air in 1954.)

 With these modest successes accomplished, Disney began his first big budget Hollywood live action film, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, based on the novel by Jules Verne.  He assembled a Hollywood cast, though lesser stars who were also good actors: James Mason, Peter Lorre and the up-and-coming young Kirk Douglas.  Except for Douglas, the cast and production had a European flair, perhaps a transition from the English films.

It turned out to be a highly ambitious film, with Disney facing technical challenges as he did with his first animated features.  This one required underwater photography in only the second Cinemascope movie ever made.  Even the diving equipment necessitated technical innovations.  Disney built a live action studio for this movie, and with the special effects and location shoots, it quickly became the most expensive movie in Hollywood history to that time. 

 Financially stretched, the Disney Studios went all in to make this film a success with a massive ad campaign. Not by coincidence, scenes from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea were the focal point for the seventh episode of the Disneyland TV show in December 1954, just weeks before the movie’s release.

 The most dramatic scene in the movie was a fight on the deck of the Nautilus submarine with a mammoth Giant Squid.  Fragments of it were featured in the TV hour.  I recall Walt Disney explaining on this show what a giant squid is, especially in contrast to an octopus; how it squirts ink, and how it may have been the source of perennial tales about sea serpents.

 Like most Disneyland episodes, this one was repeated many times over the years. But it wasn’t until 1976 that the full movie (in color) was shown on TV, after Disneyland moved to NBC and after a few name changes to The Wonderful World of Disney.

 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea did become a major international hit.  It was innovative and influential, yet it is curiously forgotten.  Part of the reason may be that it was immediately obscured by a phenomenon unparalleled in television history—and in Hollywood history-- which began the very next week after this seventh Disneyland episode, when the eighth was broadcast on December 15, 1954: the first Frontierland show called “Davy Crockett, Indian Fighter.”

 Back for a moment to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.  Creating a working model for that giant squid, with working tentacles and mouth, was a huge technical challenge. In fact the first version failed so badly that a new model had to be designed and built, and the elaborate scene re-shot at huge expense, forcing Disney to go begging to the banks so he could finish the movie.

 So when Walt Disney heard that a new movie was opening that featured giant ants with articulated limbs and mouth, he went to see it. (He may also have been taking a look at one of the film’s leads, James Arness—not yet the star of TV’s Gunsmoke.)

   The giant ants in the sci-fi horror film Them!—one of the first atomic monster movies—didn’t impress him, and apparently neither did James Arness. But another actor with one scene did.  The studio was preparing their first live action film specifically for Disneyland, the TV show.  It was based on the life and legends of an early 19^th century American folk hero, Davy Crockett.  But so far they didn’t have anyone to play Crockett.  

In Them! Fess Parker played the pilot of a small airplane who saw two winged giant queen ants flying along with him, and was confined by officials, ostensibly as a psycho, but really because scientists and the military (who at that point knew about the radiation-enlarged ants) were on the lookout for such reports.  It’s a single scene, but Parker—tall, rangy, folksy and personable-- delivered lines and a performance with conviction and humor.  Disney had found his frontier hero.

 

In his first leading role, Fess Parker was paired with Hollywood veteran Buddy Ebsen (starting out as a loose-limbed dancer, he was cast as the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz until the makeup made him seriously ill) as Crockett’s companion, Georgie Russel.  It was a quick, low budget television production, except that Disney paid extra to film it in Technicolor, as he did most of his shows, looking forward to color TV. (Which is why Walt almost always appeared in a blue suit—it filmed best for both black and white and for color.) 

The first episode was shot on location in Tennessee, far from Hollywood and its professional support, so both Parker and Ebsen had to do most of their own stunts.  Each day’s filming was sent back to Disney Studios, so no one on the production knew how it looked.

 The Davy Crockett saga appeared in three hour-long Disneyland shows, about a month apart, starting in December 1954.  By the time the last episode aired in February 1955, it was the biggest television phenomenon in history.  Initial audience was estimated at 50 million.  Disney repeated these episodes in April and May.  Eventually some 90 million viewers had watched it.  

The Davy Crockett craze revved up with the show’s signature song, “The Ballad of Davy Crockett,” one version of which was the number one record in America for 13 straight weeks.  This Bill Hayes recording ended up as the #6 song of 1955, and two other versions (by Fess Parker and by Tennessee Ernie Ford) were also in the year’s top 30, logging in at #22 and #26 respectively.

 Just two months after the third episode was first re-run, a movie edited from the TV episodes opened in theatres—in color (paying off Disney’s gamble earlier than even he could expect.)  It, too, was a hit—perhaps some solace to the perplexed in Hollywood: TV could subtract from their week-to-week audiences, but in certain cases it could also multiply. 

 The Crockett craze is also measured—and remembered-- in merchandise.  Disney, who pioneered the merchandizing of characters with Mickey Mouse in the 1930s, was up to the challenge, but since Davy Crockett was an historical character who couldn’t be trademarked, a lot of others got in on the goldrush.  It’s estimated that in just the first six months after the first episode, $100 million in merchandise was sold (and this was in an era in which the average annual wage in the US was under $5,000.) 

What was this all about?  Clearly, a lot of kids were already watching the Disneyland TV show, and their enthusiasm spread.  As part of that initial audience of postwar Baby Boom kids—our numbers swelling with each passing year until peaking later in the mid-1950s—I’m guessing we were first attracted to the Crockett charm.  The first Crockett episode was also the first under the Frontierland banner, which the narrator described as “tall tales and true from the legendary past.”  Crockett was a perfect blend of “tall tales and true.”  He was a larger than life hero, but quiet, sincere and at times ironic. He was also different in a humorous way. In our first glimpse of him he emerges from some bushes where he had been experimenting on subduing a bear by grinning at it.  You wouldn’t catch John Wayne trying something like that.

 The rollicking theme tune added to that sense of fun. As Davy, Fess Parker was a soft-spoken showman, who would soon prove to be an unusual hero: after fighting a band of Creek Indians, he makes peace with them in agreeing to guarantee they could live on their land.  In the second episode he defends other Indians from European-American predators, and storms out of Congress in protest against a bill that broke the treaty he helped forge and took away Indian land.  

 We’d seen buckskins and fringe jackets in westerns before, but not coonskin caps, and they became the rage. We all had to have one, and I recall it was one of my first lessons in socio-economics: I understood that it was the rich kids who wore the caps completely made of fur.  The rest of us got leather-topped (or more likely, leathery plastic) caps with some fur on the sides, and something like a tail, probably the $1.95 version from a five-and-ten. 

 The only other merchandise I remember having was a set of socks with Davy Crockett on them.  The best part was that they came in a package with a cardboard backing, upon which was printed all the lyrics to the Ballad of Davy Crockett—I believe it was twelve verses.  (Eventually I got a record of the song—which I still have. Not the cap, though.)

 I also was bold enough to stride out of the bright sunshine into the dim tiny showroom at the nearby Behner’s Garage on the West Newton Road, and timidly request the photograph I’d read that American Motors dealers  (sponsors of Disneyland) were giving away.  Much to my surprise, they gave me one.  It was Fess Parker in full costume, with printed autograph: “When you’re out to win, try the Crockett grin…your friend, Davy Crockett/Fess Parker.”

 Otherwise, that spring and summer we had the woods across the road in green Pennsylvania to play Davy Crockett, and we could improvise an Alamo out of a suitably shaped garage roof down on Maryland Avenue. We wore our caps and whatever else we had that looked leathery.  We cradled our long sticks meant to be rifles across our chests like Davy did.  I did what I felt was a fair imitation of Fess Parker, starting every thoughtful sentence with, “Wellp…”

 It was easy to play Crockett partly because the violence on the shows looked like play.  There was no blood and no bullet holes or visible knife wounds.  The fights were more like the roughhouse and wrestling we did anyway, and the “bang, you’re dead.”  At the same time, Disney’s stories always included death and its consequences, however gently.

  At some point in our play we would likely sing the song:

 Born on a mountaintop in Tennessee

 Greenest state in the land of the free

Raised in the woods so's he knew every tree

 Kilt him a b'ar when he was only three-

-Davy Davy Crockett

 King of the Wild Frontier

 And so we inducted ourselves into a ritual of fantasy, history and grace.  We’d seen Davy at the helpless cause of the Alamo, in the final act of going down fighting. Then the next year there were two more episodes, billed as “legends” about Davy Crockett, and the spectre of idealistic death was overcome by living on in story, in myth that could encompass our own invented adventures. 

 Live-action adventures on Disneyland—particularly under the Frontierland banner that ranged over 18^th and 19^th century American history—gradually increased in number until they dominated the hours in the late 1950s.  This nicely paralleled my growing out of the prime age for animated fantasy and into live action interests.   

I remember three characters in particular.  In fifth and sixth grades I developed a keen interest in the American Revolution and the early formation of the United States.  This may have started in school—my fifth grade history textbook was titled “Builders of Our Country”—but it was given impetus, as well as flesh and blood, by Disney’s Johnny Tremain.  

 Disney adapted Esther Forbes’ novel Johnny Tremain, about a young apprentice silversmith in colonial Boston, beginning just before protest against Britain’s “taxation without representation” that quickly led to the Revolutionary War.  Tremain interacted with real historical figures, including Paul Revere, Samuel Adams and James Otis, and the real events of the Boston Tea Party, and the battles of Lexington and Concord.   

 Disney made a movie for theatres from the book, and previewed it on a Disneyland episode in May 1957 called “The Liberty Story.”  Disney made insightful use of footage of his film version of Robin Hood, because the King John opposed by the mythical Robin Hood was the same King John who was forced to sign the Magna Carta, renowned as the first acknowledgement of rights that led centuries later to the Bill of Rights in the U.S. Constitution.   

But the centerpiece of the episode was Johnny becoming acquainted with the Sons of Liberty, and participating in the Boston Tea Party.  I couldn’t wait to see the movie, and I didn’t have to wait long—I saw it in a theatre (in color) that summer.  Then I saw it again in November 1958, when it was presented in two parts on Disneyland. 

I was taken with the story of Johnny’s silversmithing accident that burned his hand, rendering it useless for awhile, but other parts of the story were less compelling than the talk about the reasons for independence, and especially the thrilling parts, augmented as usual by catchy tunes and rousing musical staging: 

It’s a tall old tree and a strong old tree—

And we are the sons, yes we are the sons

The Sons of Liberty… 

 My enthusiasm went as far as acquiring a Johnny Tremain tricorner hat, and paying closer attention to the founding documents.  In sixth grade I was especially taken with the Declaration of Independence.  I saw a facsimile of Thomas Jefferson’s first draft in a text book, and copied it out in my notebook, trying as best I could to imitate Jefferson’s handwriting.  Later I acquired (was given or more likely sent away for) fake yellowed parchment copies of the Declaration, Preamble and Bill of Rights, and for good measure the Gettysburg Address, and tacked them all on my bedroom wall.  By the time I was in high school I knew these texts pretty well.

 

The second figure was Elfago Baca, a character at the center of ten one-hour stories in the 6^th and 7^th seasons, from October 1958 (when the show’s name had changed to Walt Disney Presents) to March 1960, the longest series within the series.  There was a real Elfago Baca, a Mexican American lawman and lawyer in New Mexico and Texas in the late 19^th century, and at least some of the stories (especially the first few) were based on historical accounts. The Disney Elfago Baca was more clearly a hero, and a champion of Mexican Americans and minorities in general.

 He was one of the few Latino (or Hispanic or Latinx) TV heroes, though not the first—not even the first that Disney produced.  He was preceded by the Cisco Kid and by Disney’s Zorro, for example.  Zorro was the only other television series Walt Disney made, besides this anthology series and the Mickey Mouse Club. He introduced it on Disneyland’s fourth anniversary show, and it ran from October 1957 to the summer of 1959.  We watched this series, too.  This was so much our Zorro that when its popularity brought the 1940 Tyrone Power flick, The Mark of Zorro, back to one of our Saturday matinees, I’m afraid it was laughed off the screen.  For one thing, his “Z” was way too sloppy.

 Though Guy Williams (Zorro) and Robert Loggia (Elfago Baca) both had Italian parents, Loggia (in his first major role) effectively played Baca as a hero who emerged from the Mexican American community.  

Because he survived an onslaught of gunfire while besieged in a crumbling sod house, Baca got the reputation as indestructible.  The inevitable Disney theme song emphasized the “nine lives” aspect as it played with the Spanish names Elfago El Gato (the cat.) 

I was drawn to Loggia as Elfago Baca partly because although he was slim he used cat-like quickness to his advantage.  I was a skinny kid, and my self-consciousness increased with age (by this time I was 11 and 12), so Baca was a kind of model.   

 But he was a model also in other ways.  In the Disney version, as a lawyer he champions the rule of law over violence, and the principle of equal justice under the law.  This extends not only to his Mexican American community but to, for example, the Anglo settlers who arrive to farm in what was until then cattle country.

 They are called Mustangers, apparently poor whites from the Blue Ridge Mountains.  They are the subject of violence by cattle ranchers and prejudice in town, where they are derided and prevented from buying goods they need.  It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see the mid-1950s parallels to the Freedom Riders, sit-ins and children attacked for going to schools because of their race.

 Veteran TV writer Maurice Tombragel, who wrote for most of the westerns I watched in the early to mid 1950s, provided some startling dialogue towards the end of the story.  Fearing the fate of their lawyer, Elfago Baca, and the sheriff in confrontation with the ranchers who burned their farms, the Mustangers and their wagons are occupying the main street of the town, and preventing anyone from trading at the general store. 

 The storekeeper (played by DeForrest Kelly) appeals to the Mustanger elder.  “It’s not right to make innocent people suffer,” he says, meaning his usual customers.

 “Those who think themselves better than others are not innocent,” the elder says.

 “But you don’t understand,” the storekeeper pleads.  “I was forced to do what I did.”

 “Cowards are even less innocent than hypocrites.”

 Good thing only children were watching.  A political statement like that could get you blacklisted.

 The third figure was another character from the Revolutionary War, but this time a real person: Francis Marion, known as the Swamp Fox.

  Though no battles in that war were fought near where I lived (as were several in the preceding, so-called French and Indian War), that period was important in the history of my hometown.  The city of Greensburg was named after Revolutionary War General Nathaniel Greene.  Though he’d never been there, several notable town fathers had been officers serving in his command.  So this added a certain texture to my interest.

 General Francis Marion was also under Greene’s command later in the war, but his fame was established in the swamps of South Carolina as Colonel Marion, leading a band of irregulars on guerilla missions. 

 Disney dramatized him as the Robin Hood of the American Revolution, and the catchy theme song emphasizes that, even stealing a line from the ITV Robin Hood series:

 Swamp Fox, Swamp Fox, tail in his hat

Nobody knows where they Swamp Fox at.

Swamp Fox, Swamp Fox, hiding in the glen,

He runs away to fight again.

 Leslie Neilson played the Swamp Fox in eight episodes: two in October 1959, four in January 1960 (taking up the entire month of shows), and two in January 1961.

 By the late 1950s, Disney’s live action TV shows were not only giving new talent the spotlight, they were employing some of the best character actors in Hollywood, as well as experienced film directors, writers and cinematographers.  Television provided these Hollywood veterans with something movies couldn’t anymore: regular work, and growing audiences. 

 So long-time Hollywood western director Harry Keller directed the Swamp Fox shows, which were written by Lewis R. Foster, a veteran writer who began with Laurel and Hardy silents and later contributed to the famous Jimmy Stewart feature Mr. Smith Goes To Washington.

 There were many movie veterans in the cast, and some relative newcomers, like star Leslie Neilsen (fresh from playing the intrepid captain of the first cinema starship in Forbidden Planet), and actors Patrick Macnee (star of the 1960s British spy spoof series The Avengers) and Slim Pickens (Doctor Strangelove.) 

Beverly Garland, Brian Keith in Elfago Baca

Appearing in Elfago Baca were such future movie and TV stars as James Coburn, Brian Keith and the aforementioned Doctor McCoy.  1950s sci-fi scream queen, Beverly Garland, got to act a different kind of role.  By then at least some of Hollywood knew it couldn’t beat TV, so it was hurriedly joining it.

 By the time Leslie Neilsen was riding across the screen, I was in eighth and ninth grades, and too old to be playing Swamp Fox with neighborhood friends. (We mostly played baseball and football, until we drifted apart, caught in the pressure-cookers of separate high schools.) It was also near the end of my regularly watching the Disney show. I don’t recognize many episodes after 1960, though I recall the teasers for the Fred MacMurray movie comedy, The Absent-Minded Professor. 

 Disney used many of the same story techniques in his live action films as he had in his animations, particularly the use of established characters, music and catchy songs, and the mood of fantasy.  His stories about storybook characters easily edged into his treatment of actual historical figures.  Some if not most historians will suggest that the real Davy Crockett or Elfago Baca or Francis Marion were not so unambiguously admirable as the Disney versions, but the emphasis in Disney was on the story as a model. 

But if the live action stories of Frontierland used fact to augment fantasy, Disney Studios made use of the tools of fantasy to illuminate fact (or at least educated conjecture) in episodes under the banner of Adventureland and Tomorrowland.  These will be the subject of my third and final Disney installment.

 That installment will also include thoughts on Disney, television and reading.  This might be especially appropriate as we try to deal with another alleged barrier to the pace and concentration of reading, represented by social media and the Internet.