THE WILD, WILD WEST: After the disappointment of FETV skipping season one in its entirety (except for the first two episodes), I tried to watch the campy season two. I think I would have been more receptive to it if I had seen the serious episodes first. As it is, the campy episodes havive been piling up in queue until I finally deleted them after watching the first ten.
MY THREE SONS - Season Three: We always enjoy spotting actors we know in guest roles. Tract wants credit for recognizing Raymond Bailey in S3 E32 before I did. In my own defense, he was bald and wearing a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. I had no idea he had been wearing a toupe throughout The Beverly Hillbillies! The the standout episode of the season was, in my estimation, "Robbie Wins His Letter (S3 E25), guest-starring Brigadier General Jimmy Stewart* as himself. Robbie is being razzed for winning an academic award, so his science teacher invites Jimmy Stewart to speak at the awards ceremony.
*From Wikipedia: "With his private pilot's skills, he enlisted in the US Army Air Forces during the war, seeking combat duty and rose to be deputy commanding officer of the 2nd Bombardment Wing and commanding the 703d Bombardment Squadron from 1941 to 1947. He later transferred to the Air Force Reserve, and held various command positions until his retirement in 1968 as a brigadier general."
SUPERMAN: I have gained a new appreciation for the first season of The Adventures of Superman TV show. I have decided to continue on into season two for as long as I can stand it. Because FETV broacasts only two episodes per week, I have been supplementing my viewing with episodes of the two Superman serials. The first couple of episodes, dealing with the origin and establishing the status quo, are as good as any of the later TV episodes, but they become less enjoyable after that. It shouldn't take the Man of Steel 15 episodes to deal with the likes of the Spider-Lady (first serial), or even Lex Luthor (second). The serials would have benefitted from being more episodic in nature, like the Max Fleischer cartoons. But, unlike Warner Bros. cartoons and Three Stooges shorts, the serials were made for an audience of children, and that would not have fit the formula. Nevertheless, Republic still could have structured each installment to end on a cliffhanger (the way Irwin Allan would later do on Lost In Space). I plan to move on to the Fleischer cartoons next.
My slow and selective re-watch of Route 66 arrives at... three selected episodes left. I just watched "A Long Way from St. Louis," the show's Canadian ep. The title is prescient. Sure, they're in Toronto, and we get a helicopter tour of the city, which includes the "new" City Hall (the one with the UFO) under construction, and the old Exhibition Stadium, which was still standing when I was a kid. The episode even namechecks the editor of the now-defunct Toronto Telegram. However, it has no real reason to take place in Canada. The guest characters include a British-born dirty old man, a sleazy strip-club owner played by Al Lewis in full NYC mode, and an all-female St. Louis jazz band stranded after their manager abandoned them and left them with the bills. The girls are pretty funny, though there are a couple of cringey moments with the one Asian-American member, including the use of that stupid "Oriental riff." However, the show has a history of including various cultural groups, and she's otherwise just one of the gals.
It's one of the comic episodes, so it gets away with a lot of silliness, and it drops a reference to Vicki, Julie Newmar's character from two previous episodes.
Overall, it's amusing, but its main appeal for me was that Tod and Linc come to Canada, and I got to see a view of a vanished TO.
I wonder if Al Lewis's bar is the earliest American TV allusion to the "Canadian ballet"? *
*For those of you who might not know border slang: while Canada has a renown national ballet company, the expression, "Canadian ballet" is used by some Americans to refer to Canadian strip clubs, especially those near the U.S. border. Historically, they draw a lot of young Americans, since the drinking age is lower here, and some of the border states have more restrictive regulations about what the dancers in such clubs can and cannot do. These things did NOT apply to the same degree in the early 1960s (though Le Strip of that era was celebrated and reviled for allowing total nudity, ahead of the curve), but I cannot help but wonder why, of all things, a strip club appears in this episode.
I've been bouncing around in my television viewing. Some shows from my boyhood I am watching for the first time. Others, I am revisiting old friends. One of those I am currently binge-watching, now: Cheyenne (ABC, 1955-62).
As a youngster, I watched all of the Warner Brothers westerns on ABC---Cheyenne and Maverick and Lawman---mainly because my father was fond of those shows. I enjoyed them for the reason a kid enjoys them: for the fights and the gunplay. I have not seen Cheyenne since I was a boy, and I discovered---as I did with Lawman---that, from my adult perspective, there was much to recommend in terms of excellent scripts.
For those of you who came in late, Cheyenne related the frontier adventures of Cheyenne Bodie, portrayed by Clint Walker. (There were no other regular or recurring characters, except for the first three episodes, when he was given a sidekick, Smitty, played by L. Q. Jones) The backstory was that Bodie was raised from infancy by the Cheyenne tribe after hostile Indians killed his parents. When he was around thirteen, he rejoined the white-man's world and lived with a farmer and his family until he came of age.
The premise is that Bodie has wanderlust. He moves on from place to place, never staying in one town or region for long. (Which is why the Smitty character was dropped---to enhance the sense that Cheyenne is a wandering spirit.) Now a man in his early thirties, Bodie has gained experience in a wide range of western skills and jobs. That sets the stage for the run of the series. Any episode might find him working as a sheriff of a town, or scouting for the Army, or leading a wagon train, or herding a cattle drive. That opens the writers to a wide range of plot possibilities. (One of my favourite episodes that I saw the other day has Cheyenne in Washington, D.C., going undercover for the War Department as a stage actor in order to ferret out a band of Southern sympathisers [the timeline of the show jumped around a bit, but was always within a few years after the Civil War ended]. Cheyenne spends most of the episode in white tie and tails. Quite a departure from the usual goings-on, but given the premise, it fits.)
To be sure, many of the episodes are standard oaters, nicely done but nothing special. But often comes an episode that's incisive, textured, and outright brilliant. I may have stumbled across many of these because, right now, I am cherry-picking which episodes to view from their IMdB synopses. After that, I'll go back and watch the others. For example, in "The Empty Gun" (aired on 25 February 1958), Cheyenne encounters a gunslinger, played by a pre-Lawman John Russell, whose injuries incurred in gunfights have put him past his prime. He's getting by primarily on his reputation. The gunslinger has one thing he wants to do before he hangs up his guns for good: make restitution to the widow of the first man he ever killed, and he asks Cheyenne to accompany him long enough to do that. Bodie is torn between the ugliness of the man's career and the decency he sees deep down within him. The depth that the writers gave to this character of the gunslinger is remarkable, and Mr. Russell is riveting in the rôle.
I chuckle when the screen posts the viewer warnings before each episode. Always included is "May Contain Outdated Cultural Attitudes", despite the fact that Cheyenne is an enlightened man, not just by nineteeth-century values, but by twentieth-century ones, as well. Obviously, because of his upbringing, Bodie has immense respect for the Indian nations, but also for the other minorities occupying the Old West. One of the tropes of the show is that, despite being a tall (6'6"), muscular man, Cheyenne is soft-spoken, courteous, and slow to anger. At the same time, because of his vast experience, he is the Voice of Reason. Nearly every episode has a scene in which a character intends to act impulsively, or out of anger or ignorance, and Cheyenne calmly but with authority will say, "I wouldn't recommend that . . . "
The show rarely relies on standard western stereotype. In the episode "Blind Spot", Bodie rides into a town of the Old South to do a favour for a friend. It's only a couple of years after the Civil War, and there are still hostilities toward the North. But instead of painting everyone in town as anti-North, we are presented with a wide range of personalities: townfolk who have accepted the war's result and bear no grudges against Northerners, and those who resent the North but are practical-minded enough to understand that they need the Northern factories' and businesses' purchasing of their cotton crops. The character of the lead protagonist is a wealthy plantation owner who is fervent in his belief in Southern principles and pride. He detests Northerners. Yet, he is also an honest, moral man who abhors violence and is outraged when the local version of the KKK, called "the Regulators" here, attempts to kill Cheyenne, and he, in fact, dies saving Cheyenne's life. The only character who fulfils a stereotype is the plantation owner's son, who is the leader of the Regulators.
I'm always pleased when I discover that I've picked out a gem like this.
(By the way, there wasn't a kid in my neighbourhood who couldn't sing the theme to Cheyenne by heart.)
The Baron > Commander BensonMay 29, 2026 at 11:03am
Interesting. I've never seen Cheyenne, although of course, I have heard of it. The program gets a mention in the 1965 Doctor Who serial "The Chase". In the serial's third episode, "Flight Throught Eternity" (first broadcast June 5,1965), the TARDIS materializes on the observation deck of the Empire State Building, where the Doctor and his companions encounter Alabama hillbilly Morton Dill (played by future series regular Peter Purves in a performance redolent of Jethro Bodine), who mistakes the TARDIS team for a film crew and asks them, "Do you know Cheyenne Bodie?". This would seem to indicate that Cheyenne was reasonably well-known in the U.K. by that time.
Replies
THE WILD, WILD WEST: After the disappointment of FETV skipping season one in its entirety (except for the first two episodes), I tried to watch the campy season two. I think I would have been more receptive to it if I had seen the serious episodes first. As it is, the campy episodes havive been piling up in queue until I finally deleted them after watching the first ten.
Not "right now," but SIR PAUL McCARTNEY will be the musical guest on SNL tonight.
MY THREE SONS - Season Three: We always enjoy spotting actors we know in guest roles. Tract wants credit for recognizing Raymond Bailey in S3 E32 before I did. In my own defense, he was bald and wearing a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. I had no idea he had been wearing a toupe throughout The Beverly Hillbillies! The the standout episode of the season was, in my estimation, "Robbie Wins His Letter (S3 E25), guest-starring Brigadier General Jimmy Stewart* as himself. Robbie is being razzed for winning an academic award, so his science teacher invites Jimmy Stewart to speak at the awards ceremony.
*From Wikipedia: "With his private pilot's skills, he enlisted in the US Army Air Forces during the war, seeking combat duty and rose to be deputy commanding officer of the 2nd Bombardment Wing and commanding the 703d Bombardment Squadron from 1941 to 1947. He later transferred to the Air Force Reserve, and held various command positions until his retirement in 1968 as a brigadier general."
While we thought the beginning wasn't his strongest, and the celebrity not-guests bit became tedious, the second half more than made up for it.
We also watched the final ep of The Boys, so it was a night of farewell programming.
We will miss Colbert.
And, the barrage of violence and obscenity aside, The Boys ended with (mostly) hope.
SUPERMAN: I have gained a new appreciation for the first season of The Adventures of Superman TV show. I have decided to continue on into season two for as long as I can stand it. Because FETV broacasts only two episodes per week, I have been supplementing my viewing with episodes of the two Superman serials. The first couple of episodes, dealing with the origin and establishing the status quo, are as good as any of the later TV episodes, but they become less enjoyable after that. It shouldn't take the Man of Steel 15 episodes to deal with the likes of the Spider-Lady (first serial), or even Lex Luthor (second). The serials would have benefitted from being more episodic in nature, like the Max Fleischer cartoons. But, unlike Warner Bros. cartoons and Three Stooges shorts, the serials were made for an audience of children, and that would not have fit the formula. Nevertheless, Republic still could have structured each installment to end on a cliffhanger (the way Irwin Allan would later do on Lost In Space). I plan to move on to the Fleischer cartoons next.
My slow and selective re-watch of Route 66 arrives at... three selected episodes left. I just watched "A Long Way from St. Louis," the show's Canadian ep. The title is prescient. Sure, they're in Toronto, and we get a helicopter tour of the city, which includes the "new" City Hall (the one with the UFO) under construction, and the old Exhibition Stadium, which was still standing when I was a kid. The episode even namechecks the editor of the now-defunct Toronto Telegram. However, it has no real reason to take place in Canada. The guest characters include a British-born dirty old man, a sleazy strip-club owner played by Al Lewis in full NYC mode, and an all-female St. Louis jazz band stranded after their manager abandoned them and left them with the bills. The girls are pretty funny, though there are a couple of cringey moments with the one Asian-American member, including the use of that stupid "Oriental riff." However, the show has a history of including various cultural groups, and she's otherwise just one of the gals.
It's one of the comic episodes, so it gets away with a lot of silliness, and it drops a reference to Vicki, Julie Newmar's character from two previous episodes.
Overall, it's amusing, but its main appeal for me was that Tod and Linc come to Canada, and I got to see a view of a vanished TO.
I wonder if Al Lewis's bar is the earliest American TV allusion to the "Canadian ballet"? *
*For those of you who might not know border slang: while Canada has a renown national ballet company, the expression, "Canadian ballet" is used by some Americans to refer to Canadian strip clubs, especially those near the U.S. border. Historically, they draw a lot of young Americans, since the drinking age is lower here, and some of the border states have more restrictive regulations about what the dancers in such clubs can and cannot do. These things did NOT apply to the same degree in the early 1960s (though Le Strip of that era was celebrated and reviled for allowing total nudity, ahead of the curve), but I cannot help but wonder why, of all things, a strip club appears in this episode.
I've been bouncing around in my television viewing. Some shows from my boyhood I am watching for the first time. Others, I am revisiting old friends. One of those I am currently binge-watching, now: Cheyenne (ABC, 1955-62).
As a youngster, I watched all of the Warner Brothers westerns on ABC---Cheyenne and Maverick and Lawman---mainly because my father was fond of those shows. I enjoyed them for the reason a kid enjoys them: for the fights and the gunplay. I have not seen Cheyenne since I was a boy, and I discovered---as I did with Lawman---that, from my adult perspective, there was much to recommend in terms of excellent scripts.
For those of you who came in late, Cheyenne related the frontier adventures of Cheyenne Bodie, portrayed by Clint Walker. (There were no other regular or recurring characters, except for the first three episodes, when he was given a sidekick, Smitty, played by L. Q. Jones) The backstory was that Bodie was raised from infancy by the Cheyenne tribe after hostile Indians killed his parents. When he was around thirteen, he rejoined the white-man's world and lived with a farmer and his family until he came of age.
The premise is that Bodie has wanderlust. He moves on from place to place, never staying in one town or region for long. (Which is why the Smitty character was dropped---to enhance the sense that Cheyenne is a wandering spirit.) Now a man in his early thirties, Bodie has gained experience in a wide range of western skills and jobs. That sets the stage for the run of the series. Any episode might find him working as a sheriff of a town, or scouting for the Army, or leading a wagon train, or herding a cattle drive. That opens the writers to a wide range of plot possibilities. (One of my favourite episodes that I saw the other day has Cheyenne in Washington, D.C., going undercover for the War Department as a stage actor in order to ferret out a band of Southern sympathisers [the timeline of the show jumped around a bit, but was always within a few years after the Civil War ended]. Cheyenne spends most of the episode in white tie and tails. Quite a departure from the usual goings-on, but given the premise, it fits.)
To be sure, many of the episodes are standard oaters, nicely done but nothing special. But often comes an episode that's incisive, textured, and outright brilliant. I may have stumbled across many of these because, right now, I am cherry-picking which episodes to view from their IMdB synopses. After that, I'll go back and watch the others. For example, in "The Empty Gun" (aired on 25 February 1958), Cheyenne encounters a gunslinger, played by a pre-Lawman John Russell, whose injuries incurred in gunfights have put him past his prime. He's getting by primarily on his reputation. The gunslinger has one thing he wants to do before he hangs up his guns for good: make restitution to the widow of the first man he ever killed, and he asks Cheyenne to accompany him long enough to do that. Bodie is torn between the ugliness of the man's career and the decency he sees deep down within him. The depth that the writers gave to this character of the gunslinger is remarkable, and Mr. Russell is riveting in the rôle.
I chuckle when the screen posts the viewer warnings before each episode. Always included is "May Contain Outdated Cultural Attitudes", despite the fact that Cheyenne is an enlightened man, not just by nineteeth-century values, but by twentieth-century ones, as well. Obviously, because of his upbringing, Bodie has immense respect for the Indian nations, but also for the other minorities occupying the Old West. One of the tropes of the show is that, despite being a tall (6'6"), muscular man, Cheyenne is soft-spoken, courteous, and slow to anger. At the same time, because of his vast experience, he is the Voice of Reason. Nearly every episode has a scene in which a character intends to act impulsively, or out of anger or ignorance, and Cheyenne calmly but with authority will say, "I wouldn't recommend that . . . "
The show rarely relies on standard western stereotype. In the episode "Blind Spot", Bodie rides into a town of the Old South to do a favour for a friend. It's only a couple of years after the Civil War, and there are still hostilities toward the North. But instead of painting everyone in town as anti-North, we are presented with a wide range of personalities: townfolk who have accepted the war's result and bear no grudges against Northerners, and those who resent the North but are practical-minded enough to understand that they need the Northern factories' and businesses' purchasing of their cotton crops. The character of the lead protagonist is a wealthy plantation owner who is fervent in his belief in Southern principles and pride. He detests Northerners. Yet, he is also an honest, moral man who abhors violence and is outraged when the local version of the KKK, called "the Regulators" here, attempts to kill Cheyenne, and he, in fact, dies saving Cheyenne's life. The only character who fulfils a stereotype is the plantation owner's son, who is the leader of the Regulators.
I'm always pleased when I discover that I've picked out a gem like this.
(By the way, there wasn't a kid in my neighbourhood who couldn't sing the theme to Cheyenne by heart.)
Interesting. I've never seen Cheyenne, although of course, I have heard of it. The program gets a mention in the 1965 Doctor Who serial "The Chase". In the serial's third episode, "Flight Throught Eternity" (first broadcast June 5,1965), the TARDIS materializes on the observation deck of the Empire State Building, where the Doctor and his companions encounter Alabama hillbilly Morton Dill (played by future series regular Peter Purves in a performance redolent of Jethro Bodine), who mistakes the TARDIS team for a film crew and asks them, "Do you know Cheyenne Bodie?". This would seem to indicate that Cheyenne was reasonably well-known in the U.K. by that time.
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