Let’s do something a little different for tonight’s Saturday Night Showcase. Usually I look at sci-fi and superhero stuff but I wanted to get away from the recent flood of Ultraman shows and the Old West seems to fit the bill. Plus it’s an interesting piece of TV, and radio, history I thought at least some of you would find interesting.
I’m not much of a Western fan but my dad enjoys a few. One of them is Gunsmoke, the CBS Western series about Matt Dillon, Marshall of the Kansas region during the Old West. Developed by Charles Marquis Warren, it was the longest running prime-time live-action show until the crown was taken by, unfortunately, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. I have…minor issues with that show we won’t go into here. Point is the show was very successful and still gets plenty of reruns and even a devoted channel on live-streaming sites like Pluto TV.
Except it wasn’t originally a TV show.
Airing on CBS radio when the chairman, William S. Paley wanted a “Philip Marlowe” type Western show, Gunsmoke was a rare cowboy show for adults. Most were made for kids, my research sources pointing to Hopalong Cassidy as their main example. The final show was created by John Meston and Norman Macdonnell after finding one of two pilots for the show (the actor they wanted was already tied to another Western called Broken Arrow) by Harry Ackerman and some of his script writers, on the request of programming head Hubell Robinson. The show would go on to air on radio even when the TV show was airing, until the radio show ended in 1961 and the TV show in 1975. I even had a coloring book based on the TV show. Australia even had their own version of the radio show, but that’s all I know about that.
None of the radio cast moved to the TV series. William Conrad was considered too overweight to play Dillon, which if you’ve seen a picture back then wouldn’t be a surprise. While not as heavy as when he played in TV shows like Cannon and Jake & The Fatman (he wasn’t Jake), he still had nothing on James Arness, who was encouraged by John Wayne to take the TV role. His deputy only went by Chester until actor Parley Baer improvised the last name “Proudfoot” during rehearsal, while the show would replace Baer’s aging sounding voice with a limp for Dennis Weaver’s Chester Goode…and that’s the guy from the TV series McCloud? Huh. Age and a mustache really does change your appearance.
Miss Kitty wouldn’t get her name until later, and Georgia Ellis would be replaced on TV by Amanda Blake, while Doc Adams would get a new first name from the radio show, played by Howard McNear (mostly known as Floyd The Barber from The Andy Griffith Show) as Charles, to the TV show, with Milburn Stone as Galen. Fun fact: Adams gets his name from Charles Addams, creator of the Addams Family comic strips, on the suggestion of Conrad.
Tonight’s episode is “Billy The Kid”, the first official episode as neither version of the pilot was ever aired. I think we can guess who’s stopping by the Longbranch…an actual Kansas saloon back then by the way. The name is a bit more accurate in this one. See if you can recognize his voice from cartoons. Enjoy.
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