I’m a fan of the way Saturdays used to be. I would get up early, watch “Scooby Doo”, “Super Friends” and “Hong Kong Phooey” then after Saturday morning cartoons were over and the regular programming turned to sports, I’d switch the channel to something with double digits and check out a monster movie or a television show from decades before in syndication.
Then again, this was a time when we had 4 networks, including PBS, and UHF was how we watched a lot of older shows in syndication. If you were lucky enough to live in a television market with multiple UHF stations (starting with channel 14 or 15 and sometimes going all the way up into the 80s – did we ever need that many UHF channels avaialble?) you had a wealth of programming options.
Shout Factory is bringing back those Saturday afternoons and UHF era discovery with its latest collection Howdy, Kids: A Saturday Afternoon Western Roundup. There’s a whole parcel of cowboy shows from the 50s included here, and with a running time of about 10 hours, there’s enough here to fill several Saturday afternoons.
Here’s a list of what’s included:
The Lone Ranger (The Renegades and Six Gun’s Legacy)
The Range Rider (Convict At large and Bullets And Badmen)
The Rifelman (Day Of The Hunter)
The Adventures Of Rick O’Shay (Stagecoach To Danger)
Fury (Killer Stallion and Scorched Earth)
The Roy Rogers Show (Bad Neighbor and The Setup)
Annie Oakley (Sharpshooting Annie and Outlaw Brand)
The Adventures Of Kit Carson (Thunder Over Inyo and The Desperate Sheriff)
The Adventures Of Champion (Hangman’s Noose and Bad Men Of The Valley)
The Cisco Kid (Freight Line Feud and Ghost Town)
Sergeant Preston Of The Yukon (Crime At Wounded Moose and Trapped)
Sky King (Bullet Bait)
Red Ryder (Whiplash)
Buffalo Bill, Jr. (Blazing Guns and Legacy Of Jesse James)
Some of these shows were prime time dramas (such as The Rifleman) and some were Saturday afternoon or even morning fare. The quality of each production varies, and the viewer does need to remember when these series were being produced. Techniques were certainly not the same. It’s plainly obvious, when watching The Adventures Of Rick O’Shay, the backgrounds (looking out the window) are painted and the sets are cheaply made. And yes, the acting can be a bit wooden. Then again, these productions were often filmed quickly.
Often indoor and outdoor scenes were filmed completely separate. Inside buildings would be done on a soundstage with plenty of exterior (and “day for night”) shots or other primitive television techniques. Sometimes the same sets and locations would get reused. That’s just how television was produced. Some of the shows are in color, but most are black and white.
Is this set worth picking up? Absoultely. It serves as a great introduction to the western genre for kids, with all of it being much “safer” than watching a film like Fistful Of Dollars. It also offers up a solid representation of what television was like, as well as a solid slice of entertainment that gets little attention these days. This is some fun stuff.