William Boyd as Hopalong

Ever since before the taming of the real west, kids have been running around playing with toy guns.

Pulp magazines glorified gunslingers and lawmenóthe movies presented heroes and villains with guns in hand as early as 1903, and then television reinforced this image in the 1950's and 1960's.

Cowboys and the wild west became a kid's way of life, and they had their heroes and had toy guns to play with.

Visit www.hopalong.com

Until the early fifties, John Ford and John Wayne ran the west, and defined it, with help from Gary Cooper, Randolph Scott, Jimmy Stewart, Glenn Ford, Audie Murphy, Joel McCrea and Henry Fonda, in front of the camera (and Anthony Mann, Fred Zinnemann,Fritz Lang, George Marshall, and Henry King in the director's chair).

They rode through westerns of varying degrees of sophistication, first on the big screen and later on television showcases such as Million Dollar Movie, in between the inevitable commercial interruptions and edited-for-television prints.

But beginning in the early 1950's, for any kid born after World War II, ahead of all of these men and their movies came Hopalong Cassidy, Gene Autry and Roy Rogers.

John Wayne, Randolph Scott and company were great, but they were shooting for a bigger audience that included our parents, and our older brothers and sis ters.

Hoppy, Gene, and Roy were different-they rode the range just for us. They'd all been doing movies since the 1930's, and after a few years 1950's TV watchers would be reintroduced to those movies.

But beginning with the turn of the 1940's into the 1950's, they began coming into our home with western adventures meant for kids born during and after World War II.

I'll always remember my Hopalong Cassidy watch, a black band that looked like a western belt with a picture of Hoppy on the watch face. And when you opened the box, the watch sat on a realistic western saddle just like Hoppy's.

Hopalong Cassidy was my first two-gun hero. He had a great gun set and he wore them both well-most western heroes only wore one gun. And for a kid, it was hard enough getting your parents to buy you a holster and one gun, but to play at being Hoppy, you needed two guns.

William Boyd ranked among the top ten western stars in salary between 1935 and 1944. He became so completely identified with the role of Hopalong Cassidy from that 11 year string of 67 movies, it was impossible for him to get any other part.

By the time that string of B-movies had run out, just about the time that television was coming in, he was down to touring with circuses for $250 dollars a week (a very comfort able living in 1944, but hardly what a movie actor would normally make).

Toby Anguish, a promoter, and an unsung hero of early television, came to his rescue. Knowing that Harry "Pop" Sherman, the original producer of the Hoppy film series, had lost interest in the character and the films, Anguish talked Boyd into buying the rights to the films.

In 1944, Boyd sold everything he owned except a Hollywood bungalow to raise the $250,000 in cash. They got the rights, but could only release the films to theaters-TV would have to wait until 1953.

Boyd reissued the movies to theaters, where they continued to be popular, but didn't make money.

The next step was to secure the to the characacter of Hopalong Cassidy, and try him in the new medium of television.

At the time, the new medium was in its infancy-programming was generally primitive, and no movie studios would go near it, fearing that television, as a "free" (i.e. sponsor-paid) entertainment brought directly into the home, would eventually destroy the movie industry; virtually every Hollywood contract contained a clause that prohibited actors from appearing on the small screen.

Moreover, there was a shortage of programming, especially for children, who seemed to take to the new medium far better than their parents.