adult Westerns – Lee Duigon

Wow! Warner Bros.’ “adult Westerns”–what a splash they made when they came out in the 1950s. Do you remember any of them? (They all had cool theme songs.)

The one I remember best was Cheyenne, starring Clint Walker, maybe because it had such a long run (1955-62, with over 100 episodes). Cheyenne Bodie wandered around the Old West, looking for adventures. He found one every week. And he was always on the side of truth and justice. That’s how old this is.

Ah! Maverick. Sugarfoot. Rawhide. Lawman. Bronco. Laramie. And of course Wagon Train. Those were shows that you could sink your teeth into. If you didn’t like Westerns, I’m afraid you were rather stuck. But it wasn’t all shoot-outs and cattle-rustling. The best scripts transcended the genre.

As for TV in the 2020s–well, I don’t know, I haven’t watched any.

Westerns were big, big, big! on TV while I was growing up. But toward the end of the 1950s, the studios decided we needed Westerns that offered something more than just cowboys riding around shooting people. We needed some adult Westerns with meat on their bones. And psychology. Lots of psychology.

Lawman, for one, aired on Sunday night after my bedtime. But I could always hear the theme song coming on, and then my brother and I would get out of bed–we had a room upstairs–and creep toward the hall door. If we opened it a crack, careful not to make any noise, we could peer through that crack all the way downstairs–right down to the TV screen. And we watched as much of Lawman as we could before conking out and crawling back to our beds.

I was not an adult, but I liked those adult Westerns. The ones by Warner Bros. always had great theme songs. “Cheyenne, Cheyenne, when will you be happening by…” “Sugarfoot, Sugarfoot, easy-lopin’, cattle-ropin’ Sugarfoot…” And they were still shooting bad guys, instead of just letting them take over our society and screwing it up.

Besides which, the set decorator for Lawman was–of all people–William Wallace! “Braveheart”! How cool was that?