Davy Crockett craze – Lee Duigon

Fess Parker, TV's Iconic Davy Crockett, Dead at 85

Fess Parker: His ship came in.

Born on a mountain-top in Tennessee, greenest state in the land of the free…

–The Ballad of Davy Crockett

The height of the craze was in 1954, after which we are told it tapered off (https://tnmuseum.org/junior-curators/posts/the-davy-crockett-craze). But you couldn’t prove it be me!

With the fad supposedly over, and me eight or nine years old, it still had scads of momentum. Here are some of the “merch” items that I gave my parents no peace until I owned them:

Davy Crockett marionette, Davy Crockett T-shirts, Sunday color comics, comic books, Davy Crockett plastic figures, Davy Crockett record albums, Davy Crockett moccasins…

Walt Disney had ignited a major cultural movement without intending to. He cried all the way to the bank.

Star Fess Parker got tons of mileage out of his coonskin persona.

Yeesh! If it was this intense in 1957, when I was old enough to get blown away by it, what must it have been like in the middle of 1955? (“Everything was Davy Crockett,” says my wife.

Ah! The treasures to be found in comic books! At least they looked like treasures, if you were ten years old in 1959.

This video shows you what some of those things turned out to be when you finally got them. So if you ever wondered if that “Learn to throw your voice!” trick really worked, here’s your chance to find out.

It reminds me of the “Authentic Davy Crockett Log Cabin!” that I badgered my folks into sending away for. You can to collect labels from a certain brain of maple syrup–which entailed buying a lot of syrup, because my brother had to have an Authentic Davy Crockett Log Cabin too.

Imagine our emotional devestation when the Authentic Davy Crockett Log Cabin turned out to be a crummy little cardboard box that looked like a crummy little cardboard box. Even a cardboard Davy Crockett wouldn’t be caught dead in there.

Oh, well, we’ve all grown up, we’re more sophisticated now. So now instead of an Authentic Davy Crockett Log Cabin made out of genuine cardboard, they pitch us Climate Change instead.