Tag: fess parker

The Davy Crockett Craze

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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.

‘When Disney Was Disney (Movie Review)’ (2016)

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The Great Locomotive Chase (1956) - IMDb

The abominable dreck that comes oozing out of Disney Studios today bears no resemblance to the great family entertainment they used to provide when Walt Disney himself was still alive and running the store.

Like, for instance, this:

When Disney Was Disney (Movie Review)

The Great Locomotive Chase was a thrill a minute, but it was far from simple-minded. Nowadays it’s become fashionable and all PC to view the Civil War in terms of black and white instead of blue and grey. If they were making it today (God forbid), it’d be nothing but shrill screed about evil white people.

Maybe someday we’ll make movies like this again. For now, let’s just hope they don’t g et purged from YouTube in a frenzy of self-righteous bullschiff.

When Disney Was Disney (Movie Review)

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Image result for images of the great locomotive chase movie

When Walt Disney himself was still running the show, Disney Productions made a lot of really cool movies instead of proselytizing for sodomy. We watched one of them yesterday.

The Great Locomotive Chase, starring Fess Parker (aka Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone) and Jeffrey Hunter, came out in 1956. I saw previews for it then: didn’t get a chance to see it, but always remembered those previews and always wanted to see it.

This is an exciting, suspenseful Civil War drama that also sheds some light on how very difficult and tricky it must be to run a railroad. Parker is a Union spy, who, with the aid of a few soldiers out of uniform, steals a train and tries to cut one of the Confederacy’s vital rail links, in hopes of shortening the war. He might have succeeded, but for a Confederate conductor (Hunter) who chases the stolen train–on foot, at first!–and overcomes every obstacle the resourceful Yankees throw at him. Time and again, we think they’ve stopped him, but time and again he comes up with some way to continue the chase.

It can hardly be a spoiler to say that, in the end, the conductor catches the stolen train and prolongs the war. Those Yankees who survive, and finally escape, win the first-ever Congressional Medal of Honor. But not all of them. Not all.

The movie industry constantly bellyaches, these days, about an under-performing box office. Well, maybe if they stopped producing a lot of piffle and went back to making movies like this, their ticket sales would vastly improve.

The Great Locomotive Chase is a movie that the whole family can enjoy, and you can rent it from youtube. Don’t miss it.

Song, ‘The Ballad of Davy Crockett’

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I’m feeling good right now, so, why not?

Hey, remember this song? The Davy Crockett craze of the 1950s, kicked off by Walt Disney’s TV episodes? I never got the coonskin hat, but I had Davy Crockett T-shirts, a genuine cardboard Davy Crockett log cabin, a Davy Crockett cup, and even a Davy Crockett marionette. The fad was about the biggest fad there ever was, while it lasted.

How young Fess Parker looks in that picture!

Here’s one thing you should remember about the real David Crockett.

When he was elected to the House of Representatives, he thought he’d died and gone to heaven. He loved being a Congressman–the campaigning, the speechifying, being in on important public business: not bad at all for a man born into poverty on the wild frontier.

And yet, when it would have been the easiest thing in the world for him to go along with his president (Andrew Jackson), his political party, and popular opinion, Rep Crockett absolutely refused to support the president’s “Indian removal” policy–that is, forcibly evicting the Native Americans from their lands. He opposed it because it was unjust and wrong. Knowing it would cost him his beloved political career, and that his opposition was futile, he opposed it nevertheless, and swore he would oppose it even if he were the only man in America to stand against it. And that was the end of David Crockett, Congressman. When he ran for re-election, he was creamed.

No one ever heard him say he wished he’d saved himself by voting for a wicked policy that was bound to go forward no matter what he did.

Father in Heaven, send us more like him!