Subject: RE: Obit: Fess Parker: Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone
From:
Desert Dancer
Date: 19 Mar 10 - 01:29 PM
Here's the full New York Times obituary: click.
For music content:
The scriptwriter for the series, Tom W. Blackburn, and the head staff composer for the Disney organization, George Bruns, came up with a title song, "The Ballad of Davy Crockett," and it was introduced on the first episode of "Disneyland" on Oct. 27, 1954, to publicize the coming Crockett episodes.
The song, with multiple choruses, began:
Born on a mountaintop in Tennessee
Greenest state in the land of the free
Raised in the woods so he knew every tree
Kilt him a b'ar when he was only 3
Davy, Davy Crockett
King of the wild frontier
"The Ballad of Davy Crockett" would become stamped in the memories of a generation of young viewers. A number of artists, including Mr. Parker himself, recorded the song, and it sold in the millions. Bill Hayes's version reached No. 1 on the pop charts. Tennessee Ernie Ford, Eddy Arnold, Burl Ives, and Mitch Miller were among the others to come out with recordings.
---
It's interesting to read there what a short lifetime the series had, given its impact, only 2 years:
The first episode of the Davy Crockett trilogy, "Davy Crockett: Indian Fighter," with Buddy Ebsen as Mr. Parker's sidekick, George, was shown on Dec. 15, 1954. "Davy Crockett Goes to Congress" appeared on Jan. 26, 1955. By the time the last episode, "Davy Crockett at the Alamo," was broadcast, on Feb. 23, 1955, the country was in a Crockett frenzy.
Children wore coonskin caps to school and wore them to bed. They wore them with their Davy Crockett plastic fringe frontier costumes while they played with their Crockett trading cards, their Crockett board games and puzzles, their Crockett color slide sets and their Crockett powder horns. They pestered their parents for Crockett toy muskets and Crockett bubble gum and Crockett rings and comic books.
By the end of 1955, The New York Times reported, American children had their choice of more than 3,000 different Davy Crockett toys, lunch boxes, thermoses and coloring books.
The Disney studio also turned episodes from the series into two feature films — "Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier" in 1955 and "Davy Crockett and the River Pirates" the following year.
If the Disney scripts stretched the truth about Crockett, the final episode remained faithful to at least one historical fact. The real-life Crockett died at the Alamo in 1836 at the age of 49, and Mr. Parker's Crockett fell there, too. But Disney, responding to a public outcry, brought him back for episodes in the 1955-56 season, including "Davy Crockett's Keelboat Race."
"Take off those black armbands, kids," the gossip columnist Hedda Hopper wrote, "and put on your coonskin caps, for Davy Crockett will hit the trail again."
But not for long. By early 1956 interest had begun to flag, and as suddenly as it had begun, the craze ended.
---
"Daniel Boone" went for six years, but didn't have the same impact.
I like this conclusion to the article:
As a developer and entrepreneur, Mr. Parker had interests in luxury hotels and a mobile home park in addition to his winery, which had its first harvest in 1989. He also acquired a reputation for being sure of himself and determined to get his way. Playing Davy Crockett, he said, had made him that way.
And if Crockett had a shrewd side, so did the businessman in Mr. Parker, who understood the character's continuing marketing power long after the '50s craze had become a memory.
At his winery visitors almost invariably asked him about Crockett, and he was sure to direct them to the gift shop, where coonskin caps were for sale. And though he politely but consistently refused to wear one for their cameras, he was always happy to sign a Fess Parker wine label, bearing its familiar trademark: a tiny picture of a coonskin cap.
|
sj
