Death of a legend

Matt Dillon died last week.
Okay, to be precise, actor James Arness died last week.
But to a couple of generations of Americans, James Arness was Matt Dillon. Every week, stern-jawed, economic in his conversation, Matt Dillon ruled the streets of Dodge City, Kansas, and ruled the airwaves of this country.
Ours was not a “Gunsmoke” household.
Most were.
(In the 1950s, the show was on past my bedtime. In the 1960s, “The Movie of the Week” prevailed.)
When Saturday night rolled around, “Gunsmoke,” with its set of iconic characters — Marshal Dillon, Chester Goode, Doc, Kitty, and Festus — was at the top of most folks’ agenda.
So dominating was the “Gunsmoke” brand, that even now — while I remember episodes that I watched on the sly — I can’t recall much about what we watched instead.
To readers today who did not experience the great Western frenzy on television programming in the 1950s and 1960s, the whole thing may seem hard to understand.
Westerns have long been a part of American popular culture. That was especially true in the middle of the last century.
Why? My guess is that nostalgia played a huge role.
The first movie with anything close to a plot was “The Great Train Robbery.” It was, you guessed it, a cowboy movie. That’s because it played to an early 20th century audience who had read scores of dime novels about the Wild West and — maybe more importantly — because that era was fading rapidly into history.
When those early Westerns were made, there were still living, breathing cowboys who could still tell the tales of the 1870s and 1880s on the American frontier.
But their numbers were dwindling, though it was still possible in my childhood for some antique gent with a sketchy biography to represent himself as the real Jesse James and claim that old Jesse hadn’t actually been shot by his cousin, Bob Ford, known more colloquially as “the dirty little coward who shot Mr. Howard.”
Hollywood brought the whole thing back to life, so that moviegoers who had heard cowboy tales when they were kids could recreate those fantasies well into adulthood.
“Gunsmoke” and James Arness brought that whole story to television, where it captured the imagination of the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of cowboys, just as it had captured the imagination of their children.
And with its success, the floodgates opened.
Suddenly, everything — or nearly everything — on TV had a Western angle.
There were cowboys in black (Richard Boone in “Have Gun Will Travel), there were cowboys who didn’t use pistols (Chuck Conners in “The Rifleman”), there were cowboys who hit people with their canes (Gene Barry in “Bat Masterson”), there were cowboys with sawed off specialty weapons (Steve McQueen in “Wanted: Dead or Alive), there were cowboys driving cattle (Clint Eastwood in “Rawhide”), there were cowboys driving wagon trains (Ward Bond in “Wagon Train”), there were cowboy gamblers (James Garner and others in “Maverick”), and more, much more.
One season, Warner Brothers Studio, which had a whole bunch of young actors under contract unleashed a flood of shows, featuring future heartthrobs: “Cheyenne,” “Bronco,” “Sugarfoot,” “Lawman,” and others long since forgotten.
And all of this happened at the same time.
When you consider that most people in Indiana and Ohio with a TV antenna were able to get only half a dozen stations at any given time, it’s astonishing to realize that at any given moment there was a cowboy show — also known as a horse opera — on somewhere.
Some people must have been banging their heads against the wall, hoping they’d never see another Western again.
Then, almost as suddenly as it appeared, the fad ended.
Only a few survived — “Gunsmoke” among them — and nothing similar has really occurred until the current affliction known erroneously as “reality TV.”
Those programs now rule the airwaves much like the cowboys of yore, but we suspect that the moment is coming when they’ll evaporate in a puff of smoke.
And it can’t come any time too soon. Maybe Marshal Dillon can tell them to get the heck out of Dodge.[[In-content Ad]]