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Despite its age, 'Daniel Boone' is still worth watching
Several years ago, we introduced our son to Parker via Disney's "Davy Crockett." It was his first non-animated movie, and, as with many children his age, it became a film worth repeating ... and repeating. He memorized whole scenes in the three Crockett movies and became every bit the Crockett fan I once was in the mid-'50s. We found him a coonskin cap, a toy rifle, even an old lunchbox, no thanks to Disney World, which has evidently erased one of its early icons from its 21st-century offerings. What my son liked most, though, was Bill Hayes' 45 of the theme song, which is still on our gameroom jukebox, and I reckon is played as much now as when it was released in 1955. "I reckon," you may recall, is one of Crockett's favorite phrases.
One can take only so much so much of "Born on a mountaintop in Tennessee," though, so we've introduced him to a new tune:
"Daniel Boone was a man
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With an eye like an eagle
And tall as a mountain was he!"
We started with season two (the better to ease the transition to the black-and-white season one) and suffice it to say that Daniel and Davy are interchangeable, even if the characters are more than a generation apart. I'm not even going to try to pretend that "Daniel Boone" has withstood the test of time. It''s no "Lost," no "24," no "Desperate Housewives" - although occasionally the laughs are louder.
To be sure, the dialogue is clunky, the staging clunkier and the theme song clunkiest of all. The mere fact that we're using the word "clunky," however, is a telltale sign that we've been seriously affected by this out-of-date series. And in a good way.
All things considered, I'd rather have kids watching "Daniel Boone" than just about anything else on television today. There are a few politically and socially incorrect items, namely the frequent use of the term, "Injuns" by the show's children, and Tonto-style broken English that is used by virtually every Native American on the show. Oh, and nobody utters the words "Native Americans," although that could be because they are portrayed primarily by white guys wearing feathers.
All of the women are homemakers, and all of the kids - complete with Beatlesque haircuts - roam freely in the forest without adult supervision.
There's also lots of gunplay, which my son has correctly pegged as a requisite element of the final 10 minutes. But if lots of people get shot, there's less blood shown than on just about any episode of "Fringe."
I'm not worried much about the word, "Injun" or the firing of guns. I suspect in the late 1700s, guns and Native American slurs were quite common, so one could rationalize that the show is historically correct.
What wasn't common, perhaps, was Boone's tolerance, even altruistic affection, for those Native Americans, which is a running theme, at least in season two. In that respect, "Boone" was leap years beyond most other shows of that era. You may also remember that Ed Ames' Mingo is his trusted, and extremely intelligent sidekick. That a frontiersman was best friends with an Indian isn't nearly as difficult to believe as the Mingo character itself, a half-English, half-Cherokee, college-educated dude centuries ahead of his time in terms of some of his decidedly 20th-century American slang.
Parker, a seasoned actor, and Ames, a seasoned, uh, singer, are actually quite good, considering the lines they're fed, such as "Anybody who moves will receive a ball between the eyes." (And anytime you hear a villain say to one of them, "You're no value to me dead," you just know our heroes are going to be escaping soon.)
Dialogue aside, "Daniel Boone" remains extremely watchable. The series took full advantage of the then-new "living color" and unlike network companion, "Bonanza," much of "Boone" seems to have been filmed in on location rather than on a set. The DVD set doesn't indicate if the film stock has been restored, but either way, families with color TVs in the late '60s (our home wasn't one of them) were no doubt awfully impressed.
Also, for its time, "Boone" is fast-paced, despite individual scenes that are extremely long by today's standards.
Though it aired for six seasons, "Boone" was never considered a classic "western" series, probably because it came at the tail end of the TV western craze, and was, by default, derivitive. And I suspect many of its storylines were lifted from earlier series. I'm still impressed, though, that more than 40 years after its final episode, it's vastly less cringe-inducing than most '70s dramas popping up on "Retro TV."
It's my kind of clunky.
Terry Hazlett can be reached at snowballrizzo@aol.com.
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