This Late '40s Western TV Series Features An Actor We Don't Talk About Today
by Joe Roberts · /FilmAdd SlashFilm on Google:
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After John Ford pulled a legendary performance out of John Wayne in 1939's "Stagecoach," the once flailing genre was revitalized. Suddenly the Western moved out of "poverty row" and was taken seriously again. One man who straddled both sides of this seminal evolution of the genre was William Boyd, who in the 1930s and '40s played cowboy hero Hopalong Cassidy on the silver screen before bringing him to TV in yet another seminal moment for the Western. And yet you probably never heard of him.
Boyd's career stretched beyond his Western films. He started out as an extra in Cecil B. DeMille's 1920 comedy "Why Change Your Wife?" before re-teaming with DeMille for 1925's "The Road to Yesterday." This film proved to be his breakout role, and along with 1926's "The Volga Boatman" helped propel him to leading man status, allowing him to appear in some of the best films of the silent era. But by the early 1930s, having lost his contract, Boyd was struggling to maintain his standing. Soon, however, he'd land the role which revitalized his career and with which he became synonymous.
Hopalong Cassidy was a character created by writer Clarence E. Mulford. Cassidy walked with a limp due to an old gunshot wound, hence his nickname, and first appeared in the book "Bar-20" in 1906. This original incarnation of the character was much rougher and hard-bitten than the version Boyd came to define on-screen. Ultimately, the actor made the character entirely his own across an incredible 66 films produced between 1935 and 1948. Then, he brought Cassidy to the small screen, and by extension, introduced the Western to TV audiences.
William Boyd played Hopalong Cassidy in an incredible 66 films
Classic Western TV shows gave us such towering Old West heroes as Clint Eastwood's Rowdy Yates, James Drury's Virginian, and James Arness' Marshal Matt Dillon. But all of these icons of the small screen Western came in the wake of William Boyd's Hopalong Cassidy.
The actor first portrayed Cassidy in the 1935 film "Hop-Along Cassidy." But this was not the tobacco-chewing foul mouthed anti-hero of Clarence E. Mulford's stories. Boyd's version was upstanding in every way. Across 65 subsequent movies, his version of Cassidy traversed the frontier on his white horse, Topper, delivering justice in as morally upright a way as possible. That meant no drinking (he consumed nonalcoholic sarsaparilla), smoking, or drawing first in a gunfight. Boyd's Cassidy always preferred to bring outlaws in rather than shooting them down, and unlike Mulford's original character, never allowed himself profanity. He was the epitome of the white hat-wearing Western hero (though, strangely, he wore a black hat), and the character became inseparable from Boyd himself.
After 66 "Hoppies," as the films came to be known, Boyd decided it was time to bring Cassidy to the small screen. In truth, the film series was — as you might expect given the sheer volume of entries — running out of steam. But Boyd, who had made the last 12 Cassidy movies without the help of his longtime producer Harry Sherman, was determined to keep his version of the character alive, and bought the TV rights from original author Mulford. According to a Time article from 1950, the actor sold his ranch, mortgaged his car, and even moved into a bungalow in order to afford the $350,000 he needed for the TV rights and control of the Hopalong Cassidy films. It paid off.
William Boyd's Hopalong Cassidy TV show was a phenomenon
In 1949, "The Hopalong Cassidy Show" debuted on NBC as the first Western TV series. Naturally, William Boyd starred as the title character, in a show specifically designed to appeal to younger audiences. When the show first started airing, it was nothing more than Hopalong Cassidy films re-edited for broadcast. But episodes filmed specifically for the show soon started to arrive, introducing Edgar Buchanan's Red Connors, a sidekick for Cassidy who was similarly taken from the pages of Clarence E. Mulford's stories.
The show was hugely popular, running from 1949 to 1952 and becoming a phenomenon among younger viewers, leading to lucrative merchandising deals. As the 1950 Time article put it, "Among all the U.S. enterprisers who devote themselves to titillating the unripened mind, none has succeeded as Hoppy has, both with his under-age customers and the thousands of manufacturers, retailers, and advertising men who hawk his wares." Suddenly, Hoppy merchandise was everywhere, and Boyd — who just a few years earlier had gambled everything on the Hopalong Cassidy TV rights — was a very rich man.
After the show ended and Cassidy faded from popularity, so too did Boyd disappear into obscurity. Western die-hards know his name today, but he's hardly as well known as other Western icons of both film and TV. Sadly, despite arguably being one of the most influential Western actors of all time, he seems to have struggled with the legacy of the character he made a household name. According to the Los Angeles Times, the actor hardly talked to the press prior to his death in 1972, at one point saying, "I'm not the man people remember as Hopalong Cassidy. I don't want to tamper with their memories."