Davy Crockett, the Green Hornet, the Phantom and other heroes of my youth who weren’t really heroes of my youth

The debate over the best Sherlock Holmes will continue forever.  Although I think Jeremy Brett settled the question once and for all, and my father-in-law thinks the question didn’t need to be settled because the answer has always been, obviously, Basil Rathbone, the fun of Robert Downey’s Holmes was that Downey didn’t even try to be a definitive Holmes---his Holmes was a comic pastiche of every Holmes that ever was and ever will be and suggested that like Hamlet the number of satisfying interpretations is possibly infinite.  It wasn’t Downey, but someone is going to come along and create a new, true, best Sherlock Holmes for another generation.

Christopher Reeve was Superman and always will be to the point that all future Supermen will be playing him, just as Dean Cain and Tom Welling had to incorporate Reeve into their Clark Kents.  (They did it pretty well, too.) Someday, though, somebody could come along and do a better job of playing Reeve playing Superman than Reeve.

Russell Crowe isn’t going to come close to replacing Errol Flynn as Robin Hood but Flynn is my sons’ third favorite Robin after Jonas Armstrong and Cary Elwes.

There probably will be a better Batman than Christian Bale some day.  Chris Pine may be in the process of taking Captain Kirk away from William Shatner. 

But who’s the real Zorro?  Tyrone Power, Guy Williams, or Antonio Banderas?

Extra points if your answer was none of the above, it’s Douglas Fairbanks or Anthony Hopkins or George Hamilton, twice over.

There hasn’t been a definitive Philip Marlowe, not even Humphrey Bogart’s.  (I’m actually kind of partial to James Garner’s.)  Nor has there been a definitive Natty Bumpo, Long John Silver, or Wyatt Earp (although again I’m partial to Garner’s.)  So far King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table have stumped every movie director except John Boorman and Terry Gilliam et al but off the top of your head can you name the actors who played Arthur and Lancelot in Excalibur?  Good as they were they didn’t make either hero their own, nor, as much as I love them all in the roles, did Michael York, Oliver Reed, Richard Chamberlain, and Frank Finley make it impossible for anyone else to play D’Artagnan and the Musketeers.

Well, Reed made it very difficult for every future Athos.

Captain Nemo and Phillias Fogg, David Copperfield, Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, Dick Tracy, Tarzan, the Lone Ranger, Frank and Joe Hardy, Ivanhoe, and all the other of the comic book, novel, and TV show heroes I idolized when I was a kid have remained themselves apart from any actor who’s played them in movies or on TV, no matter how perfectly that actor was suited for the role and how fine a job he did.

But there has been and always only will be one Davy Crockett.

John Wayne was fun.  Billy Bob Thornton was interesting for the way he suggested that the real David Crockett might not have been as outsized a hero as the legendary Davy but still might have been admirable and heroic.  But that’s just it.  Thornton’s Crockett was a history lesson and Wayne’s was just Wayne having fun.

Nope.  The one, the true, the real King of the Wild Frontier, Davy, Davy Crockett is Fess Parker.

It’s not that no one could play a character named Davy Crockett and play him well.

It’s simply that he’d just be playing a character named Davy Crockett.

Davy Crockett is somebody, and some thing, else.

Parker brought the legend to life.  He embodied it.  He gave it a face and a shape and a voice.  He made Davy Crockett real.

He didn’t do this alone.  He had help from the Disney marketing department and a generation of children.  But together they gave the legend its own existence to the point that there was Fess Parker and there was Davy Crockett, and sometimes they occupied the same space, but for the most part Davy Crockett lived on his own, no matter what Fess Parker was up to, and that includes dying.

Fess Parker passed away the week before last, but Davy Crockett didn’t.

This might explain why I didn’t feel the same pang of lost youth and approaching mortality I felt when I heard that two other stars of TV shows I enjoyed when I was a kid, Peter Graves and Robert Culp, died within a week on either side of Parker.

Jim Phelps and Kelly Robinson were just characters Graves and Culp played.

Fess Parker was some guy Davy Crockett chose to look and sound like.

Parker died but he didn’t take any of Davy with him.

I suppose you could say that for me Fess Parker is the definitive Davy Crockett or that he’ll always be my Davy the way Jeremy Brett will always be my Holmes.

But there’s a problem with putting it that way.

I never saw those Disney Davy Crocketts.

I wasn’t born when they first aired and though I always hoped Disney would show them again on the Wonderful World of Color some Sunday night in the 60s, either it never happened or for some reason I wasn’t watching when they they did.

By all rights, Fess Parker should be my Daniel Boone.

He’s not.  I barely remember him as Daniel Boone.  I barely remember the show at all, although I can sing the the theme song.

Daniel Boone was a man,
Yes, a big man!
And he fought for America
To make all America free!

What a Boone, what a doer,
What a dream-come-truer was he!

That proves to me that I watched it regularly.  But I can’t prove it to myself in the usual way of remembering specific episodes or quoting lines of dialog the way I can to prove I watched and enjoyed, say, Mission Impossible or Star Trek or Maverick.

But I shouldn’t be able to do that with Maverick.  Maverick went off the air in 1962.  James Garner left the show in 1960.  But I remember Maverick vividly and James Garner is still the only Maverick brother or cousin who matters to me, the first and only one I think of when I think of the show.

How can that be?

Easy answer.

Syndication.

Looking back, I realize that the TV shows I remember best from when I was a little kid I actually remember from when I was a bigger kid watching them in re-runs after school and on days when I was home sick from school.  I can’t say for sure if I ever watched some shows when they were on at their right times in the evening.  So with many shows I think I loved when I was very young, it’s the case that I liked them enough to want to watch them again when I was not quite as young.  It was re-watching them, several times over, many of them, that fixed them in my heart and in my memory.

If Daniel Boone went into syndication, and it must have, I didn’t make a point of re-watching it.  But I was still watching episodes of Mission: Impossible in college.  Even shows I know I watched regularly in prime time and loved, like MASH and Barney Miller, I really remember from watching again and again in re-runs.

And it’s the same for the books I loved as a kid.  Treasure Island, which I first read when I was ten, means so much to me now because when I was fourteen it meant so much to me that it meant so much to me when I was ten that I read it again to find out why and because when I was in college it meant so much to me that it meant so much to me that when I was fourteen it meant so much that it meant so much to me when I was ten that I read it again that I read it again…and so it has gone, all my life since.

It’s been said that we don’t remember anything, we only remember the last time we remembered it.

This would explain why I don’t remember Fess Parker as Daniel Boone.

It doesn’t explain why I don’t need to remember him as Davy Crockett because Davy just is.

_______________

I used to read and enjoy The Phantom in the Sunday comics but he wasn’t one of my absolute favorites.  I much preferred Prince Valiant.  And I think I gave up on the Phantom when it occurred to me that a purple leotard and tights are not the wisest choice for jungle-wear.  I think I was also disappointed when I figured out that the Ghost Who Walks wasn’t really a ghost at all.

And I probably watched episodes of The Green Hornet when it was on but I don’t remember it at all.  I do remember getting a Green Hornet coloring book in a Christmas grab bag at Cub Scouts.  Can’t say it made the Green Hornet and Kato childhood heroes of mine.

So the news that Seth Rogen’s playing Britt Reid in the upcoming Green Hornet movie doesn’t fill me with dread.

Well, no more dread than the news that any movie starring Seth Rogen’s on its way.

But the great science fiction Harlan Ellison writer grew up listening to The Green Hornet on the radio and The Phantom was his favorite Sunday comic.

So it came as a shock to him that he couldn’t complete the short story he started bringing his two childhood heroes together.

And in this interview Ellison tries to explain what went wrong.

Tip of the hat to Dan Coyle.

Earwigged myself update:  Now I can’t get the Daniel Boone theme out of my head!

From the coonskin cap on the top of old Dan
To the heel of his rawhide shoe,
The rippin'est, roarin'ist, fightin'ist man
The frontier ever knew!

Daniel Boone was a man,
Yes, a big man!
And he fought for America
To make all America free!

Everybody!

Yes, Daniel Boone was a man,
Yes, a big man!
And he fought for America
To make all America free!

Comments

[Jonathan Korman]

The notion of a Brett Maverick other than James Garner is patently absurd. And I will brook no disagreement: Jeremey Brett is the real Sherlock Holmes.

There is already a better Batman than Christian Bale—the voice actor Kevin Conroy. Plus I cannot resist bringing up Jeffrey Combs as The Question while we're watching cartoons ....

[El Jefe]

Lance,

The main acting event in Downey's "Holmes" (other than just the screen presence of Watson's intended -- shazam) was watching Jude Law tone down his ego and wrestle with David Burke for the title of Best Watson Ever. (Well, Edward Hardwicke was a decent Watson-going-grey, but Burke and Law are between them far more what Conan Doyle intended. The authorial Watson, I think, lies in their middle distance.) Totally with you on Garner's Marlowe and his Earp. Sorry to see you overlook the Mavericks' English cousin -- Roger Moore. (Sidebar: I do hope they get the "Saint" TV movie with James Purefoy off the ground. He might just echo back to the halcyon days of George Sanders doing Simon Templar. Possibly Sanders' best role besides his bits in "Foreign Correspondent" and "A Shot in the Dark." The b&w Roger Moores are pretty good, though.)

When I was little, playing with my preschool best friend in the fairly early 70s, he had an old (not so old then) singles record player, one of the little ones, in his room. We threaded "Davy Crockett" in with Sesame Street pretty much constantly. But our Batman was Adam West. And we dutifully took turns as Robin.

And, though it may even get me barred here, no one, *no one*, will ever be Emma Peel except Diana Rigg.

[Mark]

I grew up watching Davy Crockett - I'm that old- but when I think of the theme song, somewhere around "killed him a bear when he was only three", the song morphs into the Beverly Hillbillies theme. Weird.

[Janelle Dvorak]

Daveee, Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier. I believe Buddy Ebsen was his sidekick although I barely remember it. I was fonder of Tom Tryon in "Texas John Slaughter", sort of a cut-rate pastiche of Ford's cavalry trilogy.

[Mark]

Diana Rigg as Emma Peel! Oh, man! Talk about your adolescent fantasies. I loved her character. "Kick ass" could have been coined for her.

[Dave the H.]

Sean Connery's Robin Hood was quite special, though...surprised you didn't mention it...made the character more human than other actors had.

[actor212]

You DARE to mention Marlowe and ignore Robert Mitchum?????

*GASP*

I'm...I'm so disillusioned!

[actor212]

I'll throw yet another popular character out at you and the only actor to credibly portray him:

Dracula - Frank Langella (altho I saw Raul Julia on Broadway, ironically understudying Langella that night).

I've seen most of the Dracula adaptations, except for the cheesy ripoffs of the genre like Dracula 2000. Gary Oldman was credible, but he never brought the ethereal sexuality that Langella dripped.

Odd, because I've seen Oldman play that kind of character in other films, like the Gary Gilmore biography.

[Linkmeister]

Re: Zorro, it was only Antonio Banderas that had Catherine Zeta-Jones to dally with. That has to count for something.

[Dave]

Definitives: Clark Kent: Christopher Reeve. Superman: George Reeves. Batman: Kevin Conroy. Philip Marlowe: Dick Powell. Agreeance on Sherlock Holmes, Robin Hood, and the Musketeers

[marianne19]

I am kind of partial to Garner's Earp in Sunset also.

[Lance]

Marianne, yes! Sunset! Thanks for reminding me.

El Jefe, Law did a great job. His Watson was like Doyle's Watson's subconscious unleashed. It also made me look forward to his taking his own, serious crack at Holmes.

Dave the H, can't get everything in. That's why I rely on and love my commenters. Yep, Connery was very human in Robin and Marian. But I like that one as much for Nichol Williamson's Little John and Robert Shaw's sheriff, as for Connery and Hepburn. They both captured in different ways what it was like to live in the shadow of a legend and it was more what they did than what Connery did himself that suggested that this Robin had really once been that Robin.

[Mike Schilling]

Robert Newton is the very best Long John Silver there ever has been or ever could be.

Mandy Patinkin is the Platonic ideal of Inigo Montoya. The rest of the cast is merely very, very good (aside from Wallace Shawn, totally miscast as Vizzini, who should have been played by someone as sinister as Peter Lorre), but Patinkin alone is perfect. (Well, maybe Andre the Giant was also perfect.)

Lance is 100% correct that Oliver Reed was the only Musketeer who approached being definitive, though Faye Dunaway simply is Milady (and Heston, to give him his due, was a brilliant Cardinal Richilieu).

No one in the The Lord of the Rings films came close to being the definitive anybody. That's one of many reasons that the films are essentially disposable, and the books will long outlive them.