Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok

That Andy Devine always yelling at Wild Bill Hickok to slow down and allow his to catch up. Hickok's appaloosa Buckshot had a lot less weight to carry than Andy's trusty pinto steed Joker, given the handicap allowance, Andy was right to complain.

This television series had nothing to do with the story of the real James Butler Hickok, nicknamed Wild Bill by his contemporaries. You'd hardly know from this show that Hickok would meet an abrupt demise in Deadwood. Or that his famous tenure as Marshal of Abilene lasted slightly over a year.

Guy Madison was a fine Wild Bill, a cowboy hero in the tradition of movie cowboy heroes and Andy who had been doing sidekick roles for Roy Rogers in his feature films just prior to signing on for this television series was the comic relief as Wild Bill's deputy Jingles Jones. We all know how good a marshal Andy would have been, we have only The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance for reference.

I can still hear Andy yelling impatiently at Wild Bill to slow down at the end of every episode. It was a tag line like the one where some knowledgeable citizen identified that masked man as the Lone Ranger.

Still I wouldn't mind if TVLand channel would acquire this series and run some of these. I don't care if they're black and white, no one else should either.