What I watched: The twenty-second episode of the first season of The Lone Ranger, a kid-oriented Western created by George W. Trendle. This episode starred Clayton Moore as the titular hero and Jay Silverheels as Tonto, with guest appearances by Chuck Courtney, Jimmy Ogg and Pedro de Cordova. This episode was directed by George Archainbaud and written by Louise Rousseau and Herb Meadow. “Sheep Thieves” aired on Thursday, February 9, 1950 at 7:30 PM on ABC, and is available to watch on YouTube.
What happened: We’re introduced to two young men, one clean-cut Anglo-American (Courtney) and one Spanish (Ogg). The Spaniard Carlos proposes switching identities with Dan Reid (hmm, that name sounds familiar) for rather dubious reasons, and Dan accepts. Their stagecoach gets shot at, with Carlos getting hit and Dan kidnapped.
We cut abruptly from this to the Ranger and Tonto looking onto stock footage of a herd of sheep, apparently a source of much conflict in the agrarian West. From there they stumble onto the crime scene, and immediately determine that Carlos is not Dan. Tonto takes the coach into town, then rides off without providing any explanation, presumably to further the misunderstanding. The Ranger wakes up Carlos, who apparently wasn’t that hurt, and deduces that the bad guys kidnapped Dan looking for Carlos.
At a cabin, the bad guys exposit about their plan, which is to ransom not-Carlos off so that his grandfather, a big sheep farmer, will give them enough money to buy his land. This seems much more efficient to them than rustling. Dan gets up and sends a smoke signal by fiddling with the fire, which Tonto recognizes. Two goons watch on as the heroic duo investigate. The Ranger sees another villain leaving the cabin and decides to follow him.
At a fancy house (it looks like the same fancy house from past Lone Ranger episodes), Don Pedrano (Cordova) is waiting for the arrival of Carlos, fussing over his dinner. One of the goons turns out to be Pedrano’s ranch-hand, who delivers the ransom note found on the stage. The Don says that he’s going to sell his ranch to Frank Lucas to raise the money. The Ranger drops in on the old man, and tells him that his son is safe.
Elsewhere, Tonto is sneaking around the cabin, but he gets captured. I guess he’s incompetent in this episode. Elsewhere, Lucas agrees to pay the $25, 000 for the ranch. He tells ranch-hand Jack that he was going to leave half of the ranch to him, which obviously bugs him. As soon as Jack leaves, the Ranger takes the money at gunpoint.
Thinking that the masked man is working for Lucas, Jack confronts his fellow goons. They think he’s trying to cheat him, and flying clotheslines ensue. In the midst of this ruckus, Dan unties himself and jumps out the window. Without a hostage to worry about, the Ranger and Tonto easily mop up the bad guys. It also turns out that the deed of sale was signed in Carlos’s name, so it doesn’t count. And that’s all.
What I watched: This is another bog-standard Lone Ranger story, one that could almost be written by algorithm. We have the inciting incident of seemingly random violence, the villain who appears to be an upstanding citizen, his rough but mostly incompetent villains, and the innocent landowner who our heroes must help out. There’s also the whole business about switching clothes, a plot complication which is never really justified (Carlos says something about wanting his grandfather to like him for him, which seems to defeat the point of family), and also doesn’t really add much to the plot.
The one slight addition to the formula is the presence of Dan Reid, the Lone Ranger’s nephew. Dan serves the purpose of being the kid sidekick, allowing the young audience an avatar to imagine themselves in the adventure. In this, he was similar to other obsequious youths, from Batman’s Robin to Captain Video’s Video Ranger.
What’s interesting is that, at least in the 1940s and early 50s, kids didn’t seem to need these identificatory figures as much as grown-ups thought they did. Dan Reid was evidently less of a popular character than the producers of the radio series expected when they introduced him in 1942, and quickly shuffled him off to the East for “schooling” and have him occasionally return for adventures such as this one. Even in this episode, he’s not the protagonist but rather a victim who needs to be saved. Today no one would try to launch a kid’s show without at least a teenage protagonist, but in this era children were perfectly happy identifying with adult protagonists like the Ranger and Hopalong Cassidy.
The other narrative purpose of Dan Reid is to connect The Lone Ranger with George W. Trendle’s other successful radio series, The Green Hornet. Dan also appears in that series as the father of the titular hero, Britt Reid. Connecting the two heroes together through familial lineage suggested that the frontier adventures of The Lone Ranger were still relevant today, and that the Hornet’s battles against Communists and other modern-day villains were essentially equivalent to the Ranger’s battle against old-West swindlers. (Interestingly, the older Dan was voiced by the same (white) actor as the radio Tonto.)
Trendle’s shows, then, make up a very early example of the kind of inter-textual universe which dominate so much of our entertainment today. As successful as it was on radio, The Green Hornet never made much of an impact on television, running for one season on TV in the 60s in an attempt to cash in on the Batman craze. Maybe a series that started earlier and was paired with The Lone Ranger would have been more successful. Instead, all that remains of its legacy is an annoying kid sidekick who sometimes shows up in the Old West.
Coming up next: The twentieth episode of The Life of Riley. This is where Evangelion really got weird, so I’m holding out hope.
The Eternal Couch Potato 