Originally Posted By: StevieBoy
One of my favorite westerns. Everything else went on hold when it was time to come on.
I remember the show faintly from my childhood, with a better memory of the Hartland plastic figurine based on his character. Hartland produced figures, both standing ("The Gunfighter Series") and mounted on a horse figure, from the TV Westerns of the time, like Have Gun - Will Travel, Maverick, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, Cheyenne, and many more.
Now, seeing some of the shows on Heroes & Icons TV, I'm impressed. Cheyenne started way back in 1955, and Warners' then-new TV production company put quite a bit of effort into them, adapting stories from print Westerns and producing it from the start as an hour-long show when so many other TV oaters were only 30 minutes long.
I read somewhere, though, that Warners paid their lead actors peanuts -- $300 a week, or per episode, in the 1950s, and the leads like Walker (and later, James Garner) were in practically every scene . . . 6 12-hr. days of being on set. And then WB expected Walker and the other leads to do promotional appearances on their own time, for little or no extra money. Seems to me I read that Walker was one of the first to rebel against that; anybody know?
Never having seen him in much else, I can't imagine him ever playingHamlet or Macbeth. But he was a strong presence on screen, and perfectly suited to roles in Westerns and war stories.
