June 24, 2024: WesternStudying: Hopalong Cassidy

[75 years ago this week, the first network TV Western, Hopalong Cassidy debuted. Few genres have been influential for longer or across more media, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy Hopalong and other Westerns—add your responses & analyses in the comments, pardner!]

On how the TV show built on an established character, and two important ways it changed things.

When Hopalong Cassidy premiered on NBC on June 24^th, 1949, it did so as an extension of nearly a half-century of cultural representations of the character. Hopalong was originally created in a 1904 short story by author Clarence E. Mulford, who would over the next thirty-five years write 28 novels and numerous additional stories about the character. Even more popular were the 66 films produced between 1935 and 1948 (for an average of nearly five films per year, if you’re counting), all starring William Boyd in the title role. So when Boyd bought the rights to the character from Mulford and to the films from producer Harry Sherman, sold those rights to NBC, and began playing the character in the TV series in June 1949 (and in a radio show that launched around the same moment), he knew that he and the show would have a built-in, longstanding, and multimedia audience, making this first TV Western not nearly as much of an unknown quantity as that phrase might suggest.

While the character might not have been new in 1949, the genre of the TV Western unquestionably was. Even though the first few episodes were edited versions of existing Hopalong films (before original TV episodes began to be produced and aired), they still aired once a week in a scheduled time slot on a national television network. And I would argue that this represented a significant evolution in the existing form of storytelling known as the serial—not the 19^th century genre of serialized print publications that audiences could acquire and then read when and how they wanted; nor the early 20^th century genre of film serials that required going to a movie theater to catch the new episode; but a serialized TV show, gradually released installments that every audience member would watch in their own home but all at precisely the same time (particularly in that early era before later evolutions like reruns and home video). Phrases like “appointment television” and “must see TV” emerged down the road to describe particular shows or time slots, but in truth those concepts were never more relevant than for this first generation of TV shows, which audiences had to see at that precise moment or risk missing out on that part of the story entirely.

Perhaps that serialization contributed to the immense popularity of the Hopalong TV show, or perhaps it was just the built-in audience for the character by then—but whatever the case, the show was indeed a mega-hit, and that popularity led to other significant cultural shifts. To cite one of the most individually striking examples, in 1950 the character of Hopalong Cassidy was the first licensed image featured on a children’s lunchbox, and shortly thereafter sales for the Aladdin Industries lunchboxes overall rose from 50,000 to 600,000 per year. That’s just the tip of the iceberg of the more than $70 million worth of Hopalong products produced in 1950 alone, much of it directly targeted kids as the primary audience—as illustrated by the reference to “Hopalong boots” as a desired present in Meredith Wilson’s hit song “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot like Christmas” (1951). Kids had no doubt been part of the audience for Western films (and books, and radio shows, and etc.) throughout the genre’s history, but the TV show’s popularity nonetheless reflected a potent evolution and emphasis of that children’s entertainment side to this cultural form.

Next Western tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Westerns you’d analyze?