Revisiting Walt Disney's Davy Crockett: Part 1 (Western Wednesdays)

I'm back! And I've finally graduated from college! To celebrate I wanted to do a bit of a retrospective/review on one of the formative pieces of media from my childhood: Walt Disney's Davy Crockett.

     I was first introduced to Fess Parker as Davy Crockett through the 1955 movie Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier and its sequel, Davy Crockett and the River Pirates. Disney was mostly taboo in my home growing up (a fairly sensible restriction in retrospect) but there were a few exceptions. Movies that my father had grown up with, like Mary Poppins and the aforementioned Crockett pictures were allowed as he considered them to be of exceptional moral and artistic quality. My brothers and I were immediately hooked. We watched both movies so many times growing up that I believe I could recite all the dialogue verbatim if I really wanted to. We spent countless hours reenacting scenes from the movies and inventing new adventures of our own. Who would play Davy and who would be regulated to play his trusty companion Georgie Russel  (or worse, one of the bad guys) was a constant source of contention.

     This would lead me to a keen interest with anything Crockett related: books, documentaries, action figures; but also with other American frontiersman like Daniel Boone (who I was introduced to through the Disney series with Dewey Martin), Jim Bowie, and Grizzly Adams; and a longstanding fascination with the battle of the Alamo. But none of this was able to satisfy my Crockett craze. What I really longed for was a continuation of those two Fess Parker movies. Fueling this frenzy was my father's continued insistence that he remembered watching other "lost" episodes that Disney had never released on video. This, it turns out, was partly true.

When our family first got access to the internet (my dad needed it for his work-from-home job) I investigated his claims for myself. I found that, while there weren't entire episodes missing, the movies had edited the original five episodes quite a bit to shorten the run time. The three episodes that made of King of the Wild Frontier had each lost around fifteen minutes of footage while River Pirates, which only combined two episodes, had been edited much more minimally.  Disney had never seen fit to release to full, unedited episodes on home video. Since this discovery I had always hoped for an eventual release.

     Finally, I discovered the Walt Disney Treasures box sets. To celebrate Walt Disney's would-be 100th birthday the studio released a bunch of their early titles, including Crockett, uncensored, unedited and uncut on DVD. Unfortunately, these sets were sold in limited quantities and as a result were hard to find and expensive. Davy Crockett was upwards of $150 which was way out of my budget for a five episode mini-series at the time though I knew I would break down and buy it one day barring a less expensive alternative.

     Then I discovered YouTube. Low and behold, some one had uploaded the entire series (this was back in the early days of the website when you could still easily find copyrighted material for free). I was ecstatic when I first discovered this, like a kid on Christmas all over again (I was probably 15 or 16 at the time). I watched the first episode with my brothers as soon as I could find the time. But then something strange happened. My enthusiasm vanished. Like a man who spends his whole life hunting for something and then feels purposeless when he finally does. I decided to wait to watch the rest of the series, to savor it a little longer.

     I continued to procrastinate until, finally, the series was removed from YouTube for copyright restrictions. By this time I had moved on to other interests (comic books, WWII reenacting, western films, science fiction and fantasy stories), yet there was still a part of me that planned to revisit the series one day....

To be continued next week!