Today in the Department of Before They Were Star Trek Stars, DeForest Kelley guest stars in "The Legion of Old Timers," episode 5 of the first season of The Lone Ranger (original air date October 6, 1949).
Kelley plays Bob Kittredge, a tenderfoot from back East who's just inherited his late father's ranch. He falls prey to a con man who drives away the ranch's faithful foreman (the eponymous "old timer") and tries to sell the land out from under him. The Lone Ranger, Tonto, and the old foreman ride to the rescue and good triumphs over evil until next week's episode.
Since there are no other Trek connections, allow me to just ramble a bit about The Lone Ranger and me. I've never seen the 1949-57 TV series before, but I'm told it was one of my Grandpa's favorites. I also never saw the 2013 movie, but people assure me I didn't miss much. This was around the time I was thinking, “Gore Verbinski and Johnny Depp could use a break from each other,” and “Tim Burton and Johnny Depp could use a break from each other.”
The 1980 Filmation animated series was part of my regular Saturday morning cartoon experience as a little kid. I don't have a ton of clear memories of it, except that characters from American history made guest appearances/cameos, and it was part of a larger series with Tarzan and Zorro.
Several kids I knew had these Lone Ranger action figures, and they were really high quality. One line from the TV commercial jingle (set to the tune of the William Tell overture that became the Lone Ranger theme) went, “Let him ride in a covered wagon; let him hold a rifle in his hand,” and still gets stuck in my head decades later. One issue with this is that I've never been able to find a recording or video of this commercial ever since it aired in the 1980s. Another is that I, being unfamiliar with the term “covered wagon” at the time, thought he was riding in something called a “cupboard wagon” and immediately pictured the wagon from the Chuck Wagon dog food commercials (which, in all fairness the Lone Ranger action figure could have easily ridden in).
When I was a teenager, one of my mother's best friends married a man who claimed to be a cousin of Jay Silverheels, the actor who played Tonto. I have no idea if there was any merit to his claim. He had a signed picture of them together, but if every celebrity someone had a signed picture with was their cousin, the world would be a big, weird family.
Anyway, season's greetings from Tonto, Tarzan, and Frankenstein.
