I like to have the TV on when I work from home. But I don’t want to watch it. Northwest Cable News repeats every five minutes (OK, it might be half hour) and it starts getting into my consciousness. I don’t want anything playing I’m actually interested in, and movies on TCM can sometimes be too invasive by virtue of being ones I really don’t want to have on the periphery. So I’ll play some old TV shows on MeTV. I can ignore them and they make adequate background noise. Except Daniel Boone…
No, I don’t get sucked into watching it. But the theme song! Every time I hear it I think of (in order):
[ul][li]The racist version I heard as a child[/li][li]Rippin’est, roarin’est, fightin’est man The frontier ever knew makes me think he had severe flatulence[/li][li]The version that popped into my head after a certain beheading[/li]Why does this particular theme song make me go whacky?[/ul]
I like to have the TV on when I work from home. But I don’t want to watch it. Northwest Cable News repeats every five minutes (OK, it might be half hour) and it starts getting into my consciousness. I don’t want anything playing I’m actually interested in, and movies on TCM can sometimes be too invasive by virtue of being ones I really don’t want to have on the periphery. So I’ll play some old TV shows on MeTV. I can ignore them and they make adequate background noise. Except Daniel Boone…
No, I don’t get sucked into watching it. But the theme song! Every time I hear it I think of (in order):
[ul][li]The racist version I heard as a child[/li][li]Rippin’est, roarin’est, fightin’est man The frontier ever knew makes me think he had severe flatulence[/li][li]The version that popped into my head after a certain beheading[/li][li]Why does this particular theme song make me go whacky?[/ul][/li][/QUOTE]
If you do a search here, you should find the version I wrote in high school, lurking in a zombie raunchy humor thread. (No, I’m not going to repeat it here.)
I sang my version for a kid at summer camp in 1972. Imagine my shock when I heard another guy singing it at the same camp a year later!*
ME: Y’know, I wrote that!
HIM: No, you didn’t! A guy at my school, S____ [The kid I taught it to the year before], did!
*Proof that things were going viral long before the Internet!
I wonder if I’m the only one who’s always getting Daniel Boone confused with Davy Crockett. I just now had to Google to see if Daniel Boone died at the Alamo.
The producers of “Daniel Boone” originally wanted to make a series based on Disney’s version of Davy Crockett, but couldn’t get permission from Disney. They had Fess Parker signed up, so since they couldn’t do Davy Crockett, they settled on another American frontier hero who was equally legendary, Daniel Boone. So Parker was essentially playing the same character.
It’s somewhat deliberate. Fess Parker played Daniel Boone in the 1960s because he had played Davy Crockett on Disney in the 1950s. TV likes to re-use folks identified with a role. As a result, Boomers have the two men – who were sorta contemporaries (although Daniel was born half a century before Davy) and had very different histories – frequently confused. They were both frontiersmen and folk heroes.
I suspect that Buddy Ebsen got to be “Jed” Clampett on The Beverly Hillbillies in large part because he’d played Davy’s buddy Bob Russel, also a backwoodsman.
For me, San Diego. Race was a non-issue in my house. I was taught that people are to be treated equally, and that The N-Word™ was a Bad Word. Other than that, race was never brought up. But being in San Diego, one is exposed to it nonetheless.