I was scrolling through YouTube and saw in the feed The Lone Ranger Takes on the Masked woman. The masked woman was played by Phyllis Coates who played Lois Lane from The Adventures of Superman. It was a fun episode that took me back to waking early on Saturday morning going into the living room and turning on the old black and white TV and switching between numerous westerns including the Lone Ranger and Sid and Marty Krofft shows.
This was one of the few Tonto-less episodes. These shows are so simplistic but still fun to watch. I would be interested in a new, updated series that takes it seriously. Not too long ago I rewatched The Legend of the Lone Ranger (1981) I enjoyed it but they really effed up by going after Clayton Moore and alienating old fans. And it was much better than the 2013 movie and not just because of the casting of Johnny Depp.
I’ll probably now see more recommended episodes and I will watch them. There are some voices that stand out from back then that instantly take me back in time. Clayton Moore is one and Adam West is another.
I get why people hate on the 2013 Lone Ranger (one critic summed it up as “bloated, ungainly and much too long”), but I really liked it. The blu-ray looks and sounds terrific.
Just watched it on YouTube. I’d never seen this one before, been a long time since I’ve seen any of them. My god those sets are cheesy, but not as cheapo as the woman’s white mask which is obviously a 50’s style plastic costume mask.
The one with Klinton Spilsbury? The actor who managed to win three bad acting awards? The $18 million film that only took in $12 million? Alienating old fans was the least of that film’s problems.
I just watched the episode on YouTube. Yeah, I really ate this stuff up when I was a pre- and primary-schooler 60-odd years ago. I watched so much TV in the afternoons (e.g., Westerns, Hanna-Barbera cartoons, Whirlybirds, Sea Hunt, and The Adventures of Superman) I got sent to the Principal’s office for neglecting my homework.
I’ve always wondered how the Lone Ranger kept his clothes so damned clean, and how he could sleep next to his campfire fully clothed and wake up fresh as a daisy the next morning. Didn’t even wash his face when he got up, and never disappeared behind a rock to empty his bladder. (I remember a Dennis the Menace cartoon where the lad’s watching TV and asks his mom “Don’t cowboys ever have to go to the bathroom?”)
Whenever they stopped somewhere for the night, the Lone Ranger would always send Tonto to buy supplies in the nearby town, where he’d invariably get roughed up by the locals. I wish now they had filmed an episode in which Tonto says “Tonto have better idea. Kemo Sabe ride into town, buy supplies. Tonto stay here and set up camp.”
I always hoped to meet Clayton Moore someday once he moved to my neck of the woods in 1964, but it was never to be.
Unlike John Hart, who replaced him as the Ranger in the series’ third season, I could recognize his voice immediately. I have nothing against Mr Hart, who was an okay actor, but I could always tell when one of his episodes was on TV, and I never cared for them as much as I did Moore’s.
He and his brother (who, IIRC, was killed in the ambush by the Cavendish Gang) owned a silver mine. That’s also where he got the silver for his bullets.
On his first or second album, Bill Cosby riffed on this for a while. This was in the 60’s when Cosby was very, very funny. I bet most of us can’t listen to those albums any more without getting sad and angry at the same time.
If I remember correctly, he cast his own bullets out of silver to encourage himself to use them sparingly, a reminder to himself how precious a human life is. Or something like that. Watching the Woman in the Plastic Mask episode today I couldn’t help but notice that during the climatic chase scene he wasted six of those precious bullets firing promiscuously at two guys while chasing them at high speed on horseback.
John Byner once told Johnny Carson that he’d come up with a bit in which Tonto had been an interior decorator before he hooked up with the Lone Ranger. He said the people who owned the rights to the characters threatened to sue him if he ever used it again.
I remember seeing a few TV episodes when I was a kid, but my Lone Ranger is Brace Beemer; not Clayton Moore. I delivered pizza all through college and listened to dozens of episodes of the radio show from the late 40s-50s. The Lone Ranger was aired back-to-back on a retro radio show with Sgt. Preston of the Yukon who, confusingly was often voiced by Beemer as well. Sometimes I couldn’t remember which show I was listening to until Tonto or Preston’s dog King had a line. Even though it was just barks, whimpers, and howls, King always got more lines than Tonto.
