For the first time in half a century, I just watched 2 episodes of the Roy Rogers Show.
And now I need help understanding just how stupid the human race was back in the 1950’s…
Now, let me tell ya— I was a BIG fan of Roy Rogers when I was six years old. He was a real cowboy… It was the Wild West !!!
Well, yeah, sort of…
But now , watching the show again, I realize that the TV show included 1940’s technology. Roy’s humorous side-kick drove a jeep named NellyBelle. The jeep was a prominent feature in the show.
How the hell did anybody come up with the idea of a cowboy who has modern technology, but doesn’t use it?
Why, if they have modern cars, does the whole town still use horses?
Roy’s wife is a waitress at the town’s restaurant–where there are modern ( i.e. 1940’s) aluminum-clad tables, with modern (1940’s) style napkin holders, etc. Then she steps out of the restaurant, and right outside the door, and right next to the jeep is her horse —so she jumps up onto the saddle to gallop away and warn Roy Rogers about the bad guys who just rode into town…on their horses, of course.
The wiki articlesays: " the series featured traditional cowboys riding horses and carrying six-shooters where they coexisted with automobiles, telephones, and electric lighting. No attempt was made to explain or justify this strange blend of 19th-century characters with 20th-century technology"
So my questions are :
Was the show aimed at children, or at adults? (it may be possible to answer this question by the type of products advertised in the commercials during the show.)
And if adults watched it, were they willing to admit it?
The show was nominated for an Emmy in 1955 in the category of “Best western/adventure”, which implies that somebody took it seriously.
How did they justify watching such pure stupidity?
Did any of the writers/actors ever give an interview later in life and admit that the Roy Rogers Show is nothing to be proud of?
Why did my mother throw away my Roy Rogers toys when we moved house in 1968?
Did you ever follow the old “Rick O’Shay” comic strip by Stan Lynde? Fascinating evolution. It started out as a pure gag strip, set in the modern “Old West.” People rode horses and carried cap-and-ball revolvers…and then they went to Hollywood to talk to TV producers!
But in 1969, Lynde effected a Great Divorce, and removed his characters from the modern age. He decreed the comic strip was now set in 1869, and maintained the purported date at an even century behind “real time.”
He also made the strip more and more serious, darker, grimmer, and, eventually heavily proselytized in it.
Given the two extremes…perhaps the funny anachronisms are the lesser of two sins.
Real Life is Messy. We still [del]had[/del] have radios after television, and Victorian houses don’t dissolve in a puff of smoke because someone built an Art Deco building.
More to the point, in 1910 New York, a businessman could sit in his electrically-lit 30th-floor office making telephone calls, then ride downstairs in an electric elevator, go outside, and catch a horse-drawn cab to take him to Penn Station to catch an electric train.
To answer a bit less snarkily
I’d say that shiny diner decor could go back to the 1920s or '30s.
When was the shift from horses to autos so far along that horses would be rare for practical travel? I’m sure like horse-cabs and taxis coexisted for a time in the cities, horses and Model Ts shared the roads for some time.
Would that point have been later in rough Southwestern terrain – as often seen on Roy Rogers and other modern-ish Westerns like Hopalong Cassidy – especially before the Jeep was available on the civilian market?
Absent an “exclusionist” answer to (2) and (3) – in other words, that horses disappeared from practical use very quickly and 1920s-'40s autos were sufficiently hearty for rough terrain – I’m not seeing any anachronism.
The Roy Rogers Show was originally broadcast on late afternoons on Sunday and was definitely a show for kids.
They used horses for three reasons:
a) A lot of the stories were set up in the mountains or down in canyons that were inacessible even by jeep.
b) If you watch more episodes you will realize that NellyBelle was the most unreliable vehicle ever built. It was constantly breaking down, refusing to start, and able to roll away from Pat entirely on its own. Between a) and b) Roy (and Dale, for that matter) got everywhere before Pat, who often didn’t show up until after Roy had already fought the bad guys, caught them, returned the money to the widows and orphans, and sung a song with Dale.
c) If you had The Smartest Horse in the Movies why wouldn’t you use him instead of a car? Trigger was cool. Trigger got Roy out of plenty of jams. Trigger could catch bad guys without Roy. Plus, Trigger was faster than NellyBelle and even had his own comic book.
A few years after the show I got to see Roy and Dale live in Fort Worth, Texas. The original Trigger was long-since dead; I think they were on the third Trigger at that point. But even the third Trigger was still better than any stupid jeep!
And if you didn’t realize all this on your own, you don’t deserve to have Roy Rogers toys!
Gene Autry in 1940 was a cowboy with a radio show. And IIRC there was a serial with Gene fighting robots from an underground empire.
As a kid back then, I suspect the point was to let the kids imagine they could be cowboys in the present. I preferred Rocky Jones myself.
I recall (but cannot locate right now) a comment by Dale about Roy having Trigger stuffed and mounted after death, and she wondered if he would to the same thing to her.
(unintentionally humorous on a different level, especially with their prim & proper image)
I used to watch it as a kid in the 1950s. Since I lived in New York and knew nothing whatever about the west, it never crossed my mind that people might not ride horses as well as use cars in the modern west. Of course, the car that was usually seen was Nellybelle, which was there mainly for comic relief. (I thought Pat’s misadventures with Nellybelle were hilarious, and the best part of the show.)
The Roy Rogers Show was far from the dumbest premise ever marketed to kids. Virtually nobody would have noticed or cared about any anachronisms.
OP, you’ve clearly paid close attention to the episodes that you saw. Which makes me wonder–
How in blazes did you see all that and yet miss the magical six-shooters that shoot 9 or 10 bullets without reloading??
