I believe that the taxidermy versions of both Trigger the horse and Bullet the dog can be seen in the lobby of RFD-TV in Omaha Nebraska.
Ahem. That should be “Bullet the Wonder Dog.”
And the good guys on horseback are still catching the thieves.
I wonder if the OP is still around. He never did answer my question.
Reliable technology lasts until it cannot compete at all anymore. My Dad drove a horse-drawn milk wagon in the early 1950s in Lorain, Ohio, not in the slightest bit rural. Prince, the horse, knew the route. As Dad got out to deliver milk to several houses in a row, Prince clopped ahead to wait at the last house. The Divco never did that.
My grandparents phone in rural Grafton, Ohio was a crank phone until well into the 50s.
A friend who lives just outside Oberlin, Ohio, STILL does not have a touch-tone line.
Dennis
Roy Rogers and Dale Evans had recently bought some shoes. One day they left them outside, so as not to track mud in the house. During the night a mountain lion, attracted by the aroma of new leather, wandered into their yard and chewed up the shoes. The next day Roy went out with his shotgun in search of the lion. Dale heard a shot and soon Roy returned with the body of the mountain lion slung over the back of Trigger.
Dale Evans says, ‘Pardon me Roy, is that the cat that chewed the new shoes?’
So self-driving cars aren’t really new technology after all?
I thought Gene’s sidekick was usually Frog Milhouse (Smiley Burnette). Love that voice.
yeah, I’m still here.
And even as a kid I realized that on TV and in the movies, gunfighters never stopped to reload. But It didn’t bother me too much… I also realized that nobody on screen ever went to the bathroom, either. 
Even as a kid, I didn’t mind a little exaggeration , to keep the story exciting…I knew it wasn’t real.
But now, after re-reading the thread, I’m going to disagree with a lot of the people in this thread --the ones who make excuses for the Roy Rogers show by saying that its plots were reasonable, because horses were still in use during the 1940’s and 50’s. It’s true, of course, that rural America was much more primitive then, and horses did co-exist with cars…but that’s not what the show was about. The show was about the wild west and cowboys; about Roy Rogers and his six-shooter! Everybody in the show wears a holster and guns.
Now the wild west* , where everybody walked around town with pistols on their hips, had disappeared back in the 1880’ s or so.
So by the 1940’s , the show was simply silly. The kids watching it had a good time, but the adults writing the scripts must have been …just nuts.
*( I’m talking about Hollywood’s version of the wild west–I know that in the real world, the “Wild west” never really existed)
As late as the 1910s, my great-grandfather used to get drunk, ride his horse down the middle of Main Street, and shoot out the streetlights.
Whisky, horses, and six-shooters: the Wild West at its wackiest!
I can understand the use of horses in the Roy Rogers show, since roads in the West were not level, 4-lane, cement freeways then, but bumpy, washed-out dirt tracks in many cases. A horse is a much better vehicle.
But I have never understood why Ayn Rand treated airplanes as small, non-commercial gimmicks and never foresaw major airlines or long-haul jets. Her heroes and villains were always using trains to get around, as if that form of transport was the ultimate in the 1950’s, when her stories were written. In reality, trains were in serious decline after the 1930’s, and by the 1950’s, worthless for passenger transport.
No one in this thread has suggested the plots were “reasonable.” We only pointed out that it was reasonable to have people ride horses in an era of electricity and Jeeps.
This was just a show aimed for kids, starring a singing cowboy extending his career for a few more years after B-movies and serials had run their course. The plots were simple: good guys beat bad guys, with some G-rated action and some sort of moral at the end.
And if you hated westerns on TV, you must have really hated it a few years later. By 1959, years after Roy and Dale had ridden off into reruns, there were 26 westerns on TV, including seven of the top-10 rated shows (Gunsmoke, Wagon Train, Have Gun Will Travel, Rifleman, Maverick, Tales of Wells Fargo and Wyatt Earp)
It does seem strange to have a show with a mentality of the good old west, but thrown in the mix is all the conveniences of a modern era. Would almost be like watching a movie about cavemen and seeing them start a fire with matches. I never watched the Roy Rogers show much when I was a kid, but I have eaten at one of Roy Roger’s Restaurants. I wonder why this franchise isn’t everywhere like similar franchises which spread nation and sometimes world wide. I see on Wikipedia that the first one opened in 1968. There are now only 31 franchises. They did have good food. I’d go, if there was one near me.
Just for the fun of it, forget the anachronisms of the 1950’s Roy Rogers show - welcome to the 2015 Goshen, Indiana Walmart where horse-and-buggy transport meets HD TV sets. They have sheltered areas for the animals so they don’t have to stand out in the sun on hot pavement and I believe water is also available for the horses.
Welcome to the real world, where anachronisms really do exist and old technology takes a long time to completely disappear.
I don’t want to start a major highjack, but it is a lot of fun, actually, to try to discern how and why the world in Atlas Shrugged differs from ours. There was a Great War, but it wasn’t our WWII. There are no nuclear weapons. There is no “Imperial Presidency,” a la FDR; the book indicates power is in “The Legislature.”
Without the advances of WWII aviation, commercial airlines might have not developed yet by the new 1950s. Trains would be (heck still are in our time!) a pretty good way to haul freight and passengers.
You can’t judge Atlas Shrugged by real-world technology: her world is definitely an “alternate history” timeline.
(One of my favorite jokes is that, in Socialist Europe, there is a little holdout community, like Galt’s Gulch, made up of the German and Italian nuclear physicists. It is named “Fermi’s Freehold.”)
I would like to give an apology to chappachula. I see that I hijacked your post. It was too late for me to edit my remarks. I should not have discussed restaurants when the topic you started was about the Roy Rogers TV show. I’m sorry.
Yes, the program was rife with anachronisms. It was 50s children’s Saturday morning television. Accept and enjoy it for what it is. Or change the channel.
And…
Happy trails.
I live in a small town (~4500 people) in Texas. I’ve seen a horse and rider pulled up in a stall at the local Sonic.
As far as strapping on the six-shooter and heading into town, welcome to Texas and the land of open carry. It is somewhat unusual, but not unheard of, to see a person with a firearm strapped to his/her hip around here. Today, our state leaders tell us those are “Good Guys with Guns.” I wish we could go back to Roy’s day, when the “Bad Guys with Guns” always wore black hats. It would make it much easier to identify them.
You’ve already got the Blues Brothers, why not Firefly?