Western Weekends - Davy Crockett and the River Pirates

After Davy Crockett's success on TV and cinema, Disney were inspired to make a couple more episodes. Despite the fact that the series and the film ended with most of the characters getting killed at the Alamo and Davy making a last stand in what TV Tropes refers to as a "Bolivian Army Ending" (a reference to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid). Anyway, they decided to make a prequel consisting of two more episodes which also had a theatrical release in 1956 under the title Davy Crockett and the River Pirates. Unlike the first film, which loosely followed Crockett's life as a frontiersman and politician with a highly romanticised element, Davy Crockett and the River Pirates is entirely fictional. Even the opening theme song explicitly states this.

In the first story, Davy Crockett's Keelboat Race, Crockett and Russell are looking for a market to trade pelts and encounter a blowhard keelboat captain named Mike Fink. Not wanting to pay an extortionate sum for passage to New Orleans on Fink's boat, the pair try and acquire their own boat and crew. When Fink learns of this, he gets Russell drunk and tricks him into challenging him to a keelboat race to New Orleans. The rest of the story follows our heroes as they learn about boating and try to win the race while overcoming numerous obstacles and Fink's dirty tricks.

In the second story, Davy Crockett and the River Pirates, Crockett and Russell are abducted by Chickasaws who are preparing to go to war with the local settlers following a massacre. They deduce that a gang of river pirates have been masquerading as Native Americans, prompting reprisals from settlers. Hoping to avert a war, the pair team up with Fink and his crew to bring down the pirates.

Overall, the film isn't too bad. There are two decent adventures, and both Fess Parker and Buddy Ebsen continue to give off good performances as Crockett and Russell. However, the true star of the show is Jeff York as Mike Fink. He is delightfully over-the-top, and so fun to watch. Yes, he starts out as the antagonist, but he later becomes a staunch ally of Crockett, which means he can keep stealing the show. He's similar to Falstaff, with his bawdiness serving as a foil to the more upright Crockett.

While the miniseries is hard to find, both Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier and Davy Crockett and the River Pirates are available on Disney+. I think they're both worth a watch.

Western Weekends - Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier

I've looked at a couple of "Twilight of the Old West" stories, like The Wild Bunch, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and Rockstar's Red Dead series. I thought I'd mix things up a bit by looking at a "Dawn of the Old West" story. With this in mind, I'm looking at a classic American folk hero, Davy Crockett. Specifically his portrayal by Fess Parker in the 1950s Disney adaptation.

Davy Crockett was initially a three-part miniseries on the anthology series Walt Disney's Disneyland. It stars Fess Parker as Davy Crockett, and Buddy Ebsen as his sidekick Georgie Russell. The miniseries follows Crockett and Russell as they go on numerous adventures:

• Davy Crockett, Indian Fighter follows the pair as they serve as scouts under General Andrew Jackson during the Creek Wars. They butt heads with Jackson's second-in-command, Major Tobias Norton, and Crockett later duels with a Creek war chief named Red Stick
• Davy Crockett Goes to Congress has Crockett going to settle new land in Tennessee. After learning that a local bully named Bigfoot Mason has been running Cherokee families off their land and re-selling it, he becomes a magistrate for the region and arrests him. He later runs for the state legislature to oppose Bigfoot's attorney, and subsequently gets elected to The House of Representatives.
• The final episode, Davy Crockett at the Alamo follows Crockett as he decides his next adventure will be to fight in the Texas Revolution. With Russell, a  cowardly riverboat gambler named Thimblerig, and a Comanche known only as "Busted Luck", they travel to Bexar (present day San Antonio) and join the Texans being besieged in an old mission known as The Alamo.

I haven't seen the original series, but would very much like to. Fortunately it was re-edited as a feature-length film in 1955 titled Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier.

The film is certainly a product of its time, and there's a greater focus on the myth than the man, so if you're looking for historical accuracy, you're in the wrong place. For example, Crockett is shown to be good friends with Andrew Jackson when the latter becomes president. I don't know whether or not that was the case, but I have found that Crockett was a vocal opponent of many of Jackson's policies, most notably the Indian Removal Act of 1830.

Crockett and Russell are likeable characters, and the adventures they go on are kind of fun. It does make the final part quite poignant, as it's made quite clear that Crockett isn't going to survive when Mexican Troops storm the Alamo.

I feel like this series was probably akin to the Pirates of the Caribbean of its time, being Disney's landmark live-action franchise. Yes, it's romanticised, but it's still enjoyable.

In fact, it became so popular that it spawned a prequel. I'll talk about that tomorrow.

I've got the main theme song stuck in my head now...

Western Weekends - Deadlands: The Weird West

Another feather in the cap for my Western Weekends series; role-playing games. I've previously stated that with the move to virtual table-tops like Fantasy Grounds and Roll20, role-playing games have been my primary social activity these past few months. And recently, Pinnacle Entertainment released a reboot of their landmark franchise: Deadlands: The Weird West.

Like the name suggests, The Weird West takes place in The American West, but utilises horror and steampunk elements. The exact year is 1884, but history had skewed into an alternative timeline at the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863. In this alternative history, the American Civil War continued for longer than it did in our history, ending at The Battle of Washngton in 1871. A massive earthquake hit California in 1868, creating a labyrinth of canyons known as "The Great Maze". It was here that prospectors discovered a superfuel known as "Ghost Rock", which was used to fuel powerful war machines. In this world, players can roam the West dealing with all manner of mundane and weird threats.

Since this is made using a system without classes, you have a lot of freedom with which to make characters. Sure, you could be a gunslinger, a bounty hunter, or a Native American warrior. You could even be a magic user of some kind:

• Blessed, pious souls whose powers come from divine entities as gifts for good behaviour;
• Chi Masters, martial artists who channel spiritual energy directly through their own bodies;
• Hucksters, who gamble with malevolent entities for powers;
• A sub-group of Hucksters, known as Hexslingers, use rune-cast guns to cast some of their spells;
• Mad Scientists, who are inspired by those same spirits to build their contraptions;
• Shamans, who get their powers through bargains with nature spirits.

The Savage Worlds system is great for cinematic games, and handles Wild West gunfights really well. It ultimately depends on who's running the game, but the system is pretty accommodating. It can be especially funny when your plans are ruined by poor die rolls.

I've been collecting a lot of different sourcebooks for this system over the past couple of years, and I'm looking forward to trying them out with either online communities or my university's game society.

On a side-note, I often say that this was the setting that made me want to become a writer. My brother gave me an earlier version of the rulebook when I was 17, but my group had drifted apart at that point. I loved the world so much that I decided to write a story in it.

Western Weekends - The Hateful Eight

Last week, I looked at Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, describing him as the Quentin Tarantino of his day. This week, I figured I'd take a look at Tarantino's second Western film; The Hateful Eight.

Samuel L. Jackson plays Major Marquis Warren, a former cavalry officer and Civil War veteran working as a bounty hunter in Wyoming. Stranded in the wilderness with three bodies he's taking to Red Rock to claim bounties on, he hitches a lift on board a stagecoach with two other passengers:

• John Ruth, a bounty hunter known as "The Hangman" for his tendency to bring bounties in alive so they can be hanged, played by Kurt Russell; 
• Daisy Domergue, a wanted fugitive whom Ruth is taking to Red Rock, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh; 
• They later pick up Chris Mannix, a former Confederate partisan who's due to take a post as Red Rock's new sheriff, played by Walton Goggins.

With a blizzard bearing down on them, the stagecoach driver O.B., played by James Parks, has the group take shelter at Minnie's Haberdashery. At the lodge, the passengers find that Minnie is apparently away, and there are four other people present:

• Bob, a Mexican man who claims to be acting as custodian while Minnie's away, played by Demián Bichir;
• Oswaldo Mobray, an Englishman travelling to Red Rock to serve as the new hangman, played by Tim Roth;
• Joe Gage, a laconic cowboy travelling to meet his mother, played by Michael Madsen;
• Sanford Smithers, a former Confederate General on his way to his son's funeral, played by Bruce Dern.

As all parties endure the blizzard outside, both Warren and Ruth suspect that something is amiss, and soon everybody is at each other's throats. Mannix has a lot of respect for Smithers, whom his father served under, while Warren holds a grudge against him for his war crimes. Meanwhile, Ruth believes that one or more of the lodgers aren't who they say they are, and may be plotting to rescue Daisy.

This film is very reminiscent of a classic whodunit, with a group of characters confined to one location. It isn't long before the bullets start flying and the blood is spilled. It is a Tarantino movie, after all.

The name does live up to its title. Well, the "hateful" part. There are actually nine people in the lodge, since O.B. the stagecoach driver is present. Oddly enough, it's Daisy who's the most sympathetic character for most of the film. Warren has a rather graphic confession he gives to Smithers, and Ruth constantly beats Daisy (but I get the feeling he probably treats most of his captives this way, regardless of gender). She constantly slings insults and taunts him, and it's never really stated what she's wanted for.

The mystery does develop when someone poisons the coffee, killing O.B. and Ruth when they drink it. Warren becomes more suspicious of everyone, but ends up being able to trust Mannix because he almost drank the poisoned coffee too.

I don't want to spoil anything, but I think the ultimate development was a bit of a cop-out.

All-in-all, the build-up is good, but once the violence ensues, the film goes a little downhill.

On a final note, I'd like to say that this film had an original score composed by Ennio Morricone, who passed away this week.

Western Weekends - The Wild Bunch

It's 4th July, so happy Independence Day to my American readers. It's also Camp NaNoWriMo, so I'm working on that while resisting the temptation to start another play-through of Red Dead Redemption II. With that in mind, I've decided to take a look at one of the films which has had a significant influence on the Red Dead series; The Wild Bunch. Released in 1969 under the direction of Sam Peckinpah, this ultra-violent epic revisionist Western deals with outlaws in a rapidly changing West in a new century.

William Holden plays Pike Bishop, the ageing leader of an outlaw gang known as "The Wild Bunch". After a botched robbery in which most of the gang were killed, Pike flees across the border to Mexico with the survivors: Pike's right-hand-man Dutch Engstrom, played by Ernest Borgnine; the brothers Lyle and Tector Gorch, played respectively by Warren Oates and Ben Johnson; the young recruit Angel, played by Jaime Sánchez; and old-timer Freddie Sykes, played by Edmond O'Brien. They find themselves working for General Mapache, a debauched and corrupt warlord in the Mexican Federal Army, played by Emilio Fernández. Robert Ryan plays Deke Thornton, a former member of the Wild Bunch who has agreed to hunt down his partners in exchange for a pardon. He's placed in charge of a posse of bounty hunters assembled by the railroad company, who are probably more ruthless and trigger-happy than the people they're hunting.

This ended up being one of the most violent films of its time, with large-scale and bloody shootouts at the beginning and the end of the film. This was made at a time when the Spaghetti Western was popular, and placed further emphasis on the violence and amorality of the Wild West. The Wild Bunch takes this a step further, and portrays a bleak and savage world where even children are capable of cruelty. The opening has several shots of a group of kids gleefully tormenting scorpions with fire ants in a pit, which they then set alight. And near the end, when Mapache is torturing a rebel by dragging him behind his car, there are kids chasing after him, poking him with sticks, and even riding him. Those scenes are actually grimmer than the shootouts.

The opening shootout establishes the world perfectly. The Bunch attempt to rob a cache of silver from a railroad office, but the railroad's posse are waiting in ambush. The Bunch attempt to escape using a parade organised by the local Temperance Movement, but the bounty hunters fire on them anyway, and many civilians are killed in the crossfire. And when the surviving members of the Bunch escape, they find their loot consists of steel washers rather than the silver coin they hoped for, revealing that the whole thing was a set-up. Thornton argues with the railroad's chief of security, Pat Harrigan, stating that the townspeople should have been warned, but Harrigan had refused out of fear of tipping them off. In other words, lives were lost and neither side got what they wanted.

Amateur historian me is going to take over for a bit, as it's not clear exactly when this film takes place. The general consensus places the exact year as 1913. This is suggested because Mapache is mentioned to serving General Victoriano Huerta, who ruled Mexico as a military dictator from 1913 to 1914. However, there are a few mentions of "the war" - presumably the First World War - which didn't start until 1914, and which the USA didn't take part in until 1917. There's also mentions of General Pershing stationing troops across the border, which happened in response to Pancho Villa's raid on Columbus, New Mexico in 1916.

If you look past the violence, you'll find what's actually a bleak story of outlaws who refuse to accept a changing world. Of course, if violence isn't your thing, then I can recommend Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It's a similar story but without the violence, and it was released in the same year. Actor Strother Martin actually appears in both.