Fess Parker, TV's Davy Crocket and Daniel Boone, Dies at 85
March 20th, 2010Fess Parker, a baby-boomer idol in the 1950s who launched a craze for coonskin caps as television’s Davy Crockett, died Thursday of natural causes. He was 85.
Family spokeswoman Sao Anash said Parker, who was also TV’s Daniel Boone, died at his Santa Ynez Valley home on the 84th birthday of his wife of 50 years, Marcella, according to the AP.
Of course like many American boys growing up in the suburbs in the 1950s and ’60s, I was a big fan of the Daniel Boone television series that aired from September 24, 1964 to September 10, 1970 on NBC.
This brings back many memories, and strikes me as a perfect example of how new Web technology such as YouTube, Wikipedia and Facebook can be used to collect reliable information and pass it on to friends.
According to the Knoxville News-Sentinal, many who grew up in the 1950s remember seeing the late Fess Parker fight Indians and kill a bear on ABC in television’s first “miniseries,” “Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier.”
The 1954-55 show, with its catchy theme song, sparked a “Davy Crockett craze,” on which Walt Disney Co. capitalized by selling coloring books, collectible pins and coonskin caps.
Then new generations of kids got to know Parker, who died March 18, as Crockett, when Disney edited and compiled the series into a full-length adventure film, which aired on television and later become available on home video and DVD.
But kids who had visited the Great Smoky Mountains National Park saw some familiar scenery on the screen.
Substantial portions of the series were filmed at the Mountain Farm Museum, behind Oconaluftee Visitors Center in North Carolina.
Park ranger Brad Free owns a video of the movie, which he enjoyed as a child, and recognizes some of the distinctive structures. Free worked for seven years at the farm, which the park service created in 1953 — just before the series was filmed — by moving original structures from around the park to re-create a typical mountain farm. It includes a cabin, barn, apple house, meat house, chicken house, blacksmith shop, spring house, corn cribs, hog pen, sorghum press and still, ash hopper and wood shed.
Free said most of the first episode, “Davy Crockett, Indian Fighter,” was filmed there, as was part of the second, “Davy Crockett Goes to Congress.”
“There are also some mountain scenes that could have been filmed” in other parts of the park, such as near Clingmans Dome, Free speculated.
The film’s credits thank the park and forest rangers.
Wikipedia and some other Internet sites erroneously say the series was filmed at the park’s Gatlingburg entrance, likely because that’s the address Internet Movie Database lists for the park.
‘Davy Crockett’ TV series filmed in Smokies
Comments
Powered by Facebook Comments
Tags: Daniel Boone, Davy Crocket, Fess Parker
March 20th, 2010 at 1:56 pm
Daniel Boone TV Theme Song Lyrics
Daniel Boone was a man,
Yes, a big man!
With an eye like an eagle
And as tall as a mountain was he!
Daniel Boone was a man,
Yes, a big man!
He was brave, he was fearless
And as tough as a mighty oak tree!
From the coonskin cap on the top of ol’ Dan
To the heel of his rawhide shoe;
The rippin’est, roarin’est, fightin’est man
The frontier ever knew!
Daniel Boone was a man,
Yes, a big man!
And he fought for America
To make all Americans free!
What a Boone, what a do-er,
What a dream come-er true-er was he!
March 20th, 2010 at 5:21 pm
And I was a big fan as well, both of Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone.
My brother and I both got coonskin caps, along with the full Davy Crockett outfits, one Christmas in the 50s, but I believe that the Daniel Boone series, which ran six seasons, had more impact.
One interesting off-series incident was when Ed Ames, who played Boone’s Cherokee friend Mingo, appeared on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson — when the show was really live. Ames did a demonstration “hatchett throwing” at the outline of a man on a large board. Guess where the hatchett got buried?
More interesting was that the Boone series was one of the first to portray Native Americans as people and not as some horde of crazed savages. Ames’s role as Mingo was a sea change from “Tonto” on the “Lone Ranger,” since the character was not only smart, he happened to have attended college in England courtesy his British father. That could be seen as subtly racist, but in fact the Cherokee were frequently marrying European settlers by the mid-1700s. And, like most Native Americans, they considered anyone who chose to live among them and by their cultural norms to be one of them, regardless of ethnic background.
Another interesting character on the series was Cincinnatus, a crotchety-but-lovable old curmudgeon who ran a trading post somewhere along the trails Dan’l and Mingo haunted. I have often wondered if he was a real person and that maybe Cincinnati, Ohio, just across the river from Kentucky, was named for him.