Kemo Sabe Unmasked
The most famous movie Ranger helps us recall how the iconic Texas Rangers shaped the Western film genre.
By: Henry Cabot Beck 11/01/2008
Certainly the Ranger film most justifiably honored in the last 100 years isn’t really a film at all. Lonesome Dove was a TV miniseries that tried to do in six-plus hours what Pulitzer Prize-winning author Larry McMurtry did in 864 pages, and the show very nearly pulled it off, thanks to the acting talents of Tommy Lee Jones and Robert Duvall. Jones and Duvall, as aging Texas Rangers Woodrow Call and Augustus McCrae, are looking for a new and possibly final adventure, which means stealing a huge herd of cattle and horses in Mexico, bringing them across the Rio Grande and then driving them up to Montana. It’s an epic tale but the scope of the adventure never wanders far from the two central figures, which is one of the reasons the picture hasn’t lost much of its charm. The miniseries did slight, or even eliminate, some characters and scenes, but it was otherwise more faithful to the novel than almost any other adaptation in film history.
Lonesome Dove is back on DVD in a new two-disc edition, Blu-ray and regular, and the producers have done a fine job of remastering the picture and improving the sound. A couple of new extras are included in the package, but it’s the story that counts, and it’s a great one.
As far as The Lone Ranger goes, quite a few packages should make Westerns buffs happy. In honor of the 75th anniversary of the masked man, Classic Media is releasing the first two seasons of the original series on DVD in a 13-disc collection. That may sound like a lot of discs, but back then, two seasons were 78 episodes. The company remastered the lot, which is significant because cheesy Lone Ranger DVDs have been floating in the public domain for years. Listed at $119.95, the set also includes a 1950 radio broadcast, an episode of Lassie with a Clayton Moore guest spot, an episode of the cartoon show from the 1960s, an 88-page book and a comic book.
Besides O’Neal’s Reel Rangers, another new book worth checking out is The Misadventures of a Roving Cartoonist: The Lone Ranger’s Secret Sidekick (Five Star Legends). This is the posthumously-published autobiography of Tom Gill, who created 135 of the 145 Lone Ranger comic books launched by Dell in 1948. The book does not focus solely on the Lone Ranger, as it is a firsthand account of an artist who toured military bases and hospitals all over the world as part of a troupe of comic creators (including Mort Walker of Beetle Bailey and Al Capp of Li’l Abner). A curious and mildly adventurous man, Bill took delight in some of the more risqué episodes in his travels. The book is light, but it’s charming and entertaining. And it includes some extra material on the various artists mentioned that is written by Gill’s collaborator, Tim Lasiuta.
Comments (1)
i wish that the lone ranger was back on tv again.
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