Cheyenne: The Complete Series
A Warner Bros. Television Production
5560 min. / 107 episodes 1955-62 / 1.33:1 / DTS-HD MA 2.0 Mono / SDH
Warner Archive Blu-ray $139.99*
The Warner Archive once more dips into its treasure-trove of classic TV westerns with a stellar presentation of the first and one of the best, Cheyenne starring Clint Walker, which had an unusual TV history that we are going to attempt to stitch all together for you. Pull up a comfortable saddle; roll your own if you got ‘em.
You young’uns can’t picture what a neighborhood looked like with a big ol’ TV antenna on every rooftop, but we’re not going to try and describe it. Just know that the flocking birds were happy and that Columbia Broadcasting System and the National Broadcasting Company led the market in prime stations and popular shows, while DuMont and the American Broadcasting Company lagged far behind. DuMont was dead by 1956; ABC’s path to survival was to reach out to the Hollywood studios, who’d been negatively impacted by audiences staying home to watch TV for “free” instead of heading to the local picture show to pay for a movie. ABC found two takers: Walt Disney, looking for money to build an amusement park in Southern California, produced Disneyland, The Mickey Mouse Club, and Zorro for the network; Warner Bros., who despite Jack Warner’s well-known disdain for television, saw – as Disney did – an opportunity to produce inexpensive programming for the home set while promoting their theatrical offerings. Thus was born Warner Bros. Presents, an hour-long series that debuted in September, 1955.
The show was an umbrella title that featured three rotating new series inspired by Warner Bros. films of the past, plus a sequence with Gig Young discussing past, present, and future Warner Bros. offerings, visits with Warners stars on-set, and Hollywood tidbits. The three rotating series were King’s Row, Casablanca, and a new western series that took its name but nothing else from a 1947 Warner Bros. western, Cheyenne.
The initial premise for Cheyenne: Cheyenne Bodie (Clint Walker) is a scout employed by the government to help map unknown territories, roaming the west with his partner “Smitty” Smith (L.Q. Jones), the map maker. In that first season, each episode was akin to a short (40 to 42 min.) B movie, with high production values, great locations, and well-used stock footage from the Warner Bros. catalog to enlarge the vista of the programs, and the show was an immediate hit. Because it rotated with two other weekly series, only 15 episodes were produced that season, but they were all of extremely high quality, much closer to theatrical films than typical TV fare.
Big changes occurred for season two; Warner Bros. Presents, the Gig Young segments, and Casablanca and Kings Row all went off to the television graveyard and Cheyenne found itself with a new producer – Roy Huggins, who’d become a TV legend with Maverick, The Rockford Files, and many other shows – and a new dramatic anthology series to alternate with, Conflict. There were 20 Cheyenne episodes filmed for season two, friend Smitty was gone (off to drink with Gig Young, one supposes) and Cheyenne Bodie became a lone wanderer, traipsing around the west to no apparent purpose except to be helpful in the days when the old west needed a lot of help. The quality remained extremely high, but Conflict appealed to nobody and didn’t survive into the 1957-58 season, leaving Warner Bros. to make the obvious choice and produce a western to rotate with the popular Cheyenne. Warners took the name of a 1951 film, Sugarfoot, and the plot and lead character of a 1954 film, The Boy from Oklahoma, and both Sugarfoot and Cheyenne were solid hits for the latter’s third season, with each show airing 20 new episodes.
The wind that blows, that comes and goes, has been your only home. ”
All was not well in Cheyenne, though: Clint Walker, unhappy with the pay, working conditions, and a contract stipulation that 50% of all monies earned by his public appearances had to be remitted to the studio, went on strike. Rather than replace him, exactly, the studio kept the Cheyenne program name but swapped out everything else, with Ty Hardin playing Bronco Lane, pretty much the same character (and probably the same scripts, with the names switched) for the 1958-1959 season. Eventually, a new contract for Walker was agreed upon and Cheyenne returned for its actual fourth season in the fall of 1959; new episodes were mixed in with repeats on Monday nights, while Sugarfoot and Bronco rotated on Tuesday nights. There were 13 new episodes of Cheyenne produced that season.
For 1960-61, Warner Bros. and the network combined the three series into the stronger Monday night schedule on a rotating basis, leading to 13 more Cheyenne episodes. This was the final season for Sugarfoot, and for 1961-62, Cheyenne was back to rotating with Bronco on a weekly basis in the last season for each show. Adding 13 new episodes to the mix, that’s a grand total of 107 Cheyenne episodes; interestingly, the pilot for a new series called The Dakotas aired in the time slot and with Cheyenne credits one week after the 1960-61 season, although Clint Walker was not in it and the episode is rightfully counted as part of that series.
Now that we’re all caught up with the series backstory…
Cheyenne remains one of the best of the Warner Bros. TV westerns, probably second only to the legendary Maverick. Clint Walker – all 6’6” of him, he towers over his guest stars – is one of the most stoic, formidable of all TV cowboys, and one wishes he could’ve co-starred in an episode with Jim Arness just to see who was more impressive if they stood side by side. He intimidates the series guest villains just by his size, even those episodes that unfortunately give him little to do (producer William T. Orr felt, in an interview recounted in Warner Bros. Television, that after Walker returned to the series following his walk-out he tended to mail in his part, although we didn’t see any evidence of that – after all, his character was pretty unemotional anyway. One thing that the producers had to deal with during the entire run of the series: Walker was so mammoth and chiseled, you can spot his stunt man so well they may as well have had a flashing neon sign saying STUNT DOUBLE pointing to him.
We found the season one through three episodes the best, not least of all because James Garner appears to pop up as a different character every fourth or fifth episode. If the series premiere, Mountain Fortress, had been a theatrical film, it would’ve been one of the best B westerns we’d ever seen. Another highlight from season one was the episode Quicksand with Dennis Hopper at the Utah Kid. The Broken Pledge with Frank de Kova in his patented Native-American role (he plays Sitting Bull) is a highlight of season 2; season 3 gives us Evelyn Ankers in one of her final roles, in The Gambler, and Michael Landon and Dan Blocker in various episodes, while Lorne Green shows up in the following season (what, no Pernell Roberts or Hop Sing?). Note that in the episodes we screened, there was no romance at hand for Mr. Bodie, no doubt because it was hard to find a leading lady who could kiss him without a stepladder. The plots were more likely to have Cheyenne’s friendship with a lady mistaken for something more by a jealous suitor, as with Lisa Gaye and Rhodes Reason part of an ugly triangle in season 4’s Outcast of Cripple Creek.
The 30-disc set from Warner Archives is a wow, whether you watch the show chronologically or dip into its many seasons and episodes, meticulously restored in 4K from the original negatives, and there’s only one bonus featurette, but it’s a pip: a 2006 interview with Walker (who passed away in 2018) reminiscing about the show and sharing some hilarious memories, including how – after a post-war career as a bouncer and security guard – getting shot at with fake bullets seemed like a superior career choice.
Frankly, we wonder how many of us are left who are real fans of the old TV westerns; by my childhood, there wasn’t much left of them except in reruns, so the several releases so far by Warner Archive (including Colt .45, The Alaskans, and MGM’s A Man Called Shenandoah) are generally all new to me, and each set seems to top the last for picture and sound quality. Cheyenne is a set to be enjoyed for years to come.
Source material included from "Warner Bros. Television" by Lynn Wooley, Robert W. Malsbary, and Robert G. Strange, Jr., McFarland 1985