Cheyenne (TV western)

Cheyenne
Also known as	Warner Brothers Presents ... Cheyenne and Cheyene: Bronco and The Cheyenne Show: Bronco[1][2]
Genre	western
Developed by	Roy Huggins
Starring	Clint Walker L. Q. Jones
Theme music composer	William Lava Stanley D. Jones[3]
Country of origin	United States
Language(s)	English
No. of seasons	7 including the first season on WBP
No. of episodes	108
Production
Executive producer(s)	William T. Orr
Producer(s)	Roy Huggins Arthur W. Silver Sidney Biddel Burt Dunne William L. Stuart
Location(s)	California
Running time	60 mins.
Broadcast
Original channel	ABC
Picture format	1.33:1 monochrome
Audio format	monaural
First shown in	Sundays later, Mondays
Original run	20 September 1955 – 30 April 1962
Chronology
Preceded by	Warner Brothers Presents
Followed by	The Dakotas
Related shows	Bronco Maverick Sugarfoot
External links
IMDb profile
TV.com summary

Cheyenne is a western television series broadcast on ABC from 1955 to 1962. Like its titular character, it is a pioneer in American television. It was the first hour-long western. It was the first series to be made by a major Hollywood film studio which did not derive from its established film properties.^[4] And it is the first of a long chain of William T. Orr-produced Warner Brothers original series. Cheyenne was a co-winner of the 1957 Golden Globe Award for Television Achievement.^[5]

Series history

The series began as a part of Warner Brothers Presents, a program that alternated three different series in rotation. In this first year, Cheyenne traded broadcast weeks with Casablanca and King's Row. Thereafter, Cheyenne was overhauled by outgoing producer Roy Huggins and left the umbrella of WBP. It featured Clint Walker as Cheyenne Bodie, a physically huge cowboy wandering the Old West. The show ran from 1955 to 1963, except for the time Walker struck for higher pay and the series was temporarily replaced by a similar show called Bronco that featured Ty Hardin as Bronco Lane, a virtual clone of Bodie. After Walker's pay dispute was settled, the two series alternated in the same time slot from 1958 to 1962, with Bronco as the junior partner (only a snippet of his theme song was heard in the opening credits, as a kind of aural footnote to Cheyenne's). Occasionally both Cheyenne and Bronco appeared together in the same episode, both deadly serious as they worked together. Diane Brewster first appeared as Samantha Crawford, the swindler with a fake southern accent, in an episode of Cheyenne called "Dark Rider" before the character memorably migrated to Maverick to become the Maverick brothers' most celebrated nemesis. At the conclusion of the sixth season, a special episode was aired. Called "A Man Named Ragan", it was a pilot for a program called The Dakotas that would replace Cheyenne in the middle of the next season. However, because Cheyenne Bodie never appeared in "Ragan", the two programs are only tenuously linked.^[2]

Bodie in other shows and media

Walker revived the Cheyenne Bodie character in 1991 for the TV-movie The Gambler Returns: Luck of the Draw, which presented a host of TV cowboys from the 1950s, including Gene Barry as Bat Masterson, Hugh O'Brien as Wyatt Earp, Chuck Connors as The Rifleman, and Jack Kelly in his final appearance as Bart Maverick, a year before his death. Walker also played Cheyenne in an episode of Kung Fu: The Legend Continues in 1995. Dell Comics produced a comic book based on the series. After 3 issues in their Four Color Comics series, it got its own title for issues #4-25 from (1957-1962). All issues had photo covers.

See also

• Cheyenne (game)

External links

• Cheyenne at the Internet Movie Database
• Roy Huggins' Archive of American Television Interview

References

1. ^ CTVA entry for Bronco
2. ^ ^{a b} CTVA entry for Cheyenne
3. ^ http://www.classicthemes.com/50sTVThemes/themePages/cheyenne.html Season 1 featured the Warner Brothers Presents opening theme and a closing theme by Jerry Livingston and Mack David. However, once the show came out of the WBP "umbrella", the Lava/Jones theme, "Bodie", was exclusively employed.
4. ^ Trivia about Cheyenne at IMDB
5. ^ Cheyenne at the Hollywood Foreign Press Association