This morning, whilst I dubbed onto a blank disc a copy of
Passport to Suez (1943) for my pal
Andrew “Grover” Leal, I decided to supplement
Suez’s short running time (72 minutes) with a pair of episodes from
the 1956-58 TV Western
Broken Arrow, which we recently
acquired when DISH Network added station WGTA to its lineup.
I mentioned in
Saturday’s post that this was
a most welcomed surprise in the House of Yesteryear, because a similar channel
(in the same spot as WGTA is now on DISH, channel 32) that offered up the
occasional tasty classic TV run had been yanked about the time we signed on as
DISH subscribers (in July of 2015).
What
I did not know—or rather, would have known had I did a little more research—was
that this was the same channel.
Hereby
hangs a tale.
WGTA (“Greenville to Atlanta”) was originally WNEG, a
Toccoa, GA station that had been in operation since 1984, primarily serving
four Georgian counties that comprise the Greenville/Spartanburg/Asheville
market.
(Athens, Gainesville and
Braselton comprise the station’s secondary market.)
In 2008, the station was sold to the
University of Georgia, who had planned to use WNEG as a training facility for
UGA’s journalism and broadcasting majors, and the station became WUGA in May of
2011.
But the UGA experiment came to an
end when the station was sold to Marquee Broadcasting in March 2015, and it
adopted its WGTA call letters in July (just as we were subscribing to
DISH).
If you’re like me, and you do a
lot of channel hopping just to see if there are any non-home shopping channels
on DISH, you would have come across a disclaimer on channel 32 stating that the
channel was no longer available but that you (the viewer) should keep an eye
out for replacement programming.
So DISH graciously gave us Heroes & Icons on WGTA’s
32.1; the 32.2 portion of WGTA features programming from Decades! and 32.3 is a
Movies! affiliate.
I was genuinely
surprised that the ‘rents have clutched WGTA to their bosom—they amused
themselves Saturday mornings with reruns of the 1966-68
Tarzan series (my father
wanted to know why the ape man spoke perfect English and I had to explain to
him that it was
Johnny Weissmuller who attended The Tonto School of Speech…not
Ron Ely) and Dad put on a pair of
Wanted: Dead or Alive episodes this
morning while he engaged in his morning paper ritual.
As for myself, I took a stroll down Memory
Lane last night with back-to-back reruns of
Hill Street Blues.
But leave us return to the matter of
Broken Arrow.
The TV series premiered six years after the
release of the 1950 movie version (adapted from Elliott Arnold’s novel
Blood Brother) that starred James
Stewart and Jeff Chandler, with a May 1, 1956 pilot that originally aired on
CBS’
The
20th Century-Fox Hour.
In that
pilot, actor John Lupton played Stewart’s role of Tom Jeffords and future
Fantasy
Island mogul Ricardo Montalban as Cochise.
By the time
Broken Arrow was
greenlighted as a regular series in the fall of 1956, Michael Ansara took over
as Cochise—he made for a very convincing Native American chief despite his
Syrian-Egyptian origins.
Ansara wasn’t particularly jazzed about his gig on
Broken
Arrow.
“Cochise could do one of
two things—stand with his arms folded, looking noble; or stand with arms at his
sides, looking noble,” he explained to a
TV
Guide interviewer in 1960.
But I
have to be honest; Mike is the main reason the show works, in addition to the
fact that it was one of the few small screen oaters at that time to portray
Native Americans in a positive light.
The first installment I watched was “Indian Agent” (10/09/56), in which
Jeffords falls for and marries Sonseeahray, the maiden who later draws her
rations (Debra Paget played her in the 1950 movie—here it’s Sue England in the
role) as a result of a fight between Cochise’s men and a bunch of “the-only-good-Injun-is-a-dead-Injun”
yahoos.
It’s a well-done episode that
features Tom Fadden (a series regular as “Mitt Duffield”), Robert Warwick,
James Griffith, Michael Pate, Kenneth MacDonald, and Anthony George.
Ansara sure gets his nobility workout here,
as he tries to counsel the hot-headed Jeffords not to fly off the handle in the
face of revenge.
The tables are turned in “The Captive” (10/23/56); here
Jeffords advises Cochise to keep calm and carry on when an Apache brave (Ray
Stricklyn) is kidnapped from the tribe.
The boy is a white man raised by Apaches; his grandmother (Kathryn Card)
tries to persuade him to return to his birthright…and when he refuses, a skeevy
lawyer (who else but Trevor Bardette) arranges for the young man to be
snatched, inviting the ire of the Apaches.
Lane Bradford is in this one (appropriately as a henchman), and I
chuckled to see Dick Wessel tending bar.
Broken Arrow ran only two seasons on ABC (a total of 72
episodes—seventy-three if you include the pilot) but bounced around on its
daytime and evening schedules in reruns until 1960. I can see why this one hasn’t been given the
nod for a DVD release: the prints are not particularly sparkly (I think
Facebook chum Hal Erickson pointed this out to me before I watched the show)
and of course, they’ve whittled down the running time in order to squeeze in an
extra commercial or two (I clocked both episodes at 23 minutes). But I’ll certainly continue to DVR the shows
because I think the series is entertaining; springing from a time when it was
possible to do dramatic stories in the short span of a half-hour.
(Anti) Social media update: You may have noticed (then again,
maybe not) that I recently deactivated my Twitter account—a proposition that I
had been considering for some time…yet refrained from doing so for a number of
reasons.
Long story short, I pulled the
plug on Twitter this weekend…but I want to reassure people that it’s not for
anything you did; I’ve just become frustrated with the whole 140-character “social
media” experience.
I’m still on Facebook
(I have argued all along that while the FB content can sometimes get poisonous,
it’s still preferable to Twitter any day of the week) so I’m able to share
pictures of my niece and nephew with their “Nana” and “Pop” from time to
time.
Go in peace, my children.
