mt9045

While it's hard to think of a substandard episode from season one, whenever I want to recommend this series to anybody, this is the one I suggest they sample to see how wonderful a TV show can be. From the beginning to the twist ending, through the wonderful (uncredited) NASA play-by-play by Don Fedderson veteran Paul Frees (six seasons of THE MILLIONAIRE as The Millionaire John Beresford Tipton), the perfect familiar versimilitude of the family of brothers, father, grandfather and dog, I can't imagine anything more pleasurable to experience. (My other favorite from this first season is the suspenseful season-ending "Fire Watch." And even now, I'm rembering others which stand out, making me a liar to pinpoint just one as my only "favorite.")

All of this quality is made more starkly obvious having waded through the last several seasons of the series in syndication to get to the point where the episodes begin over at season one, despite the show remaining under the series' best writer, George Tibbles' control through the end. (Of course, by then, he'd lost Mike, Robbie, Sally, Sudsy, Hank, the show's heart, Bub by attrition, and except for several small token appearances, Chip, as chess pieces, leaving him and Fred MacMurray with three wives, a stepson, a stepdaughter, an unlikable uncle, and three non-speaking triplets as the series nominal eponymous characters, so you really can't blame him that by season 12, the show had totally run out of gas.)

So, as a rule of thumb, if the episode is in black and white, you're watching one of the good ones. And this one is the best.

As repulsive as SUICIDE SQUAD, but that was expected. What I did not expect was that absolutely no creator credit was given to the men who created The Peacemaker in 1966 for Charlton (not DC) Comics. So even that backhanded credit ("characters created for DC Comics") is completely incorrect. The character--an actual hero, and not the deranged murderer seen here--was written by Joe Gill and drawn by Pat Boyette, who were not mentioned in thw credits for the movie and are similarly dissed in the TV series. I have no idea why Warner Bros. Is unwilling to spell this out, as both men are long dead.

I've got no quarrel with the qualitative assessments here, but I do have to clarify a couple of things. First of all, STAGECOACH WEST and WAGON TRAIN had almost nothing in common, despite the presence of wagon wheels on both shows. One (STAGECOACH) spotlighted single stories of the heroes' interaction with one of the passengers on the stagecoach, while the other featured multiple stories of the many occupants of the wagons that made the cross-country journey. The stagecoach ride was short and almost never shown in its entirety, while the days-long journeys on WAGON TRAIN usually started and ended the episodes.

The other clarification is that, due to the series' structure (a 38-39 episode season, one-hour episodes), the length of production of each episode made it impractical to feature both Wayne Rogers and Robert Bray in every episode. (Again, this was another difference between the two; meantime, WAGON TRAIN solved this by having multiple leads--Ward Bond, Robert Horton, Robert Fuller--who often would share episodes.) Using the MAVERICK paradigm, most STAGECOACH WEST episodes just featured one or the other, with infrequent instances when both (not to mention Richard Eyer) were involved. The Rogers episodes involved him as more of a roving gunfighter-defender usually set in destination cities (more like WANTED: DEAD OR ALIVE), while the Bray episodes were more homespun (like THE RIFLEMAN), set around the town where the stagecoach line was based. In other words, the partners were not interchangeable, just as Bret and Bart (or Beau and Bart, or even Brent and Bart) were usually given stories playing to their strengths, so, in essence, you got two different series under an umbrella title, even more similar to the much later NAME OF THE GAME.

The marshal thing seems to come and go; I'm not sure if Luke and Simon were deputized in mid-series or not, but I've seen episodes in which it would have been natural for one or the other to flash a badge, and they did not. (The consequences of viewing them randomly...)

One other thing: while it's historically interesting to see Wayne Rogers more than a decade before M*A*S*H (and Bray several years prior to becoming Corey Stuart on LASSIE), what's more interesting is how little Rogers changed between his series. In fact, you can hear Trapper John Alabama-tinged line readings in almost every episode of STAGECOACH WEST, (quite unlike Alan Alda, whose acting changed quite a bit in the same decade prior to M*A*S*H; see his episode of BILKO, for example), just as you knew what you were getting when Rogers later portrayed Jake Axminster and Dr. Charley Michaels. And even in his eighties, Rogers looks like he could still play Luke Perry.