Gunslinger

I was in the 9th grade when this show was on. Tony Young became my very first "heartthrob" :-) I cut out and saved every article I could find about him. In 2005 I was cleaning out a lot of junk from my house and found my Gunslinger Scrapbook with all the articles and pictures I had collected. I really loved that show and was heartbroken when it was canceled. I refused to watch any program that came on in that time-slot for a long time. At the time I was very much into any show that was a western. I also loved to read Louis LAmour westerns at that time. Several years after Gunslinger bit the dust I happened to see something on TV that had Tony Young in it and was glad to see that he had aged well :-).

A short-lived Western series starring the stunning Tony Young, Gunslinger apparently just didn't show enough to the network to get it even a second season.

The plots are typical western fare: rescuing ranchers' daughters, saving towns from gangs, rounding up bad guys. The main character, Cord, is an early version of the Eastwood antihero. Though he's probably not the first one to dabble in this kind of cowboy character, he should get some credit for being on the frontier, at the time.

The pilot episode is the only one to break new ground in Western series. Cord is sent to bring in a war criminal from the American Civil War: a Confederate army doctor who performed medical experiments on the Union POWs at the infamous Andersonville prison camp. This is uncharacteristically dark for westerns - or really, any TV series - of the time period, and was a promising start, but subsequent episodes drift off into the usual horse opera.

I doubt it will ever see the light of day, again. Just a little blip on the TV screen.

OK, I and my riding friends were besotted with Tony Young (or was it Cord we loved?) and the plot lines were perhaps not so important, but I do not remember them being poor. Even the fact that Tony was scared stiff of horses and we all loved horses and riding made no difference! As westerns go it was, perhaps, as has already been said, typical but for us, wonderful. It lasted such a short time that we were soon deprived of the gorgeous Tony but I can still remember the theme song as though it were yesterday, not 45 years ago!! Cord's dark, brooding presence is fixed in my memory, too. I wish I could see the series again - I really do!

Please bring thie out on DVD. I love this show and would like to see it again. really miss it.