The Cisco Kid

I remember when I was little that I was just glued to this show. One of the 1st westerns that I remember seeing, and I've seen just about all of them. I haven't seen this show for years and it would be nice to see it again sometime.

Here's "O. Henry's famous Robin Hood of the Old West!" Duncan Renaldo, The Cisco Kid of TV was a much more stand-up, stalwart hero than the short story character. Righting wrongs and doing good with his pal, Pancho Miguel Fernando Gonzalez de Conejo(Leo Carillo), Cisco was a model of right for a generation of wee cowpokes. Great low-budget nostalgic, formulaic kiddie western fun! And it's all in color, indicative of the foresight of the production company when TV was in it's infancy and a color set couldn't be had as yet!

MPI Video has compiled four DVD collections of 20 episodes each. That's just over half of the 156 episodes! Where are the rest, I wanna know?!? The color and quality are superb given the age of these shows, with great menus and all the stirring theme music and narration adding to the action and comic fun. Highly recommended!

I used to have a television that occasionally got a weak signal station from Fort Erie, Ontario over here in Buffalo. And I got to relive a little childhood seeing episodes of Cisco Kid and the Lone Ranger.

Unlike the Ranger all of Cisco's stuff was in color. Great foresight because a whole lot of westerns that were done in black and white can't be given away now.

Cisco was quite the guy. A gentleman always, a righter of wrongs, and an amazingly tolerant guy to keep Pancho around. Unlike Tonto who was really useful to the Lone Ranger, I think Cisco kept Pancho around for laughs. He was slow on the uptake, but devoted to Cisco, and someone you didn't have to worry about betraying you.

I thought and still Cisco was great. Many friends in my age group and slightly older who are of Latino background told me how much Cisco meant to them as a role model. He was such a good guy, I wonder what he did that made him an outlaw in the first place.

O Henry spent much time in border towns on the American side and in old Mexico himself. In writing The Caballero's Way and introducing us to Cisco, he gave us another universal hero. Cisco will be syndication 100 years from now.

Duncan Renaldo and Leo Carrillo were a couple of Hollywood veterans with substantial credits. But they will always be known as the Cisco Kid and Pancho.

By the way, did Pancho have a last name?

Who can forget these two cavalier Mexican heroes, The Cisco Kid, played by the dashingly handsome Duncan Renaldo and Pancho, his loyal sidekick, played wonderfully by Leo Carillo. When I was a boy, the "Cisco Kid" was a weekly series and I never missed it. Both of these actors are long buried and mostly forgotten. The message they delivered to their young audiences each week was the same message delivered by so many other oater serials of the day; always stand up for the rights of the underdog. If your friends and neighbors need help, it's up to you and other good people to come to their assistance. After all, it's the honorable thing to do. Although Renaldo and Carillo faded into relative obscurity in the years following their T.V. series, I'm sure they went to their final rewards feeling a large measure of satisfaction for the positive affect that their little t.v. program had on the lives of so many youngsters during their formative years.

I enjoyed the Cisco Kid TV series very much when I was a kid.I frankly don't see why anyone could take offense at either of the leads. Unlike most comic reliefs,Pancho was very formidable when the chips were down. As far as O'Henry's original story,it is easily found.There was a set of books published between l900 and l9l0 with his collected stories which was printed in vast numbers which has everything he ever wrote;any large library should have it.However,the character in the story has absolutely nothing to do with the movie and TV character.He was an Anglo,not a Latino. Far more important, the character of the story was a depraved homicidal maniac,as well as an outlaw."It was the Kid's pastime to shoot Mexicans for the pleasure of watching them kick".That is as near as I can get from memory.I was pretty surprised when I first read this. As Kenneth MacGowan said in "Behind the Screen" about the movie character vs O'Henry's original creation "how this degenerate sadist" was turned into the familiar hero is anybody's guess.Some unknown scriptwriter apparently. The movie and TV figure is certainly a "Robin Hood of the Old West",but not O'Henry's. I believe that the story is to be found in the volume "The Heart of the West", but it might be in one of the others.