News

Jimmy Weldon, the cheery ventriloquist, kids TV host and actor who provided the voice for the endangered duck Yakky Doodle on Hanna-Barbera cartoons starting in the early 1960s, has died. He was 99.

Weldon’s death on Thursday in Paso Robles, California, was reported by American Legion Post 43 in Hollywood, where he was chaplain emeritus.

With the puppet Webster Webfoot, a duck he created in the 1940s, Weldon hosted TV shows for youngsters in New York, Los Angeles and cities in the San Joaquin Valley. The Texan also appeared on episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Dragnet, The Waltons, S.W.A.T., B.J. and the Bear, Dallas, The Rockford Files, Diff’rent Strokes and It’s a Living.

Weldon voiced Yakky Doodle, a yellow duckling with green wings who is constantly being bailed out of trouble by his best friend, a protective bulldog named Chopper, on recurring segments of The Yogi Bear Show in 1961-62.

From left: Yogi Bear,...

John Wayne was a towering figure of Hollywood's Golden Age in the '40s and '50s, so it's hard to imagine The Duke being embarrassed by making these three Western movies. In the '20s, Wayne started out making pre-Code movies that capitalized on his college football days such as The Brown of Harvard but wanted to act in Westerns, and in the '30s, he made the sort that only took a couple of days to shoot. Wayne made dozens and dozens of low-budget Westerns prior to getting his big break in John Ford's Stagecoach, where he played an outlaw traveling through Comanche territory along with a coach full of colorful strangers.

The Duke had to find his footing in those early days, and before John Wayne's best movies established the image of him most fans have today, he played a lot of different types of characters.

Cinelinx puts on its sequin shirt and ten gallon hat to take in Warner Archive's new Monogram Cowboy Collection Volume 6, featuring the films of Jimmy Wakely!

This Warner Archive release is a Manufacture-On-Demand (Mod) DVD. It is made to be played in "play only" DVD devices, and may not play in some DVD recorders or PC drives. These discs, however, played fine in the Panasonic DVD recorder used for this review. This title is available directly from WBShop.com.

The Set-up

A collection of six films featuring cowboy crooner Jimmy Wakely. Includes Riding the Dusty Trail, Lonesome Trail, The Rangers Ride, Range Renegades, Silver Trails, and Brand of Fear.

The Delivery

Jimmy Wakely was one of the last of Hollywood's singing cowboys, and starred in dozens of films for Monogram Pictures in the 1940s and 1950s. Six of them are featured in this Warner Archive 2-disc set.

Wakely never quite...