re: The entire series run of Gunsmoke is on Pluto TV. 20 seasons, 635 episodes

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What a great thread here

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you're welcome

I had help of course

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what a treasure trove of new (to me) information

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the producers made a condition on hiring Arness: he would have to dye his blond hair dark.



Other blonds who had to dye their hair:

Alan Ladd
Steve McQueen
Michael Caine

Nothing better than old westerns

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To be fair, Hite wrote Dennis Weaver's favorite episode, "Chesterland" (originally titled "Chesterfields", but sponsor L&M refused to plug a rival cigarette), It's a character driven romance w/no action; it does have a memorable ending

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Setup: Chester gets engaged, quits Mr Dillon and moves to a dugout on a small patch of land outside town

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But learns his fiancee took out all their money from the bank and left town

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not watching the credits

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I love the credits. The theme songs, especially the mournful one, are great. I also like to see who the guest stars were, so the next time I see them I can identify them. That’s so-n-so.
Side note, the red horse with three white stockings with a white dot over his left eye is in many, many episodes. Usually ridden by the guest star, although I believe Chester was on him a couple of times.

What was the name of that half-hour "Gunsmoke" episode (from around 1957 or so) where a band of marauders were robbing and killing homesteader families out on the isolated prairie? Matt and Chester stake-out a place, pretending to be ranchers, and lie in wait to be targeted. The marauders' gang has an innocent-looking member come scope them out before attacking, but Matt smells a rat. When the gang arrives, Matt doesn't give any attempt at calling for their arrest or having them surrender, but starts blasting away at them before they knew what was happening. No way the network would have allowed this later on.

TV-westerns started getting really cold feet on that sort of thing by the time JFK's 'Camelot' era started rolling along. The series "The Dakotas" in 1963 quickly fell victim to this, stepping on toes. Of course, older westerns never batted an eye at such themes as bending rules to vanquish the villains. They could be pretty raw. You had a similarly-titled film in "Gun Smoke" in 1931, in which the hero citizen, Richard Arlen, declares 'the only way to deal with killers is to kill 'em!' He and his men proceed to ambush and slaughter the villains from high above as the latter pass through a mountain trail. The bad-guys were certainly apt to meet grisly ends, like when villainous Noah Beery gets an arrow through his neck in one silent western, and gets (implied) skinned alive in another. Some pretty stark stuff in the old-time westerns. Yet at the same time, they also had the remnants of that soft, Victorian-era romanticism. It makes for a fascinating mixture, those two contrasting elements, merged together. Westerns are such an endlessly interesting genre.

I remember that Virginia Gregg episode quite well. Always impressed the way "Gunsmoke" gave character actors like her prominent spotlight roles where they could really strut their stuff. Where else could folks like Robert F. Simon or Anthony Caruso or Milton Selzer get such juicy roles?

But what I suppose I was trying to get at is the encroaching timidity of the later years in regards to the stricter attitude and parameters involving law and justice. For example, in one of those western silents that I cited, villain Noah Beery comes across an Indian maiden alone, washing in a creek, and he clearly has rape in mind. She fights him off, and her mother sees this and starts coming to her rescue. He shoots and kills both of them, and rides off nonchalantly. Later on, the white community, tired of this rotter's villainy, happily hands him over to the Indian tribe, to receive 'Indian justice' for his crime. Basically telling them to 'have fun!' as the terrified bounder is dragged away into a teepee full of grinning, bloodthirsty Indians brandishing knives. No hackneyed scene of white settlers trying to convince the Indians of white man's law-and-order being the proper and superior route to justice!