Popularity
The Walt Disney Company acknowledged that the broad public popularity of the first three segments came as a surprise, but Disney capitalized on its success by licensing the sale of various types of Crockett paraphernalia, including coonskin caps and bubble gum cards. In his Archive of American Television interview, Fess Parker noted that his contract called for a percentage of the merchandising sales from Disney's company but that this was voided by the fact that his contract was with Walt Disney personally rather than the company itself, costing him millions of dollars from the runaway bonanza of Crockett merchandising.
After the Crockett miniseries, Disney attempted to create other heroic characters, such as six episodes of "The Saga of Andy Burnett" (1957), starring Jerome Courtland as a pioneer who traveled from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to the Rocky Mountains. "The Nine Lives of Elfego Baca" followed in 1958, with Robert Loggia as New Mexico lawman Elfego Baca. Some thirteen segments of Texas John Slaughter aired in 1958-1959, based on a real law-enforcement officer John Horton Slaughter of Texas and starring Tom Tryon. Another Disney miniseries, The Swamp Fox, starring Leslie Nielsen as the American Revolutionary War fighter Francis Marion, aired between 1959 and 1961. Marion wore a foxtail on his three-cornered hat, but the headpiece failed to attract the attention of the Crockett coonskin caps.
Read more about this topic: Davy Crockett (TV Miniseries)
Famous quotes containing the word popularity:
“There are few cases in which mere popularity should be considered a proper test of merit; but the case of song-writing is, I think, one of the few.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1845)
“A more problematic example is the parallel between the increasingly abstract and insubstantial picture of the physical universe which modern physics has given us and the popularity of abstract and non-representational forms of art and poetry. In each case the representation of reality is increasingly removed from the picture which is immediately presented to us by our senses.”
—Harvey Brooks (b. 1915)
“Here also was made the novelty ‘Chestnut Bell’ which enjoyed unusual popularity during the gay nineties when every dandy jauntily wore one of the tiny bells on the lapel of his coat, and rang it whenever a story-teller offered a ‘chestnut.’”
—Administration for the State of Con, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)