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:
“A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of “spirit” over matter.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“The nation looked upon him as a deserter, and he shrunk into insignificancy and an earldom.... He was fixed in the house of lords, that hospital of incurables, and his retreat to popularity was cut off; for the confidence of the public, when once great and once lost, is never to be regained.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“The popularity of disaster movies ... expresses a collective perception of a world threatened by irresistible and unforeseen forces which nevertheless are thwarted at the last moment. Their thinly veiled symbolic meaning might be translated thus: We are innocent of wrongdoing. We are attacked by unforeseeable forces come to harm us. We are, thus, innocent even of negligence. Though those forces are insuperable, chance will come to our aid and we shall emerge victorious.”
—David Mamet (b. 1947)