The Crockett Craze
Walt Disney Productions launched a massive marketing campaign in the UK in 1955 to publicize the film Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier (released in Britain in 1956) and to make the country's youth "Crockett conscious." There was already a "Crockett craze" in the U.S., where the episodes had become wildly popular. Crockett merchandise was produced en masse, the most iconic item being the imitation coonskin cap. The craze became immensely popular amongst schoolchildren, and the ballad made its way across the Atlantic Ocean. A French version by Annie Cordy was number 1 for 5 weeks in France in August 1956.
United States Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, a Democratic presidential hopeful, wore a Davy Crockett cap during the 1956 campaign, as the Democratic vice-presidential nominee. Stevenson-Kefauver lost in the general election to Eisenhower-Nixon.
The Crockett phenomenon is referenced in books of the time such as Back in the Jug Agane, one of the Molesworth series by Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle.
The craze was referenced in the film Back to the Future, which is set predominantly in 1955. In the film, the Fess Parker version of the song is heard on a jukebox and, in a later scene, one of Lorraine Baines' brothers appears wearing a coonskin cap. The song is sung by the characters Henry and Sammy in the Country Bear Jamboree. The 2009 film Fantastic Mr. Fox opens with the eponymous fox playing the song on his belt radio.
Read more about this topic: The Ballad Of Davy Crockett
Famous quotes containing the word craze:
“Before the birth of the New Woman the country was not an intellectual desert, as she is apt to suppose. There were teachers of the highest grade, and libraries, and countless circles in our towns and villages of scholarly, leisurely folk, who loved books, and music, and Nature, and lived much apart with them. The mad craze for money, which clutches at our souls to-day as la grippe does at our bodies, was hardly known then.”
—Rebecca Harding Davis (1831–1910)