George "Gabby" Hayes - Popular Culture

Popular Culture

Homage was paid to Hayes in a different way in the 1974 satirical western Blazing Saddles. A look-a-like actor named Claude Ennis Starrett, Jr. played a Gabby Hayes-like character. In keeping with one running joke in the movie, the character was called Gabby Johnson. After he delivered a rousing, though largely unintelligible speech to the townspeople, David Huddleston's character proclaimed, "Now, who can argue with that?!" and described it as "authentic frontier gibberish."

Hayes has also been portrayed in impressions by Fred LaBour (Too Slim), during Riders in the Sky performances.

Gabby was mentioned in the Simpsons episode Radioactive Man, where Milhouse becomes Radioactive Man's sidekick, "Fallout Boy", the producer of the film comments that Milhouse is "going to be big, Gabby Hayes big!"

Every year in April at the beginning of trout season in Pennsylvania, the Gabby Hayes Memorial Fishing Expedition is held by a group of long-time friends and is so named in whimsical homage to the man whose early career began in the environs of his boyhood New York home near the northern Pennsylvania border. The first "expedition" was held in 1969, coincidentally the year of Hayes' death."

Every year in early July, from 1983 through 1989, "Gabby Hayes Days" were celebrated in Wellsville, New York. The event featured a street sale, square dancing, and Gabby Hayes look-alike contests for adults and children. But this celebration was eventually merged into the mid-July Wellsville Balloon Rally and gradually disappeared. A street is also named after him in Wellsville, Gabby Hayes Lane.

The famous Manhattan restaurant Danny's Hideaway at 151 East 45th Street called one of its main dining areas The Gabby Hayes Room, in honor of the friendship between owner Dante "Danny" Stradella and Hayes.