Tags
Bonanza, Dan Blocker, David Canaday, Lorne Greene, Michael Landon, Pernell Roberts, premiere, television, The Lone Ranger, Westerns
Today, you’re not likely to see many Westerns on television. But from the 1940s through the early ’70s, the Stetson-sportin’, gun-slingin’, drawl-talkin’ gentlemen of old is exactly what audiences wanted to see.
When “The Lone Ranger” premiered in 1949, starring Clayton Moore (Lone Ranger) and Jay Silverheels (Tonto), it helped to kick off a small-screen wild west revolution. It paved the way for many long-running western series like “Gunsmoke” (1955-1975), “Wagon Train” (1957-1965), “The Rifleman” (1958-1963), “Rawhide” (1959-1966) and “The Virginian” (1962-1971). But for me, the best thing to come out of this western revolution was a little classic called “Bonanza”.
