The videotape of 'The Odyssey of Flint McCullough' showed how Robert Horton could be as relaxed and throwaway as any of the Method boys. This episode of Wagon Train is a kind of novelty offering. Flint lumbers himself with the job of bringing an old timer (Henry Hull, that much-loved newspaper man, retired colonel and all-round superannuated crank in many a Randolph Scott or Joel McCrea picture) and a handful of kids out of the ambit of a band of Mescaleros. (These are never seen except for one sorry-looking redskin who implausibly breaks into the deserted fort where they are holed up for the night.)
The episode is around forty years old and stands up very well alongside any big-screen production of the same era. It makes a person want to possess the whole bundle of 200-plus stories.
It doesn't stop with Wagon Train either--I've already got a seven-pack of the old Richard Greene series The Adventures of Robin Hood with 3 episodes on each tape. These come over as almost a Biblical evocation of a time that perhaps never was but certainly always will be. These black and white chunks of history, filmed some of them in the real Sherwood Forest, deserve their immortality and have not been bettered except perhaps by the equally English and far more quirky Robin of Sherwood of the 1980s.
Then we get onto Laramie, the first story of which, 'Stage Stop', I have also acquired on video. A terrific episode, it makes you see why Jess Harper was adored by the Japanese public. He moves quick, forceful, without doubt, samurai-like. The tale seems on first viewing to have this peculiarity--that the only females included in the show are the mares. Robert Fuller is still working today and seen on TV recently in a re-run of 1988's Bonanza-the Next Generation. He plays Charlie Poke, who was supposedly, in the legend of it all, cut down and saved by Ben Cartwright of pious memory after being hoisted by a necktie party. The voicing of a gruff sense of outraged decency is one of Fuller's pieces of stock in trade as an actor. It's well known to the fans of his Jess Harper incarnation in Laramie, and never fails to convince. He's not a big guy but he has a deep and rugged voice, suited to the superb horseman and master all-round aficionado of the great outdoors that this handsome specimen is. Never mind the fact that he was born, not under the name of Fuller, to a pair of show business people, namely dancers or hoofers, in Troy, New York. It might as well have been the other Troy--it wouldn't have added much more lustre to his name.
To return from the critical heights, to our own stock in trade and in hand. We've had some interest in the Derz CD which is currently in production. As we have no permission to use any copyright works and standards, the Derz has had to write his own material. It seems that a song doesn't come along just like that. After recording twenty-five minutes of music the flow has come to a stop. You can't rush these babies, but the full McGinty should be ready, 50 minutes at least (we'll do no short-changing), certainly by the end of 2001 and available we hope, like Sketches by Derz and Fugitive Days, from Amazon.co.uk. There are no live dates lined up as yet.
The Derz refused to attend the Shadborough Festival because they had a problem with the readies (see the update called 'A Severe Lack of £150').
Two more songs have recently got under way and are ready to take into the studio. These will join such numbers already in the can such as the bluesy 'Two Doors from My Home', the rocking 'Hot Diggit' as well as the folksier 'Anastasia' and 'Prince of Toads'. We will post some music by the Derz as MP3s here on the Ragged Edge eventually and possibly raffle off a few first pressings.