King of the Wild Suburbs

Yes.  I had a coonskin cap.

I also had a Davy Crockett toy flintlock pistol, and bubblegum cards with Fess Parker’s and Buddy Ebsen’s images on them, and an imitation leather jacket with fringes.  I scouted the wild vacant lots of Seattle’s Lake City neighborhood seeking a bear to shoot, and I watched all five episodes of the series, possibly the first made-for-TV mini-series, as well as the 1955 movie version compiled from it.

I was, in short, the target demographic for one of the earliest, and most successful, marketing campaigns of the television era.

Davy Crockett was the 1950s equivalent of Star Wars.  It hadn’t been heavily promoted; the first three episodes were intended for Disneyland’s “Frontierland” segment, which alternated with other themes from sections of the park.  The stars, Fess Parker as Davy and Buddy Ebsen as George, weren’t well-known (this was well before Ebsen’s Beverly Hillbillies days.)  Although technically a Western, which was still a popular genre, the period (the early 19^th Century) and the locales (Tennessee, Washington D.C. and Texas) weren’t exactly Utah’s Monument Valley. 

But something in it appealed to the zeitgeist, and the new medium of television spread it like a virus.  Across the country, boys like me started showing up in elementary school wearing dyed rabbit-fur “coonskin” caps (over 100 million dollars’ worth were reportedly sold) and playing Frontiersman and Indian.  Over sixty years later, the theme song (“Born on a mountaintop in Tennessee/Greenest land in the land of the free …”) can still be a powerful earworm (in fact, I just did it to myself).  The only other theme with that effect is “Gilligan’s Island” (Oh, shit.)

The real Davy Crockett was a soldier, land speculator, politician, and adventurer.  Today, his politics would place him in the Tea Party:  he served in Congress as an advocate for tax relief for low-income farmers in his state and died fighting for Texas’ secession (although in that case from Mexico.)  He was a shameless self-promoter who wrote his own mythic autobiography. And his death at The Alamo was the stuff of legend. To his credit, he DID lose his seat in Congress for his lonely opposition to the Indian Removal Act that initiated the Trail of Tears. The TV show missed no opportunity to voice his famous maxim:  “Be sure you’re right, then go ahead.”  In short, he was the epitome of American exceptionalism.  For a generation, the first TV generation, Fess Parker’s version of him—witty, resourceful, personally courageous and independent—provided a powerful role model.  Recently, I was considering a visit to Santa Barbara and scouting hotels, and such was the lingering influence that I was immediately drawn to the Fess Parker Hotel.

Yesterday was Davy Crockett’s 228^th birthday, and we’re approaching the 60^th anniversary of the broadcast of the first episode.  Today, we’re awash in HBO and Showtime series, Marvel Comics movies, and product tie-in merchandise.  But this, I’d argue, is where all that started. 

I wonder if Amazon.com sells coonskin caps?