Born on a mountain top in Tennessee !

The film was effectively  three television episodes stitched together.   It remains to this day Walt Disney’s most successful television film project.  The Davy Crockett phenonemon sparked a national (and later transatlantic) craze for all things related to the character.

The success of the film prompted Walt Disney to create a prequel entitled Davy Crockett and the River Pirates

Actor Fess Parker  became so identified with the role that in 1964 he starred in a successful television series Danel Boone about another American frontiersman.

Davy Crockett took the world by storm in 1956. All the young lads in England at least ran around in Davy Crockett hats and the song from the film was on the radio all the time.

Above – Picture of the Fess Parker Hotel, Santa Barbara.

Fess Parker was never that comfortable with the role. He didn’t care for horse riding and wearing buckskin made him uncomfortable. He was himself more at home in a lounge suit in the modern day world and was quite sophisticated. However fate sometimes casts you into a different mould and that certainly happened here.  He invested his earnings very shrewdly and purchased a lot of property and land in and around Santa Barbara which was a bit out of the way in those days.  Another actor who had discovered the area had been the wonderful English film actor Ronald Colman who had purchased the San Ysidro Hotel near there and in fact retired and died there in 1958.Fess Parker’s investments really paid off – he did still own the Fess Parker Hotel right down close to the beach there – which is now run by a hotel chain. He bought a farm close by and created a vineyard and became an international supplier and expert on wine.

Fess Parker died of natural causes on March 18, 2010, at his home in Santa Ynez, California, near the Fess Parker Winery.

He was buried with his parents in Santa Barbara Cemetery, in Santa Barbara, California.

Buddy Ebsen

Played Davy Crockett’s sidekick in the series but had originally been a song and dance man – and actually had been cast as the scarecrow and then switched to play the Tin Man by MGM in The Wizard of Oz  but he suffered a paint allergy and had to withdraw from the classic film.

Above – Buddy Ebsen in an earlier western with Rex Allen. 

He later became well known for his role as Jed Clampett in The Beverley Hillbillies and after this he played the title role in the 1970s TV detective series Barnaby Jones. He died in 2003.

Walt Disney

This is someone who  we will be coming back to again and again on this Blog because he in many ways he defined the film industry with his ability to pull out the unexpected and the successful and who could combine so many talents in  order to reach the final product which he instinctively knew that his audience would want.

My own view is that it was his visit to England in 1950 for Treasure Island and then The Story of Robin Hood  that coincided with the company moving forward into very profitable times.  I think the films he made here – particularly those two – proved a very lucky break for him and it then catapulted him into Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea  and Davy Crockett among others.

But it was the two films at Denham Film Studios here in England with its huge area sloping down to the River Colne,  that I am going so far as to say, were THE most important ones he ever made.

Below – Another view of the Fess Parker Hotel, Santa Barbara.