I recently alluded to the fact that Hopalong Cassidy played a larger role in shaping my psyche than Han Solo. Well, that’s chronology, not coolness. Hoppy had Topper, a beautiful white horse that could do everything but sing, while Han had the Millennium Falcon. I’d call that a draw. Han had a Wookie, Chewbacca, for a sidekick, while Hoppy had Gabby Hayes, who actually chewed tobacco, so I’d call that a draw too. But Hoppy dressed entirely in black! I think we have a winner!
Although Hoppy’s black on white persona was perhaps the most distinctive of all the fifties cowboys, his reign was brief. William Boyd, the actor who played Hoppy, was 54, white-haired, and balding when he became one of the first television stars in 1949, with the TV release of 66 “B westerns” that Boyd had cranked out during the thirties and forties. His half-hour television show that followed up on the original films only ran from 1950 to 1952. In that short time frame, Boyd/Cassidy had racked up over 100 product endorsements, including what Wikipedia informs me was the first celebrity lunch box in history. He was, perhaps, both too old and too rich to bother riding the plains any longer.
What’s really interesting about Boyd is his career. He was an A-list star in the 1920s, but his career took a bizarre and brutal beating in 1931 when another actor named William Boyd was arrested for drinking and gambling (both could be crimes in those days) and “Hoppy” Boyd’s picture was run by mistake. Boyd fell permanently from the top tier, and ended up cranking out 66 formulaic, hour-long B westerns, films that were often run as part of a double-feature. The series ended in 1948, but Boyd, who recognized that the new medium of television would have an insatiable demand for content, mortgaged everything he owned to pony up $350,000 to buy the rights to all the films. It was the bet of a life time, and it paid off more handsomely than Boyd could have imagined. For a few years, he was one of the most recognizable men in America.
