Radio Sidekicks 2

 Hopalong Cassidy and the Cisco Kid both began life as rough characters in turn-of-the twentieth century short stories. Cassidy was a tough, but law abiding cowboy who got his name through an injury in his first story. The Cisco Kid was actually a villain in an O. Henry story. In the 1930's actor William Boyd began to star in a series of 66 B-westerns loosely based on the Cassidy character. "Loosely based" means the original author of the stories fainted at a showing of the first film! The hero Cassidy had two sidekicks in the films: a young headstrong and romantic cowboy and a bumbling older cowboy who provided comic relief. The job of the young sidekick was to initiate the plot by getting involved with a girl or some problem which the wiser, older (so old he had white hair!) Hopalong would solve. The older sidekick was a not-to-bright bumbler who sometimes got into trouble and had to be rescued or made some funny mistake that got Hoppy into trouble. For most of the films Andy Clyde, a Scottish character actor who specialized in rural American accents, played California Carlson,  the older sidekick.

When the market for B-movies faded, Boyd got the brilliant idea of buying up the rights to the films and cutting them down for use in the new medium of TV. Appearing in 1949 Hopalong Cassidy became the first TV western and a megahit. Interestingly, unlike the Lone Ranger which aired on radio for years before making the jump to TV, the Hopalong Cassidy radio show was a spin off of the TV series. Wonder if anyone saw the handwriting on the wall with that although radio westerns lasted another decade after the 1950 debut of Hopalong.

Going from a B-movie to an hour TV show to a half hour radio show meant something had to give and what gave was the young sidekick. California Carlson became the only sidekick. That left room for some character development for Clyde's character. We learn that the nickname came when he bought a gold mine in California that turned out to be in the middle of San Francisco Bay. We learn that a series of spinsters have tried to land the commitment phobic Carlson and that occasionally these become the basis for an episode. We also discover that Carlson is a bottomless pit that needs to be filled with steak, bacon, beans, and flapjacks. As the not-to-bright sidekick Carlson gets to hear Cassidy advance the plot with explanations, an ancient radio story device. Like Tonto Carlson is occasionally sent off with messages to deliver, but unlike the noble Indian Carlson is often made to look foolish or backwoodsy. Despite his bumbling, he always has Hoppy's back in a gunfight.

If you're looking for a storyline for a new TV show, you could do worse than a variation on Hoppy and California. Imagine two retired grandfathers roaming the country in an RV. One a retired middle management type with a famous reputation and the other his company's former janitor or better yet former company trucker with a girlfriend in every truck stop. Each week they roll into another crime scene or swindle or broken family relationship that they fix in the 46 minutes of a typical network show.

As the last of the radio westerns rolled out, they became grittier and more realistic just like the great hour long westerns that ended the era on TV. Gunsmoke is probably the best example. The radio show usually began with the Marshall Dillon character telling us about the lonely life of the frontier marshall, but, while Dillon often acted alone, he had Doc, Miss Kitty, and Chester as continuing characters. Chester, of course, was the bumbling California Carlson type, but in Gunsmoke his miscues had real consequences and were seldom used for comic relief in this grim series. In one instance, a mistake by Chester lets two killers escape, permanantly, with Marshall Dillon left totally exasperated.

 Sidekicks who never made it out of the third grade don't offend if they are All-American dimwits, but when they are ethnic characters things change at least for us today. The radio versions of the Cisco Kid and his sidekick Pancho were played by American not Latino actors. While Cisco is presented as very bright, charismatic, and capable, his sidekick is the dumbest on radio. Pancho is so dumb that he nearly gets Cisco killed on many occasions. One comes to mind where Pancho and Cisco were in disguise but Pancho can't learn to call Cisco anything but Cisco. The banditos, slightly less dumb than Pancho pick up, on this and capture the pair. Add in Pancho's stories about his fat and lazy Mexican relatives, and you have a very offensive mix. Interestingly, the radio show is still widely available while television versions of the equally offensive (this time to African Americans) Amos and Andy are hard to come by. The Amos and Andy radio show was not recorded so all but one or two episodes are thankfully lost to history. Even one of the last radio westerns recorded at the height of the early Civil Rights Movement, Have Gun, Will Travel, has stereotypical Asian sidekicks in Hey Boy and Miss Wong, two employees of the hotel where the mysterious hero Paladin makes his home.

For better and worse, radio westerns with their heroes and sidekicks reflect the time they were made. Despite their flaws, the best of them-the Lone Ranger, Hopalong Cassidy, and Gunsmoke among the ones we've discussed and Fort Laramie among the many we haven't still provide better entertainment than the repetitious  bickering of sports radio or the drug addled babbling of Feel the Rush Limbaugh.
Podcasts of many genres of old time radio are readily available at ITunes.