The Cisco Kid: Railroad Land Rush

After a long layoff for school and other catastrophes, I’m happy to bring my blog back to life. I sincerely hope that my audience is still out there and still interested in my give and take on television history. So, let’s pick up where we left off.

The Cisco Kid: Railroad Land Rush

Originally Broadcast: Saturday, October 28, 1950 on first-run syndication.

Plot: In typical Western tradition, a gang of confidence men seeks to defraud the town in bad real estate deals with the promise of a railroad and only Cisco and Pancho can save the day.

Analysis: Here’s the problem with early TV Westerns, especially in the days before Gunsmoke and better budgets – the plots simply are repeated with just names and settings changed. Doesn’t help when you start to wonder about how logic and physics work in this world, but on the other hand, television was meant as entertainment, not as an intellectual exercise at this point.

In any case, if you keep yourself from thinking too much about how some of the characters can possibly see each other from some of these angles, where the heroine disappears to in the middle of a fist fight and, best of all, how in the world a body can be thrown from a moving stagecoach and not only does no one notice, but we don’t even see it fall out. I was waiting for someone to notice a naked corpse in the stagecoach and start screaming. If you can turn your brain off to all of this, the episode is not too bad. Just be aware that it’s a recycled plot with all the strength of wet tissue paper.

The Bottom Line: As indicated before, the show is in color but was originally broadcast in black and white, so the color on your television will need to be turned down if you want to recreate the original appearance of the show. There’s a bit of an audio hiss in the beginning, but I stopped noticing it after the first five to eight minutes. As I said before, the quality of the opening and closing credits is really not so good, so I can only presume that, especially in the case of the opening, they were only shot once and then recycled with every airing, being the image was going to degrade with repeat viewings.

If you are interested in seeing Railroad Land Rush, it’s included with 19 other episodes of Cisco Kid in The Cisco Kid: Collection 2 produced by MPI (http://www.amazon.com/Cisco-Kid-Collection-2/dp/B0001LJCX4/ref=sr_1_3?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1286758713&sr=1-3). You may want to shop around for lower prices, especially during the holiday season.

Now that we are back, I’m going to try and update daily during the holiday season, including Christmas. I’ll keep you posted if I need to break again for classes or any other reason. As for now, I’ll see you tomorrow with another episode of The Cisco Kid.