Cinemaventure

This is certainly a sad day for us Baby Boomers. Fess Parker who played Davy Crockett has passed away, March 18, 2010. For those of us of a certain age Fess WAS Davy Crockett. Later he played Daniel Boone but we always considered him as Davy using another name. I remember he first impressed me with a small role in my favorite Big Bug Movie, Them! (1954). He portrayed Alan Crotty, a pilot who had an encounter with the giant ants. It was a small role, but Fess Parker made the most of it. I am sure I also saw him in some of his other pre-Davy roles. I watched Dragnet and Stories of the Century (he played Grat Dalton), but it was as Davy Crockett that he became an important part of my young life. "Davy Crockett: Indian Fighter" was broadcast on my sixth birthday and I became a lifelong fanatic on David Crockett of Tennessee. By the time "Davy Crockett at the Alamo" was broadcast I was a confirmed history buff. Fess Parker played other roles at Disney. He was

Walt Disney's Davy Crockett King of the Wild Frontier was my introduction to History, a subject I still read a lot. It was on my sixth birthday that I caught the first installment, Davy Crockett, Indian Fighter . Here was a story about people from East Tennessee, barely one hundred miles from my home. Let's face it. Tennessee just was not the setting for much of anything on TV at the time. What's more some of the episode was filmed in my home state, something else that was almost unheard of. Walt Disney turned to American History for subjects to film, either for the theaters or for the Disneyland television series. Fess Parker appeared in a total of five episodes about Crockett. Fess Parker played another historical character, Union spy James Andrews in The Great Locomotive Chase . This was based on a incident from 1862 when Yankee spies stole a train and attempted to sabotage the rail line between Atlanta, Georgia and Chattanooga, Tennessee. Walt also filmed incidents fr