January 30, 1933—On the same day that a real-life contemporary villain seized power halfway around the world, a fictional hero from America’s Western past premiered on Detroit’s WXYZ radio station: The Lone Ranger.
The character—lone survivor of an ambush, saved by the Indian Tonto, and wearing a mask as he sought vengeance—was created at the behest of tight-fisted station owner George Trendle and fleshed out by writer Fran Striker (who also wrote the long-running Green Hornet series). One of the early actors to play the Lone Ranger (and the one who claimed to have come up with “Hi-yo, Silver!” because he couldn’t whistle for the horse) was George Stenius, who became better known in later years as film director George Seaton (most notably for the Christmas classic Miracle on 34th Street).
Besides some 3,000 radio episodes, the show also ran on TV for eight years, starring Clayton Moore as the Lone Ranger and Jay Silverheels as faithful sidekick Tonto.
Various elements of the show—the mask, the white stallion and silver bullets, the Lone Ranger’s “Creed” —became a part of American legend. But the character—a combination of Robin Hood and Zorro—also fed the American public’s deep and eternal fascination with outsider-vigilante figures who act outside the law in order to save it.
From a TV commercial commercial from the early ‘70s hawking a classical music set, starring that most British of character actors, John Williams (the detective in Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder), I first learned that the theme I had grown up with was actually Rossini’s “William Tell Overture.” I did not know until now, though, that the musical motif was chosen because it was in the public domain and, therefore, nobody had to be paid royalties for its use. Just another example of how cheap—I’m sorry, parsimonious—station owner Trendle could be!
good job "quemo sabe"
ReplyDeleteI also remember that the name "tanto" was a bit racist.
If I am not mistaken it translates into english as
"idiot"
B,
ReplyDeleteFirst, "Tonto" is a Spanish word, not a Native-American one.
As you'll see in the link below, several other people also heard about this translation.
The most relevant points are these:
1) One of the sources for the serial was the Western writer Zane Grey. One of his books contained the word "Tonto" in the title, referring not to a person but a place. It's doubtful that the serial writer, Fran Striker, knew much if any Spanish -- more likely, he was either unconsciously influenced by or paying homage to Grey.
2) Why would Tonto, a Native American, be referred to with a Spanish name? And if Striker really wanted to demean him, why didn't the character appear outright as an idiot rather than be given a name signifying it?
3) It also appears that, after one or two complaints early in the life of the radio serial, there was a conscious effort on the part of the show's writers to make the villains more uniformly Anglo, to avoid any possibility of giving offense to any ethnic group.
"The Lone Ranger" is hardly great literature, but there are plenty of truly egregiously condescending and insulting ethnic depictions from other shows or movies without going after this one.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/incharacter/2008/01/unmask_that_man.html