Customer Reviews for
The Lone Ranger
The Lone Ranger Rides Again!!!
This collection contains the color episodes of the Lone Ranger. The qualty and sound is very good, and the episodes are great! It is a wonderful travel back in time to when I was a kid watching these shows re-run on Saturday morning and afternoon in the late 70's and early 80's. I am a big Lone Ranger fan and it is great to see him in color again. If you are a Lone Ranger fan, this is definitely a set to add to your collection.The Lone Ranger
Will they ever just release the whole series?
This is an excellent set, but I want to know if instead of rereleasing the same episodes in different boxes they'll ever actually release the entire Lone Ranger series. Are they waiting for their main customers (those who were kids when the show originally aired) to die before releasing it? I know that my dad, along with thousands of other fathers and grandfathers, would jump at the chance to own the whole series. I can't imagine how much money the studio is loosing by not making it available.The Lone Ranger
Terrific In Color
Got out this set from its honored place in my DVD collection and re-viewed it yesterday while at home nursing a sprained ankle. What a great way to give yourself some "R & R" !!!!
The Lone Ranger was always a superb television series, but the addition of color near the end of the series' run was a great idea on the part of producer Jack Wrather...and a shrewd
set-up for the upcoming feature film productions. And when Wrather went to color, he did it right. Some of the color work on the last seasons of "The Adventures of Superman" was uneven, but Wrather's "Lone Ranger" and "Sergeant Preston of the Yukon"
shows were photographed gorgeously. The colors in this Ranger collection are vivid and eye-catching.
The stories and acting hold up well, too. When LR creator Geo. Trendle first began shooting this series (as "Apex Film Corp.")in 1949, he had Clayton Moore act somewhat wooden and stiff (Trendle's idea of "stoic & heroic") and directed him to use
perfect diction in the delivering of his lines. After Wrather took over in 1954 this loosened up a bit and allowed Moore a
bit more leeway in his interpretation of the masked Mr. John Reid. Moore took the opportunity to infuse more and more of himself into the Ranger (while still using good grammar) and the meld became so perfect that the two---the actor and the character---virtually became one (as was also the case with William Boyd as Hopalong Cassidy and Duncan Renaldo as the Cisco Kid).
Jay Silverheels likewise had become the quintessential Tonto.
The three-episodes-a-week shooting schedules used in those days (for a half-hour show it could be done, but the pace was exhausting)
result in something one notices immediately in this collection---wherein episodes can be watched back to back; that being that the same actors can often be seen(sometimes in the same costumes) over and over again. In one show a young would-be
Sheriff is helped by the Ranger and Tonto to rid a mining town of bullying outlaws, and, the next thing you know, this same young fellow (now wearing a stick-on mustache) is a deputy town marshal , helping the Ranger help the blinded chief marshal get back his hope for living. And one of the baddies from the previous episode is in this one as well, wearing the same clothes. When you watched these on t.v. years ago...shown a week apart...and often out of shooting sequence...you didn't catch this sort of thing. Only now can you see how they worked this and it gives you a greater appreciation of how much inventiveness and ingenuity went into these rush-job productions.
Clayton Moore's principle stuntman, Bill Ward, shows his stuff to good effect in these episodes. Ward was great at "ape-ing"
Clayton Moore's carraige and body language and this makes the
doubling much more effective and exciting. Ward...not that well known compared to other Hollywood stunt stars like Yakima Canutt,Dave Sharpe,Tom Steele, or Dale Van Sickle...was, nevertheless, wonderful at his trade. In his athleticism, agility, and coordination, Ward was strikingly similar to Dave Sharpe in his stuntwork. In fact, for a long time this reviewer believed that the fabulous "bulldogging" stunt at the end of the 1956 Warner Brothers theatrical movie "The Lone Ranger" was DONE by David Sharpe (an awesome leap from Silver, coming up from behind stuntman Bob Morgan...doubling "baddie' Robert Wilke...followed by a tremendous rolling fistfight down a steep hillside). This "gag" had all the athletic earmarks of Sharpe, but in his book "I Was That Masked Man", Clayton Moore reveals that it was, in fact, Bill Ward wearing the mask in that amazing sequence. All Ranger fans owe it to themselves to see this great western and to marvel at the climactic fight, but Ward is on his game in this television collection as well, and does a bang-up job of providing exciting physical action on the Ranger's part.
One of the hallmarks of the entire Lone Ranger saga, on radio, in the movies, and on television, was its respect for the American Indians and their cultures. This respect is there in all the Clayton Moore productions, to be sure. This is quite true in an episode called "Ghost Canyon", where cowboy baddies try to crook a local tribe out of their heard of horses. They do this with assistance of the chief's "nephew", the only "bad" Indian around. Turns out, though, that the "nephew" is a fake,
a half-breed ex-con who doesn't really have an Indian heart or soul after all. He has killed the real nephew and taken his place.
This set is enclosed in a "saddlebag" package by Rhino Video that is pretty nifty and attractive. It is a good buy for the money, great nostalgia, and just good old fashioned storytelling
about the kind of hero/role-model for young people that we see
FAR too little of today.
The Lone Ranger
Waiting with my brother to hear the Lone Ranger at 7:30
While it was a pleasure to watch the 'Lone Ranger' and his faithful Indian companion Tonto on television, the really great pleasure and time came from listening to them on Radio. My brother and I used to wait eagerly to hear those famous words,
"A fiery horse with the speed of light, a cloud of dust and a hearty Hi-Yo Silver! The Lone Ranger"
In hushed expectation we would wait to hear how the Lone Ranger and Faithful Indian Companion Tonto rode in to the town in trouble,somehow mysteriously solved the problem, got the bad guy, and then rode away.
I sit and remember now so many years later, remember and cannot remember.
The past is gone even if we see some aspect of it again in video or film.
The Lone Ranger
THIS IS NOT AS GOOD AS THE U.K. VERSION
After buying a multi-region DVD player so I can watch foreign DVD's I purchased THE LONE RANGER:THE COLOUR EPISODES via Amazon UK.This edition has all 39 of the 5th season color episodes, so if you have or are willing to buy a multi-region DVD player the U.K. Lone Ranger boxed set is a much better buy.And don't be fooled by any misguided reviews criticizing these episodes for being "colorized".All the 5th season episodes were originally broadcast in color.The Lone Ranger
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