Cheyenne (1955 TV Series) - Series History

Series History

The series began as a part of Warner Brothers Presents, a program that alternated three different series in rotation. In its first year, Cheyenne traded broadcast weeks with Casablanca and King's Row. Thereafter, Cheyenne was overhauled by new producer Roy Huggins and left the umbrella of WBP. The show starred Clint Walker, a native of Illinois, as Cheyenne Bodie, a physically large cowboy wandering the American West. The first episode, about robbers pretending to be Good Samaritans, is entitled "Mountain Fortress" and features James Garner as a guest star. The episode reveals that Bodie's parents were massacred by Cheyenne Indians, who then reared him. Bodie maintained a positive and understanding attitude toward the Native Americans.

Cheyenne ran from 1955 to 1963, except for a hiatus when Walker went on strike for better terms (1958–1959); among other demands, the actor wanted increased residuals, a reduction of the 50-percent cut of personal appearance payments that had to be turned over to Warner, and a release from the restriction of recording music only for the company's own label. The interim saw the introduction of a virtual Bodie-clone called Bronco Layne, played by Ty Hardin, a native of Texas. Hardin was featured as the quasi main character during Bodie's absence. When Warners renegotiated Walker's contract and the actor returned to the show in 1959, Bronco was spun off as a show in its own right and became independently successful.

The two series alternated in the same time slot from 1958 to 1962, with Bronco as the junior partner (only a snippet of his theme song was heard in the opening credits, as a kind of aural footnote to Cheyenne's). Occasionally both Cheyenne and Bronco appeared together in the same episode, both deadly serious as they worked together. Even after returning to the program — having been prohibited from seeking other work during the long contract negotiation — Walker was unhappy continuing to play a role he felt he had exhausted, complaining to reporters that he felt like "a caged animal."

Though Cheyenne aired for seven years, the series had only 108 episodes because it was in repeated alternation with other programs and was out of production during Clint Walker's contract dispute with Warner Brothers.

At the conclusion of the sixth season, a special episode was aired. Called "A Man Named Ragan", it was a pilot for a program called The Dakotas, starring Chad Everett, Jack Elam, and Larry Ward, that would replace Cheyenne in the middle of the next season. However, because Cheyenne Bodie never appeared in "Ragan", the two programs are only tenuously linked.

Walker reprised the Cheyenne Bodie character in 1991 for the TV-movie The Gambler Returns: The Luck of the Draw and also played Cheyenne in an episode of Kung Fu: The Legend Continues in 1995.