Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Shooting / Firearms on TV shows - the olden days!

I had wandering thoughts about firearms and how they are used on TV...mostly seems to be bad guys in drug shoot-outs or detectives making a bust. Getting boring.

Saw a couple of RIFLEMAN shows from the 60's this morning with Chuck Connors and thought the opening scene was great!...walking down main street rapid firing his Winchester then calmly starting to reload.

Throughout the show, pistols and rifles were used in what appeared sensible situations.

Other scenes had real chickens on set and his son using his boot to move 'em back to the coup...if animal rights groups were around then, they would have been hammerered him for some sort of abuse.

Seemed refreshing to watch...how things have changed!

That series of clips is funny!

As for the westerns blowing away all the bad guys with impunity, that all changed in the early 1970s. The do-right-daddy liberals were appalled at the "violence" on teeeveee and demanded the networks clamp down on the various shows that had episodes where people were "killed." So, the networks caved and things became a lot tamer on teeeveee.

At that time there were only three networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC., so it was easy to control the three. And so it goes...

L.W.

I wasn't allowed to watch Magnum Force or the Enforcer when I was a kid. I did anyway.

Speed racer was deemed too violent.
Sure liked that cartoon when I was a kid.

Remember "The A Team"? I think those guys must have fired at least 30,000 rounds during their run nobody got killed. How pathetic.

I remember seeing a "tribute" to Gunsmoke where they talked about the affect that pressure had on their show. They caved in and it became a lot less violent. I can still remember ole Chester carrying a shotgun and using it. Great stuff.
I loved the Rifleman. Just knew that anyone who called Chuck Connors a sodbuster was gonna git it. A quick aside-Johnny Crawford who played Mark became an accomplished Musician in real life.

Gunsmoke itself didn't really cave in, the top people at CBS (and ABC and NBC) did.

I wrote several scripts for Gunsmoke. I believe it was my third script, late 1973, perhaps early 1974, when I was called into the Gunsmoke office at CBS-Radford in Studio City where the show was filmed. The meeting was to talk out a few notes for me to continue from my first draft teleplay to the final draft.

Those present were John Mantley, Exec. Producer, Lenny Katzman, Producer, and Jack Miller, Exec. Story Consultant. After talking about a couple of minor changes, John said, "Oh, by the way Leanwolf, we've got a small problem with the action here."

I said, "Oh, what's the problem?"

He said, "We've just got a directive down from CBS Standards and Practices and they say we've got to cut down on the killings and violence."

Lenny Katzman chimed in, "You've killed eight people in your script. Standards and Practices says that's too many."

I asked, "Well how many can I kill?"

John said, "Three's the limit."

I said, "Okay, I'll resurrect five and wound them."

John said, "That'll do."

And that's what I did.

Thereafter, neither I nor the other Gunsmoke writers killed more than three on an episode. Matt Dillion became famous for saying to the bad guy, "Hold it!"

That's the way it goes in Tinsel Town.

L.W.