u/ineedbalto

I can’t wait to hear the guys talk about the special, it’s just fantastic. When he’s talking about the 40 year old new parents, that has to be Joe List and Sarah right?

In Rio Bravo, Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson sing “My Rifle, My Pony and Me.” The melody is derived from the instrumental theme heard throughout Red River, another Howard Hawks western made a decade earlier.

In Gunfight in Dodge City, Joel McCrea plays Bat Masterson. When someone questions whether a lawman should own half a saloon, Masterson responds by citing Wyatt Earp in Wichita, saying Earp owns three saloons and still does a fine job as marshal. An amusing bit of casting overlap is that McCrea himself had played Wyatt Earp in Wichita five years earlier.

The two boys who are convicted of murder and rustling alongside Bruce Dern's character, Miller, present an interesting moral dilemma. Even though it is clear that Miller killed the two men, his accomplices, the two boys aged 18 and 16, are still convicted of murder. Marshal Jed Cooper objects to their hanging, but the judge sentences them to death nonetheless.

On my first watch, I believed the boys were innocent; however, on a second viewing, I came to understand the judge’s reasoning that such a harsh sentence was necessary to curb frontier justice. Also, rustling was a hanging offense. What do you think of Billy Joe and Ben’s predicament?

I asked for recommendations a few months ago after finishing Tombstone Territory and The Rifleman, and many of you suggested Have Gun – Will Travel. Can I just say: it is head and shoulders above any other Western television show I’ve seen (except Godless).

I’ve since read about how Richard Boone fought tirelessly to keep the scripts fresh, and it really shows. So many Westerns of that era fall into a repetitive loop. You start to feel déjà vu as the same story ideas are recycled again and again. The Rifleman is a great example: how many times does Mark get held hostage during a robbery? It feels like multiple times a season.

Paladin, on the other hand, is almost always involved in something new. The situations, moral dilemmas, and even the tone shift from episode to episode. Does it always hit the mark? No, of course not. But overall, I think Have Gun – Will Travel operates on a completely different level from any other Western TV show I’ve watched.