I had a dream the other night when every thing was still, and while I did not dream I saw Susanna a-comin’ down the hill, I did dream about auditioning for a Western swing band.
This is weird on too many levels to describe. For one, though I admit to having watched an episode of The High Chaparral recently, just to remind myself of what it was and do in fact own an unblocked bull rider’s hat, I have traveled no farther west than Davenport, Iowa. Too, though I can listen to Western swing, my minimal instrumental skills would make me an ill fit with the Texas Playboys or Asleep at the Wheel.
The crux of the dream, I determined later, was that the guys for whom I was to audition were not interested in costuming like a traditional ensemble, but in the mode of the Eagles on the cover of Desperado, which meant, in the logic of the dream, that I would have to go to Smith’s Variety to buy a new Fanner 50.
Ah, yes. The Fanner 50, the weapon of choice back when America’s children were the best-armed in the world. It’s hard to imagine that our great nation could ever have been obsessed with owning guns, but that was the situation for a significant pre-pubescent segment of the population in the late 1950s.
You could blame Ned Buntline for that. Buntline was a wildly successful author of the post-Civil War era, popular for turning out what were called “dime novels” about the Wild West. Buntline and his fellows romanticized an otherwise prosaic piece of American real estate, making heroes out of hucksters and thugs by way of selling hundreds of thousands of books and magazines to a public, many of them kids, anxious for a ripping yarn. That many of the most successful such writers, such as Karl May, never even visited the American West did not diminish the dime novels’ lasting and phony impressions of the wild frontier.
Cultural dominos started tumbling at the turn of the 20th century. Even as the Western novel fell from popular favor, the makers of new-fangled moving pictures, anxious to sell tickets, settled on the Wild West as a popular genre. Though filmed in New Jersey and but ten minutes long, 1903’s The Great Train Robbery is generally recognized as the first action film. From that point, miles of film added to the mythic notion of America’s West as a land of nefarious bad guys, virtuous (and sometimes singing) good guys and six-shooters with inexhaustible ammunition.
Television arrived to devalue movies in the middle of the century, and, unsurprisingly, the new medium would pick up where the old one left off. Indeed, some of the first TV Westerns derived from dime novels, presenting small-screen adventures of Wild Bill Hickok, Buffalo Bill and Kit Carson. Then Walt Disney hit different pay dirt in 1954 with a fictionalization of the adventures of Davy Crockett. Though set in America’s first frontier east of the Mississippi, as played by Fess Parker, Davy Crockett became not only a TV ratings juggernaut but also a marketing bonanza for Disney, as the mass purchase of Davy-related toys, including coonskin caps and toy muskets, emptied parents’ pocketbooks across the nation.
The U.S. economy was flush, and corporations began to appreciate the new youth market, the key to which was television. Commercials to catch kids’ eyes appeared seemingly nonstop in Western TV shows cobbled from movies, such as The Lone Ranger, Hopalong Cassidy and Roy Rogers. Soon enough, prime time took the hint, filling nights with shoot-‘em-ups called Gunsmoke, Lawman and Wanted: Dead or Alive.
Kids who had never seen a horse suddenly wanted to become cowboys and there was no shortage of companies to sell them accoutrements, among them a toy firm started by Matt Matson and Elliott Handler in 1945. Taking its name from its founders, Mattel became a sponsor on Disney’s The Mickey Mouse Club in 1955, advertising all year long, not just at Christmas. Behind the slogan “You can tell it’s Mattel—it’s swell!” the company was grossing over $5 million a year when it diversified into cap guns, specifically a fully-automatic weapon called Burp Gun which became the Christmas must-have of 1955.
Two years later, Mattel unholstered the Fanner 50, a replica of the 1872 Colt Single Action Army pistol. Not only was it an accurate copy of “the gun that won the West,” the evil toy geniuses had designed the gun to fire a projectile called a “Shootin’ Shell.” This was a make-believe bullet to which one would affix a Greenie Stik-M-Cap, then load into the Fanner 50’s cylinder. If the cap fired, or even if it didn’t, a plastic slug would sail perhaps six feet across the yard.
In your mind, firing the gun sounded just like Hoppy’s or Roy’s or maybe, if you stayed up late to watch, Marshal Matt Dillon’s blazing revolver. In reality, the cap barely went Pop and you always managed to lose the plastic slug in the grass. Only years later was the true uselessness of a Fanner 50 revealed: had a real Western gunfighter actually tried to spray his foes by fanning the hammer of his Colt rapidly, the recoil of the large-caliber weapon would likely have swung him around like a milkmaid at a barn dance. Not exactly the most practical method to utilize at the OK Corral.
The Fanner 50 looked good, though, and it would have made a handsome addition to my dream attire. Just like success in Western swing music, though, my chances of finding a Fanner 50 at Smith’s Variety are pretty remote. I just checked on eBay, and the 1967 Chuck Connors model, still in the box, is priced at $499.99. Who knew that the free market would provide the most effective means of gun control?