The Legend of the Lone Ranger

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Original movie poster for The Legend of the Lone Ranger (1981)

The title The Legend of the Lone Ranger has been used for at least two motion picture treatments of the story of The Lone Ranger, a Western character created by George W. Trendle and Fran Striker. This article is concerned about the 1981 version of the story.

For several years there had been stories that a major studio would be making a big-budget, full length feature film based on the story of the Lone Ranger. There was apparently an assumption that many older baby boomers would be interested in seeing a big-screen treatment of their small-screen hero of the 1950s, a trend which was really at the time just getting started. After several false starts and rumors, such a film was actually made. Word filtered out that in this "new" version, some of the stereotypical elements which had been in past versions, such as Tonto's pidgin English, would be removed and the story, always rather stilted in the past (the primary audience for earlier versions had always been children), would be updated to be more "realistic". The film got off to a bad start in the area of public relations when one of the first things that its producers became noted for doing was attempting to constrain Clayton Moore, star of the old television series, from appearing anywhere as the Ranger, or in public wearing a mask. Moore's response was to adopt the wearing of wraparound sunglasses resembling his former mask. The public reaction to this was overwhelmingly negative, as it seemed an attempt to remove a source of income from an elderly man who had played a beloved character and seemed to have little else going for him.

After this misstep, the film was released to massive publicity in 1981 and soon sank like a stone. Box office receipts were far short of the amount needed to recoup the costs of the film, and critical reviews were almost unanimous in their condemnation. In attempting to update aspects of the story yet leave it basically intact, the producers succeeding in pleasing almost no one. Despite the presence of renowned actors in cameo roles, including Christopher Lloyd and Jason Robards as villain Butch Cavendish and President Ulysses S. Grant respectively, the film vanished from theaters rapidly. The actor playing the Ranger (Klinton Spilsbury) has never appeared in another film, while the actor portraying Tonto, Michael Horse, has done somewhat better, appearing in many minor films and as a regular on the Canadian television series North of 60 as well as the American series Twin Peaks.

[edit] Trivia

The events surrounding the release of this movie would be satirized in the episode "Who Was That Mashed Man" of the TV sitcom Night Court, where a case comes through the courtroom involving: an elderly man who played the "Red Ranger", a famous cowboy of yesteryear that was popular with children; and the producers of a movie that is a modernized remake of the character...turning him into a swearing, womanizing modern action hero. Both parties are clashing over the elderly man appearing in public as his old persona.

The movie can be compared to Heaven's Gate in that its release contributed to the bankruptcy and assimilation of a once-venerable filmmaking studio. United Artists was broken by "HG" and then bought out by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (who did, however, let UA continue making pictures using their original name with an updated "UA" production logo); By the same token, when "LOTLR" flopped at the box office, Lord Lew Grade's ITC was left in such dire financial straits that Grade was forced to sell it out to the heads of what would become Tri-Star Pictures. (This is why Tri-Star's logo, and not ITC's, appears on Jim Henson's productions Labyrinth and The Muppets Take Manhattan.)

Ironically, history repeated itself when Tri-Star's goose was cooked (no pun intended) by their ambitious big-budget action-comedy Hudson Hawk...which cost and lost almost as much money as Heaven's Gate. Because of this film, Tri-Star was bought by the Sony Corporation and merged with the similarly-troubled (by the likes of Ishtar and Leonard Part 6) Columbia Pictures.

Humorist Russell Baker satirized the producers' legal action against Clayton Moore in his newspaper column. The piece (titled "Bye Bye Silver Bullets") had the Lone Ranger in a swank attorney's office being forced to hand over Silver, his mask and his silver bullets.