The Oregon Trail (TV series)

The Oregon Trail is a 14-episode NBC western television series starring Rod Taylor as the widower Evan Thorpe, who leaves his Illinois farm in 1842 to take the Oregon Trail to the Pacific Northwest. The show also starred Andrew Stevens, Tony Becker, and Gina Marie Smika as Thorpe's children. Darleen Carr starred as Margaret Devlin, one of the passengers on the wagon train, and Charles Napier portrayed Luther Sprague, a frontier scout recruited by Thorpe. The series was filmed in the Flagstaff, Arizona area.^[1]

Of the fourteen episodes produced, only six were aired in the US:

• "Hard Ride Home and the Last Game", September 21 (Wilford Brimley)

• "The Waterhole", September 28 (Lonny Chapman and Kim Hunter)

• "Trapper's Rendezvous", October 12 (Claude Akins)

• "The Army Deserter", October 19 (Clu Gulager and Kevin McCarthy)

• "Hannah's Girl", October 26 (Stella Stevens, mother of Andrew Stevens, as Hannah Morgan)

• "The Scarlet Ribbon", November 30 (Richard Jaeckel, Donna Mills, Bill Bixby, and William Shatner).

The following are seven unaired episodes:

• "The Race" (Mariette Hartley and Robert Pine)

• "The Gold Dust Queen" (Susan Howard, later on the CBS drama Dallas)

• "The Man Who Wouldn't Die"

• "Return of the Baby" (again Mills, Shatner, and Bixby)

• "Evan's Vendetta" (William Smith, previously of the NBC western series Laredo)

• "Suffer the Children" (Robert Fuller, previously of Laramie, Wagon Train, and Emergency!)

• "Wagon Race".

The entire series was shown in the UK on BBC1 from November 1977 to January 1978.

The series followed another western-themed program, The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams on the NBC Wednesday schedule. It aired at 9 p.m. Eastern opposite the CBS Wednesday Night Movie and ABC's detective series, Charlie's Angels. Michael Gleason was the executive producer; Richard Collins, the supervising producer; Carl Vitale, the producer for NBC Universal Television. Bill Bixby also directed two episodes. The series pilot aired on January 10, 1976.^[1]

The budget for the series was a reported $380,000 an episode.^[2] Terry Wilson (Bill Hawks in Wagon Train) served as production supervisor on the series. Series stars Rod Taylor and Charles Napier also co-wrote the theme song, "Oregon Bound," with singer Danny Darst.

DVD release

On April 13, 2010, Timeless Media Group (TMG) released the show on 6 DVDs, running 750 minutes. The set includes 14 original episodes, including the feature-length pilot and 6 unaired episodes.^[3]

References

External links

• The Oregon Trail at the Internet Movie Database