Yancy Derringer

Back in the dawn of time -- 1958 -- there was a television series called Yancy Derringer, starring Jock Mahoney, a former stuntman turned B-movie/TV leading man. Mahoney did a series called Range Rider before Yancy Derringer, then went on to do, among other things, a couple of Tarzan movies -- he was forty-something when he played the ape-man. His last screen appearance, if I recall correctly, was in Hooper, the Burt Reynolds movie about a stuntman, loosely based on Mahoney. Reynolds was dating Sally Fields at the time, and gave Mahoney a bit part. (Jocko was Sally Fields' step-father, and as a boy, I thought he was waaaay cool.)

Yancy Derringer, about a gambler who became a kind of undercover operative in New Orleans after the War Between the States, was a black-and-white series with a lot of shooting and things burning down or blowing up. Derringer's sidekick was Pahoo, played by X Brands, a loyal Indian who had saved Derringer's life, and somehow had to be responsible for him thereafter as a result. Pahoo never spoke, and communicated in a weird sign language.

Pahoo -- aka Wolf Who Stands in Water -- wore a blanket poncho and had a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun under it that he employed frequently. Also carried a knife in a sheath behind his neck and could draw and spin that sucker like a drummer doing stick twirls before he threw it and skewered a bad guy.

This was back in the day when violence on TV was rampant -- the body count in this series was pretty high. Kill 'em all, God will know his own ...

I had fond memories of ole Yancy and Pahoo, and had heard that the prints of the episodes had all been destroyed.

However, it turns out, they had not gone away.. Tonight, my son showed up on my doorstep with the DVDs of the series. I must have mentioned it to him in a good light, because he was quite pleased at being able to present it to me.

As was I pleased that he remembered.

I've watched a couple of them, and they -- naturally -- aren't as good as I recalled. Over-acted and fairly silly, but it was almost fifty years ago, after all. The ten-year-0ld Steve was a tad less sophisticated about such story telling.

Even so, they have a certain ... je ne sais quoi. I plan to watch 'em all ...