bkoganbing I guess the grind of doing those B picture westerns was getting a bit much for Joel McCrea because a lot of what he was doing was winding up on the small screen in any event.So he decided he'd try television and what's more he'd bring his son Jody in on the deal. Jody would soon become a regular in those Beach Party films. Maybe for luck because he had already done a good western movie called Wichita back in 1955 McCrea called his series Wichita Town. He played the town marshal and Jody played his young deputy.Looking at the cast list you can see that Wichita Town was starting to build a cast of semi-regulars like Dodge City on Gunsmoke. Unfortunately the show was a bit too much like Gunsmoke and never broke out of the pack of a glut of westerns that were on TV at that time.Wichita Town only lasted a season, but Joel McCrea's next project would be Ride The High Country, one of the greatest westerns ever made.

dougbrode This short lived western, which appeared at a time when the airwaves were so glutted with cowboy shows that some had to fall through the cracks, has developed something of a cult reputation as being one of the really good ones that somehow got away. In truth, much of it was standard stuff, with the decent minded lawman (Joel McCrea) and his young deputy (Jody McCrea), pretty much the same formula as you could find over at ABC with Lawman (Wichita Town was on NBC). There was a nice feel for the cowtown, however, and several intriguing elements that are worth noting. For one thing, though the father and son team of the McCreas were featured, they didn't play father and son, though they were an older and younger man in a father-son style relationship. Second, though the characters' names were fictional, they were supposed to be Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson. (Young Jody's character's name was even "Ben Masters," allowing for a hint at the historicity they had to suggest rather than admit owing to the fact that Hugh O'Brian and Alan Dinehart had already done the story of that friendship over at ABC on The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp. Perhaps that helps explain why Wichita Town never caught on - there was a sense of deja vu to it all, which doesn't mean that it wasn't good, only that it arrived a little late in the TV western game. Apparently, McCrea had wanted to play Earp on TV. One of his best B+ westerns of the mid-fifties was Wichita Town, in which he played Earp and Keith Larson (later in such TV westerns as Brave Eagle and Northwest Passage) was young Masterson. That film opened in theatres only months before the ABC Earp/Masterson series premiered. So McCrea backed off and then gave it a noble try with this one-season wonder. If hardly a classic of its type, this was a highly watchable variation on what then was an all too common theme, with McCrea bringing a certain substance to the role that most of the young cowboy stars then on the air couldn't come close to.