Josh Spiegel
1955 was a banner year for the Walt Disney Company. Later this summer, even the theme-park-averse among us will be reminded that 2025 marks the 70th anniversary of Disneyland Park’s opening in Anaheim, California, establishing Disneyland as a quintessential part of the House of Mouse– in spite of the fact that a theme park didn’t exist in this form before Walt Disney and his Imagineers made it. The success of Disneyland is a microcosm of what Disney as a whole was brilliant at: taking familiar styles but fusing them into something that felt both recognizable and undeniably new. Earlier in the summer of 1955, Walt Disney Pictures tried its hand at continuing a more era-specific phenomenon, something that has endured but to a lesser extent than an enormous theme park. After finding massive success on the small screen, the studio released a film version focused on its then-most-famous character: historical legend Davy Crockett, in Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier.
If you watch enough Disney live-action fare of the late 1950s and 1960s, it’s easy to look at the low budgets, small scope, and minor ambitions and presume that many of these films felt as if they were filmed for television, not the silver screen. But with Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier, it’s the reverse: this 93-minute film is a compilation of three episodes of the Walt Disney anthology TV series, then called (fittingly) Walt Disney’s Disneyland. In its inaugural season, this show existed as much to present edited versions of animated classics as it did to advertise the as-yet-unopened Disneyland theme park, with episodes aligning to a theme: Fantasyland, Tomorrowland, Adventureland, or Frontierland.
One of the first Frontierland-themed episodes, airing on December 15, 1954, was titled “Davy Crockett: Indian Fighter.” Across the following two months, two more hour-long episodes, each with Fess Parker as the eponymous American frontiersman and politician, would air to, at the time, massive acclaim and popularity. Seventy years later, the closest recent corollary to the widespread success of the Crockett episodes would be the craze surrounding A Minecraft Movie. But instead of kids hooting and hollering at Jack Black’s glowering visage, it was kids grabbing coonskin hats by the score or buying an album featuring the smash hit song “The Ballad of Davy Crockett.”
Or, it was Disney taking those initial episodes and editing them into Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier. Where the studio was pouring higher budgets into films like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, King of the Wild Frontier isn’t able to hide the fact that it was made on a shoestring budget, as directed by Norman Foster. And although Parker and Buddy Ebsen (as Davy’s friend George Russell) have an easy charm together, the representation of Davy Crockett always feels as if it can only go so far in depicting the honesty of his life. To wit: Crockett died at the Alamo in 1836, and the famous battle is at least shown (in very small, hagiographic part) in the final third of King of the Wild Frontier, aligning to the episode fittingly entitled “Davy Crockett at the Alamo.” But the miniseries was such a big hit – and the film was, too, making a few million dollars – that Disney created two more episodes for the second season of its anthology TV series.
And as much as Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier was a naked cash grab, those subsequent TV episodes were turned into a sequel feature, Davy Crockett and the River Pirates, released to theaters in 1956. Walt Disney’s own love affair with American history (or, his love affair with the self-mythologizing version of American history, as opposed to the warts-and-all accurate truth) was partially kickstarted here. The Disney theme parks dedicate some space to a love of Americana, and while Davy Crockett was the only hero to merit feature consideration, future seasons of the Walt Disney anthology TV show would tell the stories of the lawman Texas John Slaughter as well as revolutionary War hero Francis Marion, also known as “The Swamp Fox.” (A very young Leslie Nielsen starred as the latter character across an eight-episode miniseries.)
Disney loves to celebrate itself, so they are of course making a big deal out of the fact that their original theme park is turning 70 this July. But even if Disneyland is a more famous depiction of the America that the country wishes it was, it’s fitting that Disney’s friendly depiction of Davy Crockett turns 70 this summer as well. The real history of the man known as Davy Crockett is a lot thornier and more challenging than what Disney delivered to kids around the country on TV and then on the big screen, but it’s weirdly fitting that Disney’s version is the one people are more likely to recognize, as wart-free as possible.
“Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier” is streaming on Disney+.
