User Reviews

I kept expecting John Davidson to say That's Incredible (those younger may not know the reference unless you look at Davidson's titles. Pretty standard fare for DB. Interesting that Boone was accused of land shenanigans in real life making this one of the few ep's that had a real touch of reality.

Troubadour Jimmy McGill (John Davidson) arrives in Boonesborough with a deed from the Daniel Boone Land Company, only to find its nonexistent. A remorseful Daniel sets him up with a farm on the installment plan, but complications ensue when Jimmy sets his eye toward his clergyman neighbor's daughter Charity Brown (Shelley Fabares)

After a rousing previous outing last week, we are back in the "Tales of Boonesborough" rut. The intent here is to showcase Davidson, a 1960's-70's singer and talk show host marketed as another clean-cut Pat Booneish alternative to the rock scene, and he does dutiful service in being youthfully unoffensive to the Glenn Miller crowd. Teen queen Fabares, later to have a successful run on the 80's sitcom "Coach" is the more convincing of the pair as a frontier lass. Villain specialist Dick Peabody (Private Littlejohn in 1962-67's "Combat" is the large ominous threat to the lovebirds that Charity's father is attempting to marry her off too. Fess Parker has again found good reasons to be working on his side hustles for most of the hour.

The pack train-slow pace of the minimal plot makes this another DB episode ideal to listen to over the shoulder while churning butter, and there is not much here that would not have been better suited to a "Waltons" episode. No action worth speaking of, though Davidson being decked by Peabody might be satisfying to anyone who gets tired of younger people who spend their youth trying to conform to seniors' ideas of what younger people should be like.

The history component this week is minimal in the extreme, though the Rev. Brown correctly notes that frontier life rapidly aged and killed women who came west, hence the desire to marry daughters into established families of means. Whiskey plays a major role in the story, offering a tantalizing opportunity to bring in the Whiskey Rebellion of George Washington's administration, but the thread is never taken up. Its worth noting the real Daniel Boone was beset throughout his life by legal and financial problems resulting from land speculation, but NBC would never portray him as anything other than an upright businessman.

One gets the impression that Parker at this point was simply producing filler episodes to finish out his contract as rapidly as possible; the series' gems are getting fewer and farther between.