I'm so pleased to have Fess Parker on the cover of the Born on a Mountaintop paperback, because he was such a huge part of Crockett's astonishing afterlife. John Wayne, Billy Bob Thornton and a lot of other terrific actors have done their part to keep the legend fresh. But to a high percentage of Crockett's 20th- and 21st-century fans, Parker IS Davy.
It didn't have to be that way, however.
Walt Disney had toyed with the idea of putting Davy Crockett onscreen as early as 1946, when he got the painter Thomas Hart Benton to do a rough outline for an animated Crockett operetta. We don't know much about this brief collaboration, which never got any traction, but the end product would have looked more like Fantasia than the 3-part TV series Disney finally launched in 1954.
Parker was hardly a lock to win the starring role. At the time, he was one of thousands of Hollywood wannabes living from bit part to bit part.
"I didn't miss a meal and I didn't sleep in the rain," he once recalled, but he did live in a toolshed for more than a year, and he couldn't afford a social life. Then he got a day's work on a science fiction movie called Them!, playing a man who's been committed to a mental ward because no one will believe his story about giant flying ants.
Disney and his team had considered a lot of possible Crocketts -- among them Sterling Hayden, George Montgomery and Buddy Ebsen -- and eventually the search turned to a big-shouldered young actor named James Arness, later of Gunsmoke fame. Arness had starred as a G-man in Them! Studio legend has Uncle Walt watching the film, taking one look at Fess Parker, and exclaiming "That's our Davy Crockett!"
What would have happened if Disney had been distracted during the time Parker was onscreen?
"If Walt had taken a phone call or lit a cigarette or sneezed," he told an interviewer nearly half a century later, "I wouldn't be talking to you today."
It didn't have to be that way, however.
Walt Disney had toyed with the idea of putting Davy Crockett onscreen as early as 1946, when he got the painter Thomas Hart Benton to do a rough outline for an animated Crockett operetta. We don't know much about this brief collaboration, which never got any traction, but the end product would have looked more like Fantasia than the 3-part TV series Disney finally launched in 1954.
Parker was hardly a lock to win the starring role. At the time, he was one of thousands of Hollywood wannabes living from bit part to bit part.
"I didn't miss a meal and I didn't sleep in the rain," he once recalled, but he did live in a toolshed for more than a year, and he couldn't afford a social life. Then he got a day's work on a science fiction movie called Them!, playing a man who's been committed to a mental ward because no one will believe his story about giant flying ants.
Disney and his team had considered a lot of possible Crocketts -- among them Sterling Hayden, George Montgomery and Buddy Ebsen -- and eventually the search turned to a big-shouldered young actor named James Arness, later of Gunsmoke fame. Arness had starred as a G-man in Them! Studio legend has Uncle Walt watching the film, taking one look at Fess Parker, and exclaiming "That's our Davy Crockett!"
What would have happened if Disney had been distracted during the time Parker was onscreen?
"If Walt had taken a phone call or lit a cigarette or sneezed," he told an interviewer nearly half a century later, "I wouldn't be talking to you today."
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