Red Ryder

How a Comic Strip Cowboy Came to Radio

Fred Harman — born Leslie Fred Harman on February 9, 1902, in St. Joseph, Missouri — was not a typical cartoonist. His family moved to Pagosa Springs, Colorado, when he was two months old, and he grew up on a ranch near the New Mexican border. He dropped out of school after the seventh grade, worked as a cowboy in the Four Corners region, and spent enough time among the Navajo, Ute, and Apache peoples that he was eventually adopted into the Navajo Nation — one of only a small number of white men ever to receive that recognition. That firsthand knowledge of ranch life and Native American communities would end up being the whole point.

Around 1922, Harman landed a job as an animator at the Kansas City Film Ad Company, where he worked alongside a young Walt Disney. The two later formed their own company, Kaycee Studios, though it folded after about a year. Harman kept drawing, and by 1933 he had a self-syndicated strip called Bronc Peeler — a red-headed cowboy hero, unmistakably a rough draft of what was coming. Bronc Peeler ran until 1938, when Harman went to New York and briefly tried his hand at drawing King of the Royal Mounted. That's where he met Stephen Slesinger.

Slesinger was a publisher and licensing agent who had already built franchises around Tarzan and Winnie the Pooh. He had scripted a concept for a new Western character and was looking for an artist who knew the real thing. Harman fit. The two collaborated for a year, and on Sunday, November 6, 1938, the Red Ryder comic strip launched in the Los Angeles Times, syndicated by the Newspaper Enterprise Association. It eventually ran in 750 newspapers with an estimated readership of 40 million — making it one of the most widely read Western strips of its era. The strip continued through 1965.

The Network Story

Red Ryder first hit radio on February 3, 1942, on the Blue Network, airing three times a week at 7:30 Pacific time. Mutual, which had just lost The Lone Ranger to the Blue Network, responded by picking up Red Ryder for its eastern affiliate stations beginning May 20, 1942, deliberately slotting it in direct competition with The Lone Ranger. In the early Hooper ratings reports, Red Ryder outperformed The Lone Ranger — a notable result for a show billed as "America's famous fighting cowboy" that had been on the air for only a few months.

The eastern run lasted less than four months. By September 9, 1942, Red Ryder had been sold to a regional sponsor, Langendorf Bread, which meant the show moved to Mutual's West Coast Don Lee Network and stayed there. Langendorf had actually come on as prime sponsor after just the sixth episode, and it stuck with the show for the rest of the run. On the Don Lee Network, Red Ryder aired Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays at 7:30 — the same time slot, the same regional footprint, for the better part of a decade. The air career was long and successful, but it was largely confined to the West Coast. Listeners in the East mostly missed it.

The Cast and the Characters

The radio version made some deliberate changes from Harman's strip. On radio, Red was less a lawman than a cowhand who got pulled into law enforcement only when the story required it. He never killed enemies — he shot weapons out of their hands. He lived with his aunt, known as the Duchess, in a settlement called Painted Valley, located in the Blanco Basin of the San Juan Mountains. The show was set in the 1890s. His horse was named Thunder; his young Indian ward Little Beaver rode a horse called Papoose. Red himself had red hair and wore a red shirt, and the character's sweetheart, called Beth Wilder in the comic strip, was renamed Jane Bruce for the radio version.

Three actors played Red Ryder across the run. Reed Hadley took the role from 1942 to 1944, leaving when 20th Century-Fox signed him to a term contract. Hadley had a rich bass voice that would go on to serve as narration for films including House on 92nd Street, Boomerang, and The Iron Curtain, and he later starred in the television series Racket Squad and The Public Defender; he has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Carlton KaDell replaced Hadley effective the April 27, 1943 broadcast, per a contemporary note in Broadcasting. When the show switched from Blue to Mutual on August 8, 1944, KaDell stepped away and Brooke Temple took over, playing Red Ryder through the show's final episode in 1951.

Little Beaver went through even more actors — Tommy Cook from 1942 (with Franklin Bresee alternating through 1946), then Henry Blair from 1944 to 1947 (who was simultaneously playing Ricky Nelson on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet), then Johnny McGovern from 1947 to 1950, with Sammy Ogg and Anne Whitfield splitting the role through the final season. Jim Mather handled most of the Indian dialect on the show; Little Beaver's catchphrase — "You betchum, Red Ryder" — was the notable exception.

The supporting cast included Arthur Q. Bryan, best known as the voice of Elmer Fudd in Looney Tunes cartoons, as Roland "Rawhide" Rolinson, and Horace Murphy — a B-western regular who had previously worked as a sidekick to Tex Ritter in films — as Buckskin Blodgett. Announcers included Ben Alexander and Art Gilmore. Brad Brown produced, Paul Franklin wrote and directed, and Albert Van Antwerp contributed as a writer. Sound effects were handled by Monty Fraser, Bob Turnbull, and James Dick. The show's theme was "The Dying Cowboy," played on organ, recognizable by its opening line: "oh, bury me not... on the lone prairie."

The Red Ryder Victory Patrol

One of the more unusual chapters in the show's history was the Red Ryder Victory Patrol, a wartime listener club launched in 1942 to encourage children to adopt conservation practices that would support the war effort. Young listeners obtained application cards at local grocery stores — Langendorf Bread's retail presence made distribution natural. Membership kits included a card, a glow-in-the-dark badge, a secret decoder, postcards, comics, buttons, coins, and maps. Langendorf issued three different versions of the kit between 1942 and 1944. The club ran through 1944 and was considered one of the more successful wartime youth programs of the period. The Red Ryder Victory Patrol comic book premiums that came with those kits are now among the more sought-after items in Western comics.

A Franchise Built Across Every Medium

Slesinger understood before most people in entertainment that a character's value multiplied when it appeared everywhere at once — radio, films, Big Little Books, novels, comic books, rodeos, licensed products. He had done it before with Tarzan and Winnie the Pooh, and he built the same framework around Red Ryder. The first Red Ryder comic book appeared from his Hawley Publications in September 1940. Dell Comics launched its Red Ryder series in August 1941 and ran it continuously through April–June 1957, a run described as the longest of any Western comic. Little Beaver eventually received his own Dell series beginning in January 1949.

On film, the property moved quickly. Republic Pictures released a 12-chapter serial in 1940, Adventures of Red Ryder, starring Don "Red" Barry — who reportedly picked up his nickname from the role — with Tommy Cook as Little Beaver. Republic then released 23 Red Ryder features between 1944 and 1947, the first 16 starring Wild Bill Elliott and a final seven with Allan Lane, both working with Robert Blake, then credited as Bobby Blake, as Little Beaver. Republic let the option lapse in 1947 over a clerical oversight on a renewal deadline; when contacted, the rights holder agreed to continue but demanded higher royalties, which Republic refused. The final four Red Ryder films, made for Eagle-Lion between 1949 and 1950, starred Jim Bannon and were filmed in Cinecolor — the first Red Ryder pictures shot in color. Bannon had campaigned for the role openly, dressing in Western attire and outfitting his car with a Texas Longhorn hood ornament; once cast, he dyed his hair red and kept it that way through the run.

Two television pilots were produced but never sold. The first, around 1951, starred Jim Bannon and was directed by Thomas A. Carr. The second, in 1956, starred Allan Lane with Louis Lettieri as Little Beaver. A 1963 episode of Gunsmoke titled "I Call Him Wonder" was produced as an authorized test for a new Red Ryder TV series, adapting the story of how Red and Little Beaver first met with the character under a different name — but it wasn't picked up either.

Then there is the BB gun. Daisy Air Rifles struck its licensing deal for the Red Ryder BB gun less than a year after the comic strip launched in 1938, and the gun has been manufactured continuously ever since. The 1983 film A Christmas Story — built around a boy's desperate wish for exactly that rifle — brought the Red Ryder name to audiences who had never heard the strip, the radio show, or the films, and the brand has remained in circulation ever since. Harman himself, meanwhile, turned to easel painting after retiring from the strip in the early 1960s, working from a studio in Albuquerque. He was a charter member of the Cowboy Artists of America, which he co-founded in 1965 with John Hampton, George Phippen, Charlie Dye, and Joe Beeler. His home and studio in Pagosa Springs are now the Fred Harman Art Museum. He died on January 2, 1982.