The Wooden Rifle

The first episode of season 5 was the first one televised in glorious color. It's great to see the Ranger's blue shirt and pants, white hat, and red neckerchief. And Tonto's brown buckskin outfit really stands out. For most of its run The Lone Ranger was telecast on Thursday from 730-8PM. It was the biggest hit ABC had. When Neilson began recording ratings in 1950, The Lone Ranger was ABC's only show in the top 15. All the others were NBC or CBS programs. In this episode, a young boy witnesses a murder but drops his wooden toy rifle at the scene. The Ranger and Tonto use it to find the boy but his parents won't let him testify to the crime. So, the Ranger and Tonto resort to disguises to smoke out the outlaws. The Ranger is a bearded southern medicine wagon proprietor and Tonto his assistant. This is an excellent episode with good action and fine performances from all. Well worth watching.

Shot in lively color, "The Wooden Rifle" gets high marks for allowing Clayton Moore to actually act.

John (?) Reid carries a seemingly endless supply of costumes and makeup, to disguise himself when he can't appear as The Lone Ranger. (Where he stashes them -- and why they're uncreased -- is anyone's guess.) In this episode, he's a quack selling a phony nostrum, with Tonto as his assistant (also wearing a different costume).

Moore gets a lot of laughs with his fake Southern accent and seeming inability to point a rifle in the right direction. Reid wears disguises in the two (excellent) theatrical films, but not very often in the TV series. Moore's the pity. (Sorry about that.)

It appears that by the fifth season, the writers were giving Tonto more-coherent and less-pidginy dialog, a welcome improvement.