Ward Bond's final bow
It is with a mixture of joy and sadness I anticipate season four of this wonderful western series. Sadly Ward Bond passed away during this season and he is replaced by John Mcintire. Mcintire was a versatile good actor but for me Ward Bond held a special magic and the series was never the same, and when Robert Horton departed a couple of years later the series lost so much of it's great characterisation. I always stayed loyal to the series throughout it's run but even several years later when it aired I still missed Bond's presence. His interplay with Horton was a joy and no one could match his jousts with Frank Mcgrath and Terry Wilson ( they were real life friends who Bond insisted had roles in Wagon Train ). For me Chris Hale was rather a lifeless character in comparison to Major Seth Adams. Bond's last episode to air is the poignant Beth Pearson Story where he meets his old true love again. You have to imagine that at the end he changed his mind and returned to her instead of the...
Wagon Train Season 4
I was very excited to get season 4 a couple of weeks ago and have been enjoying watching the episodes. I have never had any problem with any of the other seasons's episodes, but there are several problems with this set. Disk 1 and 2 had a little bit of pixing but mostly playable, but on disk 4 the Roger Bigelow story hardly plays at all. It is all pixied out in the beginning and it freezes and then it moves on to the next chapter, pixies out again and moves to the next chapter etc.. So the whole episode took about 5 minutes and then they were playing the credits which worked fine. The next 2 episodes on that disk are messed up as well. I'm not sure what I want to do about it, but I don't want to return it and get another set that could be damaged as well maybe in different spots. Maybe I'll keep this set and buy another set anyway so I can watch the episodes that are bad on this set. I still have 3 disks yet to watch, so I'll make a decision after that. But I am really enjoying...
John Wayne, John Ford and Ward Bond..All In One Episode
John Ford directed episode 9, "The Colter Craven Story" and I bought this set...my last set in the series...because of that. I say it's my last set because this is Ward Bond's last season before passing away and the show wasn't the same after he was gone. Not only is the scene in episode 9 with John Wayne legendary, but the episode contains generous amounts of footage Ford used from his 1950 movie, "Wagon Master" which also starred Ward Bond as a Mormon elder heading a wagon train west. Of course, "Wagon Master" was the inspiration for the TV show "Wagon Train." It is interesting to see how many of the movie's scenes were used and how Ford was able to 'cut' into them with interaction between Major Adams, Bill and Charlie Wooster.
I still recall the sad morning my fifth grade class in 1960 learned that Ward Bond had died. The sadness was compounded by the news that country singer Johnny Horton had died within hours of Bond's passing. For a ten-year-old, that news was hard to...
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