This is an excellent story of a fascinating man.
It relates how the character developed in the Republic Pictures serials (before that, the Lone Ranger had been a hit radio broadcast), but the key thrust of the piece is Lee Powell himself.
“Six years after starring as the mysterious masked man and thrilling audiences in the theater of every town in the United States, he was dead on a tiny faraway island at the age of 35. He had been wrong about the longevity of the Lone Ranger’s popularity. The character has become an American icon while Lee Powell unfortunately has faded into obscurity.”
Man, it can make you cringe to read those old newspaper articles. Powell died “fighting the Japs.” It’s not quite as blatantly racist as those old Warner Brothers cartoons, but it’ll still give you pause. Even as boys in the 1950s, my friends and I could see how old-fashioned the 1940s had been. It wasn’t just the newspapers and cartoons, but also the movie serials, like the one Lee Powell had starred in.
The movie serials were very much a harbinger of television, except that the episodes had to be watched away from the home. There were many genres: westerns, crime stories, sci-fi and more. Many of the episodes had cliffhanger endings to bring people back. They were before my time, but when I was a kid they were essentially in the public domain since nobody wanted them for TV or the theaters, so the summer camps I belonged to always screened different ones during lunchtime. We loved them, although not for reasons that would make the creators proud. They were so primitive, and so frequently and flamboyantly melodramatic, that even a bunch of unsophisticated 10-year-olds in the fifties would laugh out loud at the bad effects and clumsy overacting in moments that were supposed to be filled with suspense or drama. The line deliveries were hilarious, and often punctuated by hysterical, repetitive voice-over narration! How did so many cowboys and spacemen (and narrators) get New York outer borough accents? It was like watching the Three Stooges without all the head-bopping.
Great memories.