We learn later that his brother was one of the Rangers gunned down alongside him, but the “This Time…It’s Personal” dynamic of Reid’s journey toward becoming the Lone Ranger in the movie, doesn’t exist in the show. One man, John Reid, survives and crawls away to safety before being rescued by Tonto, just as Reid had saved Tonto many years ago. Six Texas Rangers are led into a canyon where they’re massacred by Butch Cavendish’s gang - within the first five minutes of the plot.ģ. But the pilot episode of the original series, “Enter the Lone Ranger,” gets right into the drama. Verbinski’s film offers up a framing device in which the story of the Lone Ranger is being retold by an ancient Tonto in 1933. The mere fact that Depp is credited above the title, before Hammer, shows that the Lone Ranger isn’t even as important as Tonto in this take on the characters. He can’t be dragged through horse manure. But for that vision to ring true, the Lone Ranger can’t be a bland doofus, the way he is in Verbinski’s film. They were equally competent and enhanced each other’s strengths, offering up an ideal of Anglo-Native American cooperation and harmony that obviously never happened but is a utopian vision worth striving for - especially considering the tendency of many other Westerns of the time to glorify the genocide of the Native Americans. But from the very beginning he was the Lone Ranger’s true partner.
People think that Silverheels’ Tonto is just a sidekick in the original series. The Lone Ranger and Tonto Really Are Equals
#The lone ranger tv series series
Here are six reasons why the 64-year-old TV series is better than the new film.ġ. But oddly enough, if director Gore Verbinski and producer Jerry Bruckheimer had followed the template set by that TV series, starring Clayton Moore as the masked avenger and Jay Silverheels as his Native American companion Tonto, they might have made a more successful movie. Did the much-coveted teen male demographic have any built-in interest in a property that’s best known as a TV series that debuted in 1949? Probably not. There are a lot of reasons why the Johnny Depp– Armie Hammer actioner fizzled.
#The lone ranger tv series movie
So after Disney invested nearly $250 million - and a whole lot of franchise hopes - into it, The Lone Ranger is likely going to be just that: a one-off, underperforming misfire instead of the springboard for an enduring movie series.