The railway series box set12/20/2023 Wagon Train the series was loosely based on John Ford's classic 1950 feature film, Wagon Master, which also co-starred Bond as Elder Wiggs, the hard-driving wagon master who doggedly pushed on his group of Mormon settlers across the harsh West to California. ![]() What's particularly interesting about that last statistic is the fact the show finally cracked the number one spot after the series suffered a potentially crippling setback: the death of its lead actor, Ward Bond. Remaining in its family-friendly Wednesday 7:30pm time slot for the next four years on NBC, Wagon Train would climb spectacularly to the number two spot in the Nielsen's the very next year, and remain there for three seasons (right behind CBS's Gunsmoke), until the 1961-1962 season, when it entered one of the most exclusive clubs in the world: the number one rated network show, according to the Nielsen ratings, on American TV. ![]() Running opposite the first season of I Love Lucy re-runs (after the previously number one-rated show had ceased production of original weekly episodes) and ABC's Disneyland (a regular Nielsen Top Ten and Twenty hit), Wagon Train proved to be a formidable opponent on Wednesday nights at 7:30pm, knocking both the I Love Lucy re-runs and Disneyland out of the Nielsen Top Thirty, while scoring an entirely respectable 23rd for the year. And indeed, it came out of the gate an immediate ratings' contender. NBC already had huge hits with Tales of Wells Fargo (3rd for the year) and The Restless Gun (8th), so the addition of Wagon Train to their schedule seemed a natural. The hour-long Wagon Train premiered on NBC in the fall of 1957, when the western genre really started to take off in the network ratings (that year, five of the Nielsen's Top were oaters). Therefore, it's difficult for me to evaluate the entire series here in this review, when I only have a handful of the earlier black and white episodes from the first six seasons. Certainly hour-long black and white series were less likely to make it to syndication in smaller TV markets, while the 90 minute color episodes from season seven must have presented even more of a challenge for markets looking for easily scheduled 30 and 60 minute programming blocks. Wagon Train was canceled before I was born, and I don't remember it being syndicated in my region back in the 70s (prior to receiving this boxed set, I had never seen an episode of Wagon Train), so I can't claim any special nostalgic connection with the series. ![]() Vintage TV fans will no doubt be dismayed to discover that these episodes are the syndicated versions (and thus, edited for time - more about that below), but considering the inherent value of the title, and the fact that this is probably the only way we're going to see Wagon Train on DVD, the pros outweigh the cons for this important entry in the American TV western genre. Extras include 4 additional discs containing 16 classic black and white episodes from the series, as well as interviews with stars Robert Fuller and Denny Scott Miller. ![]() Timeless Media Group, in association with NBC Universal, has released Wagon Train: The Complete Color Season, a massive special limited edition box set of the beloved TV western, featuring all 32 episodes of the series' only color season (it's 7th, from 1963-1964), gathered together on 11 discs.
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