Genesis Episode Today
The Genesis episode is being shown this afternoon on Encore Westerns.
This is the episode which shows how Paladin came to be a gunfighter.
It will be shown at 2 PM Central Time.
Yes it's a classic. I always wondered if its a metaphor of him finding himself or if he actually meets smoke.
shareThe GENESIS episode wasn't meant to be a metaphor, Noirkis. Audiences at that time were not that sophisticated. It was a literal tale to explain how Paladin came to call himself by that name and how he came to do what he did: fight for the right as a mercenary, wear the silver knight on his holster and dress all in black. Richard Boone was an iconoclast, the first good guy in black with a villain's mustache.
Back in the day the good guy wore white on television and in films. That Paladin wore black and a mustache was extremely unusual and required an episode to explain it. GENESIS was that episode. It was the first in the final season of HGWT.
Some things you just can't ride around...
The fact that Have Gun - Will Travel was able to go through five seasons before giving Paladin an origin story speaks against the idea that audiences in the '50s and early '60s were less sophisticated than TV audiences of today. Today we have the Internet, where any yahoo who can type "knows" what a show needs better than people who get paid to produce shows for a living. Audiences today generally don't the patience to wait three months to find out what makes a protagonist tick, never mind five seasons.
Je suis Charlie Hebdo.