RELIC OF FORT TEJON (November 3rd, 1957) – Here’s something a little different from the usual for Balladeer’s Blog’s Forgotten Television category. The 1950s James Garner series Maverick was an all-time classic, but this particular episode is often overlooked.
The subject matter deals with a camel supposedly left over from the ill-fated American Camel Corps that the U.S. Army tried launching in the 1800s. The project fell through in the end, but the dozens of camels from the experimental program – and their offspring – wound up roaming the deserts of the southwest for decades afterward.
Previously, I’ve examined the James Garner western One Little Indian (1973) in which his soldier character winds up using a camel to flee an unjust mutiny charge, and the legendary Red Ghost of Arizona, a Camel Corps leftover which was sighted multiple times in the 1880s to 1890s and was mistaken for a monster.
In Relic of Fort Tejon, Garner’s iconic Bret Maverick, a gambler/ gunslinger, wins a camel named Fatima from a fellow gambler who conned him into thinking he was using an Arabian stallion as part of a poker wager. Continue reading
FRONTIERADO IS COMING UP ON FRIDAY, AUGUST 7th! As always the Frontierado holiday (now celebrated on 6 continents) is about the myth of the Wild West, not the grinding reality. It’s just like the way medieval festivals celebrate the era’s romantic aspects, not “the violence inherent in the system” (for my fellow Monty Python fans). Here’s another Balladeer’s Blog review of a seasonal movie. 
MAVERICK (1994) – Richard Donner directed and Mel Gibson starred in this excellent tribute to the 1950s and 1980s Maverick television series. The original series starred James Garner as slick-talking gambler/ gunslinger Bret Maverick AND, in old-age makeup, as “Pappy” Beauregard Maverick, the gambler and con-man patriarch of that family of rogues. (No relation to the real-life Maverick family of Texas, for whom “maverick” cattle were named.)
Mel Gibson portrays Bret Maverick since by 1994 James Garner was too old for the role. Jodie Foster co-stars as rival gambler Annabelle Bransford and the iconic James Garner provides memorable support as a lawman. 
Balladeer’s Blog’s theme of Top 20 lists for the year 2020 continues with this look at a score of James Garner films. NOTE: The Great Escape is not included, only because Garner was part of an ensemble cast in that movie. 
BARBARIANS AT THE GATE (1993) – In this telefilm based on the best-selling non-fiction book, Jim plays F. Ross Johnson, the real-life president of RJR-Nabisco who unleashed one of the most chaotic and frenzied leveraged buyouts in Wall Street history during the “greed is good” 1980s. 
FRONTIERADO IS COMING UP ON FRIDAY, AUGUST 3rd! As always the Frontierado holiday (now celebrated on 6 continents) is about the myth of the Wild West, not the grinding reality. It’s just like the way medieval festivals celebrate the era’s romantic aspects, not “the violence inherent in the system” (for my fellow Monty Python fans). 
Balladeer's Blog 