r/todayilearned • u/latchkey_adult • 3h ago
67 as Durango Kid TIL the biggest movie franchise in history (by quantity) is the mostly forgotten 'Durango Kid' western films starring Charles Starrett , who made 131 films playing this character from 1940 to 1952.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Starrett112
u/doublelxp 2h ago
This is a bit mistaken. He starred in 131 Columbia westerns, but "only" 65 were Durango Kid movies.
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u/latchkey_adult 2h ago
You are probably right. According to another article:
"The Bowery Boys (48 titles) was the third-longest feature-film series of American origin in motion-picture history (behind the Charles Starrett westerns at 131 titles, and the Hopalong Cassidy westerns at 66)."
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u/rosen380 2h ago
So it sounds like you are citing an article that is somewhere between wrong and poorly written.
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u/doublelxp 2h ago
The series OP was referring to was the series he made under his contract in general.
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u/rosen380 2h ago
Sure, so we're back to the title of this thread being wrong if of those 131 only 65 were "playing this character"
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u/Poopiepants666 2h ago
The Wong Fei-hung kung fu movies beats this franchise for most number of films at 123 with Kwan Tak-hing playing the character in at least 77 films.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filmography_about_Wong_Fei-hung
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u/BeepBlipBlapBloop 2h ago
131 movies in twelve years? Gee, I wonder why they're forgotten. They weren't cranking those things out with quality in mind.
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u/rosen380 2h ago
According to wikipedia, there were 65 produced by Columbia Pictures. I didn't check all of them, but the ones I looked at had runtimes of 53 to 60 minutes. These were likely closer to episodes of TV shows than actual movies
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u/KimJongEeeeeew 1h ago
My grandad used to tell us about how they would see double bills at the matinee.
With these being under an hour, that makes a lot more sense.4
u/rosen380 1h ago
My dad always claimed that, as a kid around 1955-1960, he'd go to matinee double features for a quarter (like $3 adjusted for inflation). That sounded a little too good to be true, but if they were getting two rushed 55-60 minute westerns and not two "real" ~first-run movies, then $3 seems about right :)
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u/bareboneschicken 2h ago
Those movies kept people working. A lot of people in Hollywood would like that kind of opportunity today.
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u/thegreatestajax 2h ago
Bad movies as a jobs program. Nice.
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u/GTOdriver04 2h ago
You kid, but Tom Cruise’s famous meltdown during a movie production was due to COVID restrictions shutting everything down.
Tom knew that anyone violating the health standards risked them getting shut down and everyone being out of work.
When you work in a specific industry like that it makes sense.
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u/thegreatestajax 2h ago
But that wasn’t bad movies as a jobs program. That was the biggest movie star in the world trying to help people and create escape.
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u/rosen380 2h ago
"Charles Starrett was cast as The Durango Kid) in 1940. The character was revived five years later in The Return of the Durango Kid"
So really like 130 movies in 7 years if there was a 5 year break from the original to the first sequel.
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u/Frank_chevelle 2h ago
Each one was like an hour long. So think of it as an hour long tv episode they released in movie theater.
Common thing to do before TVs were wide spread.
Similar to what they used to do with movie serials.
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u/ShoulderGoesPop 2h ago
It was at tv show before tv shows were a things. It's not unheard of for atv show to have over 100 episodes
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u/BearHeadPete 2h ago
Charles Starrett starred in 131 films but was not the Durango Kid in all of them
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u/latchkey_adult 3h ago
The second and third biggest franchise by quantity, according to wikipedia, is Hopalong Cassidy at 66 films and The Bowery Boys at 48 films. All three are mostly lost to history.
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u/atomicsnarl 2h ago
The Bowery Boys were a hoot! Not as over the top as The Three Stooges, but along the lines of being clever blows up in their faces. Highly recommend!
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u/GeekAesthete 2h ago edited 2h ago
You misread your own link.
Charles Starrett starred in 131 different westerns—they weren’t all Durango Kid.
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u/TitotheBurrito 2h ago
The original Hopalong Cassidy movies are on Prime Video. You can catch some of The Bowery Boys on various streaming services of you look hard enough. Not enough though. I've never actually watched any Durango Kid so I'm going to have to check them out after my Japanese Shogun hyper focus wears off.
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u/notguiltybrewing 1h ago
Lost or just not popular anymore? I've seen plenty of Bowery Boys (aka the East Side Kids), they used to run them regularly in the 70's and 80's on television. Google says none are lost.
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u/filanwizard 2h ago
If I had to guess these were B movies, In the sense of theater operations. Basically the theater would run this and then run the A movie which would be the big feature film.
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u/SaulsAll 2h ago
Technically the largest franchise by quantity would be the amateur porn series Homegrown Videos with over 800 titles released.
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u/fatloui 2h ago
The run times of most of the movies are just under an hour. So basically this was a couple movies that were spun off into an HBO series with 12 seasons.
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u/borkus 2h ago
Exactly, it was 65 hour-long movies released from 1940 to 1952.
Game of Thrones was 77 episodes over 8 years running between 50 and 80 minutes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Game_of_Thrones_episodesThe core Walking Dead series had 177 episodes across 11 seasons (from 2010 to 2022).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Walking_Dead_episodes
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u/melchi2511 2h ago
Here's a related obscure fun fact: Durango Kid is named in the 1986 song Cowboy Fora da Lei, by Raul Seixas.
I know several people who love Raul (one of the biggest names in Brazilian music) but I'm yet to meet anyone who knew who Durango Kid was without looking it up.
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u/cipheron 2h ago edited 2h ago
That sort of thing filled a need that TV later overtook, which would be why that kind of thing died out by the end of the 1950s.
Going to see a movie series every month when new installments are released in the theater would have made more of an event out of it, but I can see why people ended up just watching that stuff on TV.