It's his advice to the bereaved lawyer- telling him about the good effects of silver-tipped arrows- that leads the future Ranger to come up with his famous "silver bullet" icon.ĭirected by former cinematographer William A. This time, however, Tonto is somewhat more proactive. He returns to the Old West to join his brother, already a Texas Ranger, and this leads to the "slaughter of the innocents" of which Reid, the solitary survivor, will dedicate himself to justice. John stays with Tonto's tribe long enough to make clear that the Ranger will be a liminal figure, straddling the cultures of "White" and "Red." Then John returns to the white man's world and becomes a lawyer. To avoid some of the negative associations of the most famous Ranger-Tonto origin- where Tonto virtually gives up his life to become the white hero's sidekick- young Tonto and young John Reid become bonded in childhood, when the Indian boy takes the white boy into his camp following the death of John's parents. Interestingly, the later film probably borrows more of its basic elements from the 1981 film, particularly in respect to a Lone Ranger who begins as a bit of a dude, and whose brother is more at home in the Old West than he is. Its worst sin is the opposite of Verbinski's flick: where the 2014 Ranger is overblown, the 1981 Ranger- boasting five talents working on the screenplay- is simply pedestrian. Seeing this iteration of the Lone Ranger today, in the wake of the lively but hollow LONE RANGER of 2014, the 1981 film doesn't seem so bad.
However, though Hollywood expressed interest in a lot of franchises- including, incredibly enough, PLASTIC MAN- the possibility of more big-time movies of this type was killed for a time by three major flops: FLASH GORDON and POPEYE in 1980, and LONE RANGER in 1981.
Hollywood obviously sensed the public's possible enthusiasm for properties that either derived from comic books or had "comic-bookish" reputations.
Whenever I've mentioned THE LEGEND OF THE LONE RANGER in conversation, it's usually been to allude to its role in arguably killing off a spate of "comic book movies" that might have come arisen in the wake of the box-office successes of STAR WARS, SUPERMAN, and RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK.
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