Have Gun, Will Travel:
The Ballad of Oscar Wilde
My recent article about Stephen Fry as the young Oscar featured a video of Oscar Wilde as a character in a short-lived TV Western series.
Surprisingly, this was not the first time Oscar Wilde had appeared a character in a short-lived TV Western series.
Back in the 1950s in the series Have Gun, Will Travel (1957–1963) Oscar again fell foul of local baddies in Season 2, Episode 12 entitled The Ballad of Oscar Wilde.
Have Gun,Will Travel: The Ballad of Oscar Wilde
A theme of this particulat Oscar Wilde is that each man kidnaps the thing he loves, and on this occasion Oscar—a Confucius plagiarizing “Englishman” (when he finally appears)—is held captive in a cabin scattering bon mots, but needing to escape for the inescapable shoot-out.
Oscar is successfully returned, of course, but not before insisting that the insulting ransom be raised fivefold from the “measly ten thousand” being demanded, “in dollars, mind you”.
The episode, which stars Richard Boone as recurring hero Paladin and John O’Malley1 as Oscar, first aired on December 6, 1958.2
Watch it in full here: The Ballad of Oscar Wilde.
© John Cooper, 2018.
Footnotes:
- John O’Malley, the little-known Australian actor who played Wilde, died less than a year after making this episode. ↩︎
- It was not quite the first appearance of Oscar as a character on screen. For that see Cloak of Mystery. ↩︎
Paladin brought back memories, watching westerns with my dad. However, I missed this episode with Oscar’s quick draw of the snuff box. Thanks for sharing.