But I never could call him "Hoppy"

When I was a kid in the early 1950s, all of the boys my age had a favorite cowboy movie/TV star.
It seemed most of them favored Roy Rogers. Gene Autry was past his prime and, even though Roy sang too, Gene's "singing cowboy" act seemed a little too sissified for us he-man 8-year-olds.
We also got plenty of exposure to the second-tier guys like Rex Allen and Lash Larue. As a midwestern lad, I was kind of non-plussed by Duncan Renaldo's Cisco Kid. And I have to admit a fondness for Guy Madison's historically inaccurate Wild Bill Hickock, but Andy Devine as his sidekick Jingles gave me the creeps.
I thought the Lone Ranger was cool, too, but when the chips were down, I was a Hopalong Cassidy man.
Despite his screwy name, to my young sensibilities Hopalong Cassidy was just too cool.
I had a genuine black Hopalong Cassidy denim jacket, made by Bell, with white stitched steer-head outlines on the pockets. I had pearl-handled Hopalong Cassidy cap pistols and a cool black leather holster rig in which to carry them.
My parents even decorated my bedroom with official gray-and-silver Hopalong Cassidy wallpaper.
(I found some of it on Ebay a few years ago and had it framed. It brought back long-forgotten memories of drifting off to sleep on warm summer nights with the chirp of crickets outside my bedroom window.)
I remember my first grade teacher offering a Hopalong Cassidy comb, hairbrush and mirror set to the boy who came to school for a whole month looking the neatest and best groomed. I desperately wanted to win. After all, I was practically the only declared Hopalong Cassidy fan in the class. Who better to take home such an appropriate prize? So you can imagine how crushed and disillusioned I felt when Mrs. Baum declared my friend Bill - a Roy Rogers man, for Christsake - the best groomed boy in the first grade.
Maybe that's why I've just combed my hair with my fingers ever since.
So last week, when my wife and I found ourselves pawing through a couple of boxes of $5.99 bargain DVDs at Best Buy, I couldn't pass up a disc of five feature-length Hopalong Cassidy films. Feature-length, in this case, means a running time of 60-65 minutes. "Presented in original classic black & white" and with digitally enhanced audio. Well.
I can't recall exactly what it was about William Boyd's character that resonated with me as a kid, but seeing him through 58-year-old eyes was something of a revelation.
Over the years, my memory of the specifics of Hopalong Cassidy had faded, leaving me with a short list of symbols - had gray hair, always wore black, carried a pair of pearl handled six-shooters, rode a white horse named Topper. That was about it.
Suddenly, there he was on my TV screen - moving, talking, smiling, slugging bad guys - like a childhood friend I hadn't seen in 50 years.
But the details. There were subtleties in the character that, if I had noticed them as a kid, it must have been on a subconscious level, not anything I could have articulated as an 8-year-old.
Bill Boyd's character comes across as a nice guy with a quick grin, an easy laugh and a genuinely friendly nature. There was a powerful playfulness in his nature that gave the audience the feeling that he was letting them in on the joke. It was such an "inside" thing it was almost prototypically hip.
The character had, for lack of a better term, more "texture" than other western heroes. It was something my wife noticed too and commented on.
Yes, Hopalong Cassidy was "the thinking kid's cowboy."
Or maybe that's just my take on it in the same way that you can divide ZZ Top fans into two groups - those who get the joke and those who don't, but don't care.
Either way, it was fun getting reacquainted with my boyhood hero this week.