Product: F Troop: The Complete First Season (2006)
Rating: 4.0
How the West was fun
Westerns--serious, light (likeAlias Smith and Jones - The Complete Series! 50 episodes on 10 DVDs!, and even mildly satirical (like "Maverick")--were aplenty on TV in the '50's and '60's, but this is the only Western sitcom I know of that actually lasted more than half a season. Set on and around the tiny Cavalry post of Fort Courage--somewhere between Dodge City, Laramie, Carson City, and the Apache country--and the civilian town just outside the back gate, it follows the misadventures of what must have been the Army's first "awkward squad" (the Secretary of War, in one episode, flatly states that "We sent them out there hoping they'd all desert!"). There's Pvt. Dobbs (James Hampton), the eager and well-meaning bugler, who can't blow anything in tune; Pvt. Vanderbilt (Joe Brooks), who's not only a Western Mr. Magoo ("20/900 in each eye") but doesn't hear very well either; Pvt. Duffy (Bob Steele), who claims to have fought "shoulder to shoulder" with Davy Crockett at the Alamo; Pvt. Duddleson, an overweight slob ("You're in line but your belly ain't!"); Pvt. Hoffenmueller (John Mitchum), who speaks only German; and an assembly of others just as bad. Their noncoms are more competent but a good deal less honest: Sgt. Morgan O'Rourke (Forrest Tucker) and his buddy Cpl. Randolph Agarn (Larry Storch), whose nonexistent middle initial should probably be H (for Hypochondria, Histrionics, and Hysterics), run "O'Rourke Enterprises" out of their NCO Club--a thriving Western-souvenir business, the town saloon, and anything else O'Rourke can think of (a mail-order-bride business, for example). Into this cozy nest comes Capt. Wilton Parmenter (Ken Berry), a terminal klutz who's the misfit scion of "a proud Philadelphia family" with a long military tradition (his father is a general, both his uncles were colonels, and even his first cousin is a Major) and who was jumped up from Quartermaster-Private after inadvertantly leading a victorious charge at Appomattox. Parmenter is clueless, fumble-footed, and fumble-fingered, passionately devoted to his Cavalry Manual ("It's right here, under 'Indian attacks, no furloughs in time of'") and very firm when he feels it's necessary, but genuinely brave and always kind and encouraging to his men, and he's no sooner arrived than Wrangler Jane (Melody Patterson), the pretty, hard-riding, straight-shooting blonde tomboy who runs the town's "trading post," sets her cap for him--while O'Rourke recognizes him as the perfect pigeon behind whom to hide his and Agarn's extracurricular business activities. Says O'Rourke, "I got rid of two Captains and a Major [when they seemed likely to expose him]," so how hard can it be to hang onto the one he wants? Harder than he thinks, sometimes. Several of the first-season segments turn on his efforts to keep himself, Parmenter, or Agarn from being promoted and/or transferred, or various Inspectors-General and other authority figures from finding out what's going on behind the scenes--particularly that the "treacherous" and "bloodthirsty" 400-member Hekawi Indian trobe, led by Chief Wild Eagle (Frank deKova), are actually, as Wild Eagle (though he's Geronimo's cousin and his sister is married to Sitting Bull) often declares, "not fighters, we lovers!", to say nothing of being the makers of the whiskey served in O'Rourke's saloon. (Much more of a threat are the Shugs, who not only attack the Fort twice but also carry off Wild Eagle's daughter.) Others focus on O'Rourke's various schemes, most of which don't work out (though he always has the very profitable saloon and souvenir trade to fall back on), or on visitors to the Fort, ranging from Parmenter's old sweetheart to Wild Eagle's genuinely bloodthirsty son Bald Eagle (Don Rickles) to a notorious jinx, Pvt. Leonard W. "Wrongo" Starr (Henry Gibson).The humor tends toward the physical, with a good many pratfalls (Berry very obviously did most of his own, which means he's really surprisingly graceful), and often it's politically incorrect, but it's at least clean, so kids can watch and enjoy it as well as adults. Though the entire cast is inimitable, it's Tucker who holds the whole troupe together--a tough, shrewd, and very opportunistic veteran with a ringing noncom voice who's been called by one commentator "the Sgt. Bilko of his day;" sometimes he mugs a bit, but that role is usually delegated to Storch, while "the Sarge" plays it almost straight. History, of course, is even more mangled than in most of the serious Westerns of the same era: though Parmenter comes to Fort Courage immediately after the Civil War, there are repeated references to Custer's Last Stand (1876), and once O'Rourke, observing his 25th anniversary with the Army, mentions that he signed up when the Mexican War broke out (1846, which would make the year 1871). Though I find it occasionally embarrassing (not because of the non-PC stuff but because some of the scenes are just painfully silly), it's still a fun, fresh humorous take on the era I've always loved the best of all.