page_title: Bonanza
section_title: Legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Bonanza / Legacy
caption_attribution_description: Photo of Lorne Greene from the television program Bonanza.
context_page_description: Bonanza is an American Western television series that ran on NBC from September 12, 1959, to January 16, 1973. Lasting 14 seasons and 431 episodes, Bonanza is NBC's longest-running western, and ranks overall as the second-longest-running western series on U.S. network television, and within the top 10 longest-running, live-action American series. The show continues to air in syndication. The show is set in the 1860s and it centers on the wealthy Cartwright family who live in the vicinity of Virginia City, Nevada, bordering Lake Tahoe. The series initially starred Lorne Greene, Pernell Roberts, Dan Blocker and Michael Landon and later featured Guy Williams, David Canary, Mitch Vogel and Tim Matheson. The show is known for presenting pressing moral dilemmas.
  The title "Bonanza" is a term used by miners in regard to a large vein or deposit of silver ore, from Spanish bonanza and commonly refers to the 1859 revelation of the Comstock Lode of rich silver ore mines under the town of Virginia City, not far from the fictional Ponderosa Ranch that the Cartwright family operated. The show's theme song, also titled "Bonanza", became a hit song.
context_section_description: The film Twin Town alludes to and parodies Bonanza. Some of the central characters are members of a Cartwright family, and live in a home called Ponderosa.
  The 1969 German school comedy Hurra, die Schule brennt! features its co-star Peter Alexander wearing a duplicate of Ben Cartwright's outfit and singing a cover version of the Bonanza theme at a school play originally meant to be a dramatization of Schiller's William Tell.
  In American Desperado, co-authored by Jon Roberts (né John Riccobono) and award-winning journalist/author Evan Wright, Roberts shares in Chapter 3 that he missed his "Sea Hunt and Bonanza, [his] favorite TV shows", when his mother sent him to Palermo to live with his father, Nat Riccobono. Roberts confides in the book that Riccobono – a mobster and illegal alien – had been deported to Sicily following the Apalachin Meeting. After returning to the United States "after a few weeks", Roberts found that, "Watching Bonanza on TV was one thing I had in common with normal kids. [...] But when I listened to how other people talked about Bonanza, I was amazed. [...] My way of seeing it was different.  To me the Cartwrights had the might and power, and they used it to take over all that land on their Ponderosa ranch. [...] From the way I saw it, the Cartwrights were the same as my father and uncles in the Mafia. They understood force." Roberts further discloses that, upon his return to the United States: "Because of all the stories in the news about my family, Riccobono was a bad name.  My mother told me I had to change my last name.  I changed my name to John Pernell Roberts, after Pernell Roberts, who played the oldest son on Bonanza. I liked him best because he wore black.  His hat, his vest, his gun belt were all black.  He was the top enforcer for the family. He was the kind of guy I wanted to be. I wanted to steal my own Ponderosa when I grew up." Roberts repeats this explanation for his name change in other media, as well, such as the documentary Cocaine Cowboys.
  On the first season of Law & Order: Criminal Intent, episode "Homo Homini Lupus", Detective Robert Goren is able to catch and arrest Simon Matic, a former Serbian soldier wanted for extortion and rape by calling Matic's cellphone after following him into a crowded restaurant. His victim had told Goren that his ringtone was the theme to Bonanza. Matic also goes by the name of "Little Joe."
  The couch gag for an episode of The Simpsons, titled "We're on the Road to D'ohwhere", is a parody of the show's title sequence featuring a map of Springfield burning to reveal the Simpson family riding toward the camera.
  In the TV series The Golden Girls, an episode titled "Wham, Bam, Thank You, Mammy", Blanche (Rue McClanahan) gives her former nanny, Viola Watkins, a music box and she opens it and the Bonanza theme song plays, to which Blanche says "The Theme from Bonanza".
  In the TV series Blossom's episode "The Departure", Joey (Joey Lawrence) asks if Little Joe, Hoss, and Hop Sing have their own islands.
  Some resources suggest that Ben Cartwright was the basis for Jeff Tracy and that the Tracy family as a whole was based on the Cartwrights in Gerry Anderson's Supermarionation series Thunderbirds.
  In the TV series Maverick episode "Three Queens Full" Bart (Jack Kelly) is blackmailed by Joe Wheelwright (Jim Backus), owner of the Subrosa ranch, into escorting mail order brides for Wheelwright's three sons Aaron, Moose and Small Paul.
  The German Western comedy Der Schuh des Manitu borrows the name of the Ponderosa Ranch for a beauty ranch named "Puderosa" (engl.: "Powderosa").
  In the 1987 Barry Levinson film Tin Men, aluminum siding salesman Sam (Jackie Gayle) regales his siding sales buddies on Mondays with comments on the previous night's Bonanza episode.
  In a January 1998 episode (# 15) of 3rd Rock from the Sun, characters Dick, Tommy, and Harry are driving west to rescue Sally somewhere near the impending Super Bowl in San Diego. A shot of a USA map burns from a single point as does the map in the Bonanza opening sequence.
caption: Ben Cartwright (Lorne Greene) on an elephant.
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