Pursuits: Identity Crisis

If you saw last year’s Lone Ranger movie, then you have my sympathies.

When I first heard that Disney was going to revive the Lone Ranger character with Johnny Depp as an integral part of the franchise, I was excited.

 

The Lone Ranger is one of those television characters from my childhood who faded away as the world grew more cynical. But then, the same was true of Zorro — with whom the Lone Ranger shares some characteristics — and the movies that revived Zorro were superhits, turning both Antonio Banderas and Catherine Zeta-Jones into A-list movie stars. Surely, the Zorro treatment could also be applied to the Lone Ranger, I believed.

 

   If I am beginning to lose you, then I’d better explain. The Lone Ranger is an iconic American fictional character who started out on radio. The premise is that a posse of Texas rangers are ambushed and killed by the evil Butch Cavendish gang. But one ranger survives. He fashions a mask from the clothing of one of the dead rangers (who also happens to be his brother) and with the help of his trusty Red Indian sidekick — Tonto — he rides off into the Wild West to fight bad guys.

 

   In many ways, the Lone Ranger character has as much iconography as, say, Batman. His origin is founded in tragedy and his motivation, at least initially, is revenge. Batman has the Batmobile, but the Lone Ranger has a white horse called Silver who gets a name check in every story or episode — because our hero’s catchphrase is, “Hiyo, Silver, awaaay!” Unlike other characters (say Superman or Batman) he has always had a piece of music associated with him: the overture from the Rossini opera William Tell.

 

   Like Batman, his true identity is a mystery because he always wears a mask. Like most superheroes, he has a sidekick. To his credit though, he does not partner a juvenile WASP but chooses a fully-grown man of ethnic origin. Just as Batman has the Batarang, the Lone Ranger has a silver bullet. Integral to the character is the notion that he has access to a secret silver mine. He fashions his bullets from silver that he mines at this secret location. And like Batman or Superman, he does not kill villains. Even when he shoots them, he aims for their hands or other body parts. As each of his bullets is so expensive, you could even argue that far from murdering villains, he actually enriches them.

 

   I got into the Lone Ranger because I watched the TV show when I was a little boy. But the character had already been around for decades. Many years later, I saw an edited version of a movie serial in which the Lone Ranger first appeared wearing a mask that covered nearly all of his face. In later versions, the mask was abbreviated which had the effect of not muffling his lines.

 

   Even as a kid, I was intrigued by the fact that the Lone Ranger had a Red Indian sidekick, especially as he went into battle with other Red Indians in many of the episodes. Why did Tonto feel obliged to stick with this white guy and fight his own kind, I often wondered. Clearly, I wasn’t the only one to find this odd because a popular joke in the 1960s went something like this. The Lone Ranger and Tonto ride into an ambush of wild screaming Red Indians. The Lone Ranger looks at Tonto and says, “Tonto, we are surrounded!” Tonto looks back at him and says, steel in his voice, “What do you mean ‘we’, paleface?”

 

"Most movie stars would have asked to play the title character. But perhaps because he is kind of short to be the Lone Ranger, Depp wanted to play Tonto."

   But, give the series its due. At a time when Red Indians were being portrayed by Hollywood as bloodthirsty savages, Tonto was written as an upright and decent sort who actually saved the Lone Ranger’s life, after the ambush by the Cavendish gang.

 

   Most Lone Ranger fans remember the character from the TV show that ran for five seasons with Clayton Moore playing the Masked Man. Even after the show was cancelled, Moore went on to make a career out of the Lone Ranger. He made frequent public appearances in costume and would never allow himself to be photographed without his mask. He went on to open Lone Ranger restaurants in the hick towns of middle America and kept the character alive.

 

   When the baby boomers came of age, plans were made to revive the Lone Ranger. Steven Spielberg prepared a screenplay called Silver Bullet: The legend of the Lone Ranger. But Spielberg’s movie never got made. Instead, a really crappy Lone Ranger movie was released in 1981, starring a newcomer who was so bad that they had to dub his voice. Battling rumours that he was gay, the hapless actor played the Lone Ranger like a male model in an ad for designer jeans. When the film flopped, it seemed like curtains for the Masked Man.

 

   But by then, new battles had begun. The owners of the Lone Ranger character began to get increasingly annoyed at the way in which Clayton Moore had appropriated the identity. They took legal action to prevent him from appearing in a Lone Ranger costume, complete with mask. No problem. Moore ditched the mask but wore wraparound sunglasses instead. As most of his appearances were in hick towns, nobody seemed to think it odd that this Lone Ranger wore sunglasses.

 

   In the three decades since the Lone Ranger movie flopped, there were cartoons on TV aimed at children and at least two pilots for possible TV shows. But nothing worked. Till, a few years ago, Johnny Depp indicated that he had a soft spot for the Lone Ranger legend.

 

   Most movie stars would have asked to play the title character. But perhaps because he is kind of short to be the Lone Ranger, Depp wanted to play Tonto. Naturally enough, the script was rewritten to make Tonto the real hero with the Lone Ranger played as a bit of an idiot. Then, Depp decided that it would be cool to make Tonto sort of eccentric. So, while the Tonto character had traditionally worn a Red Indian feather in his head, Depp decided that he wanted to carry an entire dead bird on his head. (Don’t ask!)
 
 

   Because this was now a Johnny Depp vehicle, the budget soared to $150 million or so. The shoot was troubled. The project was nearly scrapped. And the first cut was so bad that they had to reassemble the cast and reshoot much of the movie. Even then, the picture they released stinks and went to be a critical and commercial failure.
 
 

   And that, I imagine, will be the end of the Lone Ranger for another decade or so, till a new generation comes along and tries to revive the character. Which is a bit of a shame because the Lone Ranger has immense potential. But, I suspect, his cinematic fate will match that of the Phantom, one of the all-time great comic characters who has never found the success he deserves in modern media.