The Gold Old Wild Wild West

When I was a kid I loved "The Wild, Wild West." Everything about this show was flat out cool. James West [played by Robert Conrad] and Artemus Gordon [Ross Martin] were a team of Secret Service agents protecting our country from all sorts of evil. Think James Bond in the Wild West.

Did I say that everything about the show was cool? Good. Because everything about it was cool. And I mean everything.

Conrad and Martin were perfectly cast as West and Gordon. They had a rapport that seemed real and added an additional element to the show. Although the series was set in the time period following the Civil War, a science fiction element was involved in many of the episodes, but seldom did it go too far "over the top." West was given cool gadgets a la James Bond... and the fight / action scenes were the best on tv.

The show title sequence featured an animated cowboy in four different scenes with great theme music. Each commercial break ended with a cliffhanger and the scene would freeze, change into a line drawing and then replace a drawing on a title card.

The series was definitely ahead of it's time. It spawned two tv movies [not nearly as good] and a big screen movie staring Will Smith and Kevin Kline as West and Gordon which was really bad. I'd like to have seen Tom Cruise as West but the script was so bad, that I doubt that he'd have done much better with the project.

When I decided to do a piece for Zablo's Zone about "The Wild, Wild West," I visited a lot of fan pages. Reading interviews, episode summaries, and looking at pictures of all of the spin offs [comics, novelizations, etc.] brought back a lot of happy memories. When I was a kid, I loved "The Wild, Wild West."

I still do.