Carved Out

Last time out I promised a look at Zorro, which was an ABC-TV show that ran for two seasons from October 1957 until September 1959, occupying the Thursday night time slot from 8-8:30 and produced by Walt Disney Productions.  The show was set in 1820's Los Angeles and centered around Don Diego de la Vega, scion of a wealthy Spanish landowner who became the masked and caped Zorro when it was time to fight injustice. As they did with Davy Crockett, Disney spliced together pieces of several first season episodes to create a feature length film called The Sign of Zorro that was exhibited overseas before being released domestically in 1960. 

Unfortunately, despite robust ratings, the show had been cancelled by then due to a dispute between Disney and ABC, although four specials, the last airing in April of 1961, would follow on what was called the Disneyland show at the time, later known as the Wonderful World of Disney.  All ties were then severed and Disney bailed on ABC, which it had literally saved from financial ruin, shortly thereafter. Zorro the TV show lived on in syndication for many years thereafter though. And if you're thinking Batman lifted many elements from Zorro, who was featured in dozens of books and short stories and even a handful of movies starting in 1919 (the character was created by Johnston McCulley) when it debuted in Detective Comics in 1939, you would be correct.

Topps put out an 88 card set covering the show in 1958 that relied heavily upon images of series star Guy Williams, who portrayed the namesake acrobatic swordsman with panache and grace. While filmed in black-and-white, the cards were printed with muddy-ish looking color, heavy on browns and greens; it's not clear to me if WDP or Topps did the colorizing but it's not done very well:

The swashbuckling action scenes were a real high point of the show, which was kind of boring, at least to me as a kid, otherwise.  The backs are fairly pedestrian and reflect the semi-standardization Topps was embarking upon at the time:

The images all seem plucked from the show's first season, which is a shame as it robbed the world of seeing the pre-F-Troop Krazy Kat actor Don Diamond, who played Corporal Reyes in season two, on a  Topps card.

Sold in one and five cent wax packs along with ten cent cellos, with some vending thrown in, the set was massively overproduced and cards can be found with ease today, quite cheaply at that. The one cent pack is a mundane repeater:

While the five cent version is a lot more dramatic:

Box graphics were also bold, with some added elements and very nice photography worked in:

Indicia for fun, I like the Disney reference:

Zorro means "fox" in Spanish by the way. A succinct and pretty great history of the character can be found here.