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The Cisco Kid TV Trivia

# First television series to be shot in color

# Diablo was The Cisco Kid's horse. Loco was Pancho's horse.

# In the 1953 season star Duncan Renaldo was injured in a rock fall and hospitalized, resulting in his missing nine episodes. To cover for Renaldo's absence on the show, the Cisco Kid was shown wearing masks, disguised as a ghost and in other situations where a double could be used for him and footage of him that had been previously shot but not used was also used. He recorded his lines from his hospital bed.

# last lines of each episode
The Cisco Kid: Oh, Pancho!
Pancho: Oh, Cisco!

The Cisco Kid - Collection 1 DVD


The Cisco Kid is a durable half-hour western television series starring Duncan Renaldo (1904-1980) in the title role, The Cisco Kid, and Leo Carrillo (1880-1961) as the jovial sidekick, Pancho. Cisco and Pancho were technically desperadoes, wanted for unspecified crimes, were instead viewed by the poor as Robin Hood figures who assisted the downtrodden when law enforcement officers proved corrupt or unwilling to help.

Production notes

The characters and story were created by the American short story author O Henry, pen name of William Sidney Porter. The Cisco Kid character is taken from O Henry's "The Caballero's Way", published in 1907 in the collection Heart of the West. Films and television depict the Cisco Kid as a heroic Mexican caballero, but in the original story, the Kid is non-Hispanic and a real outlaw.

Renaldo, a native of Spain, and Carrillo, a native of Los Angeles, were nevertheless the first regular Hispanic television stars. Desi Arnaz, Sr, of Cuban descent, went on the air with his wife and co-star, Lucille Ball, in I Love Lucy a year later. When the series began, Carrillo was already seventy years of age; Renaldo, forty-six. Part of the humor of the series is reflected in Carrillo's mangling of the English language. Viewers also became acquainted with the characters' horses, Cisco's Diablo and Pancho's Loco.

The program, somewhat similar to The Lone Ranger, aired via syndication from 1950-1956. Because most of the 156 episodes were filmed in color, the series was in demand until the 1970s. However, most viewers of the original run saw the program in black and white. In 1956, the year the run ended, only 0.05% of US households with a television set had a color set, and 10 years later only 9.7% had a color set.

The Cisco Kid was nominated in 1953 for an Emmy Award for children's programming. It was filmed by ZIV Productions, since MGM Television, at the Ray Corrigan Ranch in Simi Valley in Ventura County, California.

In 1994, Turner Network Television ran a television movie on the pair, with Jimmy Smits as Cisco and Cheech Marin as Pancho. The Cisco Kid actually began on radio in 1943, seven years before the television series

Guest stars

A number of recurring guest stars on The Cisco Kid later had television series of their own:

* Tristram Coffin (1909-1990) appeared in nine episodes as banker Tom Barton. He later portrayed the real Thomas H. Rynning, first commander of the Arizona Rangers, in the syndicated series 26 Men (1957-1959), with co-star Kelo Henderson.

* William Fawcett (1894-1974) appeared seven times as "Grampaw" between 1953 and 1956, at which time he joined the cast of NBC's Fury in the role of cantankerous Broken Wheel ranch hand Pete Wilkey.

* Gail Davis (1925-1997), later star of the syndicated Annie Oakley series and a particular favorite of Gene Autry, appeared five times on The Cisco Kid in the role of Ruth Drake. First, however, she portrayed Nancy King in the 1950 episode "False Marriage", the story of a young woman planning to marry a gangster named Duke Ralston played by Robert Livingston. Nancy's uncle, played by Russell Hicks (1895-1957), asks Cisco to help him to halt the pending marriage.

* Phyllis Coates (born 1927), also Lois Lane on The Adventures of Superman, with George Reeves, guest starred four times as Marge Lacey.

* Lyle Talbot (1902-1996), friendly neighbor Joe Randolph on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, appeared four times as a judge.

* Glenn Strange (1899-1973), later the stern-faced Sam Noonan, the bartender on CBS's Gunsmoke, appeared twice as Blake.

* Sheb Wooley (1921-2003), later a singer and the cowboy Pete Nolan on CBS's Rawhide, starred twice as Bill Bronson.

* Robert Blake (born 1933), years later the fictional detective Baretta, starred twice in the role of Alfredo.

Other guest stars follow:

* Forrest Taylor (1883-1965), who appeared ten times as a sheriff

* Kermit Maynard (1897-1971), brother of western film star Ken Maynard, nine times as Albuquerque Jones

* Myron Healey (1923-2005), five times as Don White

* Robert J. Wilke (1914-1989), three times as Barney

* Denver Pyle (1920-1997), twice as an unidentified bank robber

* Russ Conway (1913-2009), as E.W. Akers in "The Ventriloquist"

* Iron Eyes Cody (1904-1999), twice as the Indian Chief Big Cloud

* Gloria Talbott (1931-2000), twice as Amelia Lawrence

* I. Stanford Jolly (1900-1978), ten times as Gus Brown, and

* John Doucette (1921-1994), twice as Sandy Harris.