Scott Forbes played Bowie, and I could not have come up with his name without Google-help. I do remember, seeing this title image above, that a Bowie knife comes whirling through the air and sticks in that door—or whatever it is.
Trusty Wikipedia tells me that the knife was more prominent on the early episodes, but began to diminish when complaints of violence began to swell; in fact, it seems to have been one of the first TV shows to get a lot of criticism for its violence. So, Jim, save The Knife for special occasions, K?
Link to theme song.
Listening to that song right now, by the way, reminded me of something that the audio confirmed: In the early episodes, the singers pronounced Bowie to rhyme with Joey. And that must have inflamed Texans, for as I knew (being an authority on Jim Bowie: Boy with a Hunting Knife), his surname rhymed with Dewey.
As I recall it wasn’t too long before the producers fixed that little problem.
Needless to say, in the TV series Bowie was the consummate Good Guy. Helping others, defending the weak, battling the bad Guys—these were his specialties, these and whipping out a knife at the precisely correct time and hurling it with superb accuracy at ... whatever, whomever.
I’ve learned in subsequent years—and after a lot of subsequent reading—that most of what is in the song (and the show) is just false. Bowie was not one who “fought for the rights of man” (as the theme song says): He was, as I said the other day, a notorious slave-trader and con artist. Hardly the kind of guy you want to impress seventh graders like me. Oh, and he had two enslaved people with him in the Alamo. Santa Anna spared their lives.
But Bowie and the show did impress me back then. (I was still into the heroic version of his life.) And I loved the show itself—especially whenever The Knife emerged, as it frequently did.
Link to an episode.
As I said above, I read a lot about the Alamo story and its principals later in my life, but this new book I just read, Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth (2021), tells the story and its long aftermath (clear up till 2020) and adds some alarming detail.
I’ll get into some of it next time, but how about this sentence very near the end?
“To learn the real lessons of the Texas Revolt, we need to learn the truth about Bowie, Travis, and Crockett. Bowie was a murderer, slaver, and con man; Travis was a pompous, racist agitator and syphilitic lech; and Crockett was a self-promoting old fool who was a captive to his own myth” (340).
Ouch!
To be continued.
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