The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 91, July 1987 - April, 1988 Page: 458

Southwestern Historical Quarterly

AIIY, 6 G 0/ TilL WI/ FRON/Li?
Figure 1. Lobby poster from Walt Disney's Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Fron-
tier, 1955. Photograph, io/4 x 14 in. Courtesy Division of Motion Pictures, Library
of Congress.
romanticized characterization of Crockett as the high-minded and
fearless frontiersman who fell so heroically at the Alamo did not add
much to our understanding of the Crockett of fact and history. More to
the point here, Parker's interpretation also did not leave us with even a
proximate impression of what Crockett looked like in actual life. Nor
did it stimulate much popular desire to discover the facts of his appear-
ance. Although the Crockett mania of 1955 sparked a somewhat greater
interest among Americana specialists in prints based on life portraits of
Crockett, for most Americans the face of this early nineteenth-century
backwoodsman would, for the next several decades at least, remain syn-
onymous with the features of the actor Disney had chosen to play him.

458