Saturday, July 16, 2016

Forgotten TV: Mackenzie's Raiders (1958)

Ziv Television is best remembered for shows like Sea Hunt, Highway Patrol, & The Cisco Kid. Those series aside, they also produced a large number of series that didn't quite last as long.

Mackenzie's Raiders, a fictionalized account of the exploits of Col. Ranald Mackenzie (Richard Carlson), was one such show. In a way, Raiders was an amalgam of genres. It was a Western, a crime drama, and a spy series rolled into one, as Mackenzie and his Raiders were under secret orders from President Ulysses S. Grant in the post-Civil War US.

In the episode, "The Hawk", Mackenzie faces off with a former soldier (DeForest Kelley, well before Star Trek) he court-martialed years before.



Announcer-narrator Art Gilmore was also serving in the former capacity for Red Skelton around the same time. Voice actor John Stephenson guest stars in this episode, as well.

Rating: B.

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