The alamo narrative has always been a challenge for storytellers, in part because everyone knows how it ends, and the “bad guys” win. Another problem is the ensemble cast. Who to feature? The puffed-up Travis? The brooding Bowie? Crockett was the best-known name, but he played a soldier, not a leader, and as such deserved third billing at best. That’s what he got in 1937’s Heroes of the Alamo. Other films told Crockett’s life story but, intimidated by the Alamo’s dramatic challenges, left the battle out entirely, preferring to focus on his bear-hunting days.
Nor were modern history books exactly putting him front and center. Neither Barker nor Williams gave him much thought. In 1945’s The Age of Jackson, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called Crockett a “phony frontiersman” and a con artist who wasn’t smart enough to cut it in Washington. But alone among the Alamo’s “heroes,” Crockett had star potential. He’d shown it during his lifetime. He had been a stalwart of comic books and children’s literature for more than a century. All you had to do was ignore the historical David Crockett, the failed congressman, and embrace his alter ego, Davy. The rugged individualism, the frontier populism, the quips, the bears—not to mention a heroic death at the Alamo. It was all there, waiting for a clever storyteller to bring it to a wider audience.
Which is where Disney comes in. In 1948, the chairman of Disney Studios was in a funk. Hollywood had been plagued by labor strikes for years, and Disney had suffered his share. Like a lot of studio bigwigs, Disney was convinced Communists were behind it all. It was driving him nuts. Because Disney hated union members, many of the studio’s best animators were leaving. Meanwhile Disney’s animated films, once considered technological wonders, were losing audience to live-action movies, especially action-packed westerns. Disney hatched an idea to solve all his problems at once, by making live-action movies and imbuing them with “traditional” American values centered on families and patriotism. He wanted dramatic story lines with a hero who faced adversity, experienced self-discovery, and instilled viewers with a moral. He wanted heroes who battled a more powerful foe, a corrupt government, a tyrant, a criminal.
Disney’s writers pored over history books and folklore. Their first discoveries, such as Don Diego “Zorro” de la Vega, were featured in live-action shorts that played before Disney’s animated films. These shorts were the perfect length for a new medium, television, that was sweeping America. Most studios were dismissing it as a fad. Walt Disney sensed it was far more than that.