TELE-FOLKS DIRECTORY: A SALUTE TO THE SALOON GIRLS

Toobworld Central would like to salute a group of TV characters from the wild, wild West who are a major link between TV cowboys and the modern TV characters who resemble them.

"I'll take 'Whore Ads' for 100, Alex."

Sean Connery

'Saturday Night Live'

That's right - the Frontier Whores.

Of course, polite society and the antiquated system known as Standards And Practices under which most of our great TV Westerns flourished would have demanded that I should call them saloon girls.  But we know what they really were......

Mutliple roles played by the same actor account for many of the theories of relateeveety.  Some are identical cousins which is the classic norm.  There are the twin sons of different mothers, which isn't just a title for a rock 'n' roll album.  That accounts for most of the identical characters who share the same timeline.  But when it comes to mult-generational look-a-likes, especially when one of those involved is a cowboy, having a "saloon girl' in the family tree is a godsend for a televisiologist like me.  

Many of those early cowboy roles were played by actors who later went on to private eye action shows or sitcoms or just the frequent guest star circuit (James Garner, Will Hutchins, Pernell Roberts) so why not connect them in this way?  (It happened in reverse as well, but there could be other reasons for that.  A certain Weeping Angel, for example.)

The thing is, we might never have seen the character from the earlier timeline get married.  But there were always saloon girls in frontier towns who may have eventually become pregnant by some over-sexed sagebrush stud.

A lot of these saloon girls passed through the swinging doors of the Long Branch Saloon in Dodge City.  Miss Kitty Russell ran the Long Branch until she sold it to Miss Hannah (one of those characters from the 1970s who were transported back in Time by that Weeping Angel.)

But there were saloon girls in plenty of other TV Westerns and every so often this month we'll showcase one of them who might have had a hand in expanding the roster of TV characters......

Happy trails to you!