MIRROR TOOBWORLD - "THE LONE RANGER"

John Hart was also that masked man
by Joe Southern
For one season, in 1952, Clayton Moore was replaced as the Lone Ranger on the popular television series. For 52 episodes, John Hart dashed across the television screen as the man behind the mask.

John Hart played the part from 1952 to 1954 on 52 episodes when Moore held out in a contact dispute.

For more on that story, click here.

The producer (Jack Chertok) was supposedly a cheap guy to work with and he figured that the kids watching the show would accept anybody under the mask as the Lone Ranger. But they knew; boy, did they know! So after a year, Clayton Moore came back and John Hart moved on to other endeavours.

For Toobworld, this is how it plays out: when we see Clayton Moore as the Lone Ranger, we're watching the actual Lone Ranger. Those 52 episodes with John Hart are part of a TV series within the main Toobworld in which John Hart portrayed the legendary hero of the West. It's just that unlike many other TV shows we see from Toobworld, there was no framing device of TV characters watching the program in other shows.

So the Lone Ranger in the Mirror Toobworld would look, sound, and act like John Hart, not Clayton Moore. But there was no danger of him crossing over into the "real" world of Earth Prime-Time. That's because the Lone Ranger remained in his proper timeline - the mid-1880s after the Civil War.

However, John Hart did show up in two other TV shows of the 1980s as the Lone Ranger - 'The Fall Guy' and 'Happy Days'. He's not a video transfer from Mirror Toobworld; he's simply appearing as the televersion of himself, in costume as one of his two most famous roles. (Natty Bumppo of 'The Last Of The Mohicans' being the other.)