Walt Disney Treasures: Zorro—The Complete First Season, 1957-1958

Zorro, the pulp-fiction adventurer created by Johnston McCulley in print and transformed into a screen icon in The Mark of Zorro with Douglas Fairbanks (and in numerous sequels and remakes, the most famous being the 1940 swashbuckler starring Tyrone Power), was brought to television in 1957 by Walt Disney in his first foray into a weekly series. Guy Williams, a B-movie actor with matinee-idol looks, leapt into the saddle with all the flair of a born action hero to play the masked swordsman, a Robin Hood-like figure in old California. With the help of his loyal servant Bernardo (Gene Sheldon), a mute who pretends to be deaf and plays the clown in front of company, Zorro hides his identity, posing as spoiled cavalier Don Diego to fool the tyrannical Capitán Monasterio (Britt Lomond). The series mixes frontier action with broad comedy (thanks largely to the indolent Sgt. Garcia, played by Henry Calvin as a thick-headed caricature) and superhero secrecy (Zorro has a cave hideaway, just like Batman), and the charm still holds after all these years. The show ran for two full seasons and was revived in hour-long episodes on the anthology series Walt Disney Presents. Film critic Leonard Maltin provides an introduction for this six-disc set, which features all 39 half-hour first season episodes, as well as DVD extras such as two bonus Zorro episodes from Walt Disney Presents (with guest stars Gilbert Roland and Rita Moreno) and the featurette “The Life and Legend of Zorro.” [Note: Zorro: The Complete Second Season is also available]. Highly recommended. (S. Axmaker)