Throughout the ‘30s and ‘40s-and then again throughout the ‘50s once the characters transitioned to television-little boys (and tomboy girls) wore official and unofficial domino masks, the General Mills-sponsored premium rings and deputy badges, having devoured boxes of Cheerios to amount the boxtops needed. He shot guns out of villains’ hands and treated every arrest as a teachable moment. He wore a white hat, rode a “firey white horse”, shot silver bullets, looked out for the oppressed and his best friend, a member of the Potawatomi (which would make him, in Texas, very far south of his tribe’s normal territory, I believe, but what do I know?) who was constantly the target of simple-minded racism and prejudice. He wore a mask for the same reason as Batman-to strike fear in the hearts of superstitious and usually uneducated criminals, generally men made mean by the world or, mostly, out of simple stupid greed. At a time when Wall Street had failed the entire country, once a week, The Lone Ranger looked out for the interests of the “little people”. Trendle, and writer Fran Striker, conceived of the masked man and his “trusted Indian companion” as a window into an even simpler time. WXYZ (Detroit) radio station owner, George W. The Lone Ranger first rode into culture in 1933, in the midst of the Great Depression, where radio was really the only thing that was free. McClain aside, who do we aspire to be in our post-9/11 world when our most recent heroes can’t even bear to be seen in public with white hats? (That’s the way it started, anyway, and the “real” John McClain is still in there despite the character assassination of A Good Day to Die Hard.) Certainly McClain is a distillation of our “classic” heroes, but passed through the emotionally-fried filter of the ‘70s and ‘80s. He was constantly frightened, stressed out, but brave five seconds longer than most other good people would be. He started as a regular guy who did the right thing because he was the only one who could. A modern prototypical hero that comes to my mind is John McClain, played by Bruce Willis in the Die Hard movies. But we live in a culture of anti-heroism, people who do good because it’s in their best interest.
It’s very easy to look at these proto-pop culture ideals askance and find them dismissable because for the last two decades Americans have stopped believing in heroes.
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