40 years after the final broadcast, Death Valley Days returns to television, thanks to Rio Tinto’s Dr. Williams Adams.
LONE PINE, CALIFORNIA (MINEWEB) – In September 1930, the Pacific Coast Borax Company and its advertising agency, McCann-Erikson created one of the longest running western radio broadcasts and television series in U.S. history—solely to sell Boraxo hand soap and 20-Mule Team Borax laundry detergent booster to the American public.
Since its first radio broadcast on NBC’s old Blue Network to its transition to television as a western anthology series in 1950 to the final episode aired in 1975, “Death Valley Days” would also be credited with launching the political career of former U.S. President Ronald Reagan, whose two years as host of one of the most popular western television series in U.S. history was credited with helping elect him as governor of California.
The radio show produced more than 600 episodes, while the TV anthology would yield another 458 episodes, all written by advertising copywriter Ruth Woodman, who also dramatized the story of Pacific Coast Borax Company, which would subsequently become U.S. Borax and a Rio Tinto subsidiary.
Woodman, who spent every summer traveling through California and Nevada to soak up western history, wrote scripts based on such renowned and real-life characters as prospector Death Valley Scotty; bandit Black Bar; Ishi, the sole surviving member of the Yahi Tribe; and Sequoia, who developed a written language for his tribe and for whom California’s towering redwood trees are named.
Pacific Coast’s product division including Boraxo and 20 Mule Team Borax Laundry Additive was sold years ago to the Dial Corporation.
However, thanks to a $3 million restoration program launched by Rio Tinto and Cinelicious, the series will be rebroadcast in January 2015 on the Starz Encore Western Cable Network for the first time in four decades. “Death Valley Days’” radio episodes were donated by U.S. Borax to the Library of Congress in 2008.
Because U.S. Borax directly marketed the series as commercial programs to individual TV stations throughout the United States., no television network was ever given the rights to broadcast the TV shows.
The TV episodes will be presented to the Smithsonian Institution archives when the restoration project is completed by early 2017, according to Steve Wystrach, who manages the U.S. Borax film archives and is supervising the restoration.
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