Thoughts on ZORRO, Part 4: The Disney TV series (spoilers)

The 1957 Disney Zorro series draws a lot of inspiration from incarnations I covered in my previous posts. The first season consists of three loosely serialized 13-episode arcs in the spirit of the Republic serials, and the show’s composer, William Lava, previously scored Zorro’s Fighting Legion. William Witney, co-director of the first two serials, directs multiple episodes of season 2 and the first two of the subsequent hourlong specials. And George J. Lewis, the male lead from Zorro’s Black Whip and Clayton Moore’s sidekick from The Ghost of Zorro, plays Don Alejandro. Don Diego/Zorro is played by future Lost in Space star Guy Williams. This is, as far as I can tell, the first work in any medium to refer to the character by his now-standard name of Don Diego de la Vega instead of Vega or de Vega. Using Amazon’s search feature on the text of the final volume of Johnston McCulley’s selected stories, and comparing the page numbers to the table of contents, I find that the only McCulley…