Somewhat less well known that the ’70s trend of “revisionist Westerns” (a term I tend to think means “Westerns where you don’t like any of the characters”) was a stretch of comedy Westerns. The best known of these, of course, is Blazing Saddles. In my opinion, the actual best is Support Your Local Sheriff. All told, Disney made a surprising number of them. This is neither the best-known nor the best, but it’s certainly one of them. It also stars several people who were in better ones, which is not necessarily a good decision.

Elderly Jasper Bloodshy (Jim Dale) asks Mayor Ragsdale (Darren McGavin) and Sheriff Denver Kid (Don Knotts) of the town named after him to meet him in the middle of nowhere to discuss his will. He is knocked off a cliff, like you do, and presumed dead. In fact, he has faked his own death as part of an elaborate ruse to reunite his long-separated identical twin sons, Wild Billy and Eli (both also Dale). The boys are to compete for their inheritance, but Mayor Ragsdale has realized that, if both sons should die during the competition, the estate goes to the executor of the will—Ragsdale. So he hires some local goons to kill the brothers.

Naturally, the sons are as different in personality as possible. Wild Billy, as the name implies, is your standard Western gunman. Everyone in Bloodshy is afraid of him. Eli, meanwhile, was taken back to England by his mother and is now a missionary in Philadelphia. He is the guardian of your standard Precocious Disney Orphans, Roxanne (Debbie Lytton) and Marcus (Michael Sharrett). On his way out to Bloodshy, everyone mistakes him for his brother and runs in terror, except incoming schoolmarm Jenny (Karen Valentine). Who of course falls for him.

It kind of tells you something about the cast of this film that Don Knotts was marketed as the selling point, even though practically all he does is a wacky series of bits where he and his archfoe, Rattlesnake (Jack Elam), attempt to shoot things out with one another but end up in one way or another unable to do so. The problem with this is that Don Knotts was of course in both The Apple Dumping Gang and The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again, and Elam was in both the latter and also the two Support Your Local movies, and honestly it kind of proves the adage that you should never remind your audience of a better movie.

Let’s be honest, though; it’s weird to have the hero of a Disney Western be a missionary. Though his proselytizing seems mostly limited to lecturing the children about keeping good thoughts and so forth. Which is nice and all, but I’m not sure Jesus ever actually comes up. Or God much, really. So he’s a missionary for decency, which I guess we could stand more of, but it’s still weird. The goal is to make him as different from Wild Billy as possible, and that means Salvation Army. Okay, I’ll go along with that. Why not? But at the same time, I think they didn’t want to offend anyone by putting actual religious beliefs into it.

I’ll also say that this feels like the sort of will that could be challenged in court. Okay, perhaps not in the wild West; this is another one of those Western towns that doesn’t appear to have a legal structure beyond mayor and sheriff. Their jail has burned down and is basically a frame sort of vaguely holding up some bars. It’s not a bad joke, though it’s not as funny as the well-constructed brick building with no bars in Sheriff. Still, while we pay a lot of lip service to the idea that you can write whatever lunatic will you want, in practice, I’m not sure you can require people to endanger their lives this way.

And Jenny. Oh, Jenny. Yet again, we have a woman as the calm voice of reason who is also capable of things like driving a runaway team. I feel as though the comedy Westerns were a lot more likely to give us this sort of character. She’s something of an anachronism, but then, the sort of woman who’d go West would generally be the sort of woman with more independence, right? Anyway, it’s not as though there’s any doubt from the moment she appears what will happen to her. Which, incidentally, meant she wouldn’t be allowed to keep teaching in a lot of schools in those days—married women weren’t allowed to teach. Which means the school is losing a teacher almost as soon as they gain one, if you think about it.

Oh, I’ve also just discovered that Amazon has a trove of obscure Disney stuff on streaming. Not Prime, of course, but streaming. This includes the notorious White Wilderness installment of the True-Life Adventure series. As the budget permits, I will start renting from these. Contributions to that fund are definitely accepted.