I was talking to my mother once about the show, I guess after Graham bought me one or the other of the two seasons in the beautiful commemorative tin. My mother told me that she’d had a crush on Zorro, or possibly Guy Williams himself, when she was a child. Which was certainly information I hadn’t previously had about my mother. Then, I looked at a picture of grinning Guy Williams as Don Diego de la Vega that came in the tin. Boy, my mother has a type, huh? Guy Williams looked like my dad!

Don Diego returns from Spain in the first episode. He’s been away at school, where he also happens to have become quite the swordsman. He also brings with him a mute servant, Bernardo (Gene Sheldon). He finds out that his home, the sleepy little pueblo of Los Angeles, is under the heel of the oppressor, the commandante of the local presidio, Captain Enrique Sánchez Monastario. He decides that the best way to improve things for Los Angeles is to keep his abilities secret and to disguise himself as the mysterious and dashing Zorro, the Fox, and battle the commandante directly.

There was a lot more going on in the show, but that’s where it all starts. He of course defeats the Commandante, and there are other villains, and there’s this plot where maybe the Russians are taking over California, and an episode with “indentured servants” that’s got some undertones that someone must have noticed, even in the ’50s, but mostly, we’re in this to watch Zorro duel with anyone he has to. And maybe some people he doesn’t, provided he slashes a “Z” in their pants.

Disney put a lot of money into this show. There’s a certain amount of cost-cutting if you know where to look, but it’s in how they filmed and a resultant confusion in the actors as to what scenes went with which episode, since they’d film scenes for multiple episodes at the same time, if they were using the same location more than once. But those locations were sturdy; it’s clear, when you look around the locations, that those sets were built to last. The show was made to look like a real town, real homes, real people, and that’s all on the screen.

I haven’t actually read any of the Zorro books, I admit. But it amuses me that, just a couple of years after Wertham wrote about the evils of superheroes, Walt Disney made a very expensive show about one of the grandfathers of the modern superhero. Zorro doesn’t have powers, but then, neither does Batman. You can see a lot of Don Diego in Bruce Wayne, and you don’t even have to squint. Sure, Diego’s got his dad, the feisty old Don Alejandro (George J. Lewis), though we never, so far as I recall, quite know what happened to Diego’s mother. And maybe Diego doesn’t have a bunch of nifty gadgets, but he has a servant who spies for him and a secret passageway and a really well trained horse.

Oh, how I wanted that secret passageway as a child. Yeah, I wanted to sword fight and all that, too, but what I really wanted was the passages. It did kind of bug me that there aren’t a lot of girls on the show—Annette Funicello’s birthday appearance notwithstanding—but they probably wouldn’t have gotten anything interesting to do anyway, since, you know, debuted in 1957.

I’m not sure if the character of Bernardo is progressive for 1957 or not. He’s mute, and pretends to be deaf because it means people won’t worry about talking in front of him. Which means he can find out all sorts of things without anyone suspecting it’s where Zorro got the information. If they suspected, that would pretty well reveal who Zorro was. And Bernardo manages to have quite a personality for someone who communicates using a made-up sign language.

Including with the show’s other stand-out minor character, Sergeant Garcia (Henry Calvin). Garcia himself eventually gets a sidekick in the person of Corporal Reyes (Don Diamond), but it’s mostly Garcia’s job to be jovial and fat and easily bribed by food and wine and tell Diego all sorts of things that he isn’t supposed to know. And as the series goes on, he learns to communicate a bit with Bernardo, and the pair were so popular with fans that Disney kept them on contract after the show went off the air because he hoped to bring it back and knew it wouldn’t work without them—I don’t know if they got full salary, as Guy Williams did, but they made two other movies together!

Now, I have studied some of the actual history of this era, whenever this era is—it’s a little unclear, but it seems to be before Mexico broke away from Spain, except that was as early as 1810, and there are Americans running around in later episodes. I suppose you don’t really need a specific timeline so much as you need to evoke a certain atmosphere. Anyway, it does make a few of the details a little sketchy; the de la Vegas were unlikely to be all that concerned with the plight of the peasants. But it makes for a better story if they are, so they are.

But there are details here and there that make Angelenos amused. There’s an episode where some characters are supposed to tar a roof, so they dutifully schlep asphalt from the Rancho La Brea. And, of course, there are the missions, and the Camino Real, and all sorts of other details that they drill into you in California history classes when you’re a kid. Yes, the whole thing is that sort of romanticized Early California that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with reality, the Pueblo de Los Angeles that would eventually become the Mythic Los Angeles about which I’ve written before. Its roots are here, where Zorro ride out of the night when the full Moon is bright.

There are over eighty episodes of this show, and yet it was only two seasons. Seasons were hefty in those days. But the other reason you could be fooled into thinking this lasted longer than it did was that there were several thirteen-episode arcs per season, following Don Diego’s trip to Monterey or whatever. There would have been more were it not for a contract difficulty with ABC; by the time it got sorted out, Walt believed the time had passed and the audience didn’t care about the character anymore. I’m pretty sure my mom would have told him otherwise.