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Klondike
Genre	Western
Written by	Richard Donovan Jack Gariss Robert Hamner Lou Huston Sam Peckinpah
Directed by	William Conrad Elliott Lewis Sam Peckinpah
Starring	Ralph Taeger James Coburn
Theme music composer	Mann Curtis
Country of origin	United States
Language(s)	English
No. of seasons	1
No. of episodes	17
Production
Running time	30 mins.
Production company(s)	Ziv Television Programs
Broadcast
Original channel	NBC
Picture format	Black-and-white
Original run	October 10, 1960 – February 13, 1961

Klondike is a 17-episode half-hour Western television series that aired on NBC. The series premiered on October 10, 1960 and ran until February 13, 1961. It faced stiff competition from The Danny Thomas Show on CBS and the second half of the first-season detective series Surfside 6 starring Troy Donahue on ABC. Klondike followed Dale Robertson's Tales of Wells Fargo on the NBC schedule.^[1]

Synopsis

Klondike was set during 1897 in the gold rush town of Skagway in the Alaskan Klondike region, starring Ralph Taeger and James Coburn, with supporting roles for Joi Lansing as Goldie and Mari Blanchard as Kathy O'Hara.

Taeger played the "good guy" Mike Halliday, described by one observer as "Clint Walker without the charisma", and Coburn portrayed the con man Jeff Durain. When Klondike did not attract a large audience, NBC cancelled the show but shifted Taeger and Coburn to play detectives in Mexico in the short-lived Acapulco series. Klondike was related to the hour-long 1959-1960 ABC series The Alaskans starring Roger Moore, Jeff York, and Dorothy Provine, also set in the port city of Skagway and during the 1890s.^[2]

In the debut episode, the characters rush to Alaska to search for gold. Other episodes included "The Golden Burro" with Edgar Buchanan and Robert F. Simon about a burro who could find and dig for gold; "Bathhouse Justice", in which a bathhouse serves as a courtroom in a murder case; "Sure Thing, Men" (with Tyler McVey as Emil Watkins) in which the group seeks a mining site only to run afoul of an old sourdough; "88 Keys to Trouble", in which someone releases all the inmates from the jail; "Saints and Stickups" in which a person of apparent moral bearing robs a stagecoach, and "Swing Your Partner", in which a group comes to town and dances the night away. In the series finale, "The Hostages", featuring Chris Alcaide, some townspeople are held hostage for their gold. The others work to free them, and to salvage the treasure for which they had all labored so diligently. Ron Hayes appeared as Harold Enright in the episode "Sitka Madonna". Judson Pratt guest starred as Dan Sheean in the episode "The Unexpected Candidate".

Various episodes of Klondike were directed by Sam Peckinpah and William Conrad, later Frank Cannon on CBS's detective series Cannon. Supporting roles were played by Western tough guy L.Q. Jones, a native Texan as Joe Teel,^[3] and by Karl Swenson, a recognized character actor of Swedish descent in two different roles.^[4]

Episodes

References

External links

• Klondike at the Internet Movie Database
• Klondike at TV.com