By BRUCE DANCIS
Scripps Howard News Service

You can take your Trigger, your Champion, your Silver and all the other television horses. For my money, the only TV horse worth his oats was the golden palomino, Mister Ed.

Sure, those other horses regularly showed off their valor and loyalty to Roy Rogers, Gene Autry and the Lone Ranger, respectively. But unlike Mister Ed, they couldn’t talk. Nor could they use the telephone, play a phonograph record or watch TV. And, as far as I can tell, neither Trigger, Champion nor Silver was smarter than their masters.

Call it a guilty pleasure, but what has me whinnying this week is the long-awaited release of “Mister Ed: The Complete First Season” (four discs, Shout! Factory, $39.99, not rated). The box set includes the series’ first 26 episodes from January to July 1961, when “Mister Ed” debuted in syndication; in what was then a rare move in the TV business, CBS picked up the show for its second season, beginning in October 1961. The series remained on the air until 1966.

I don’t think I’m alone in my guilt — those of a certain age will have little trouble singing the series’ catchy theme song (“A horse is a horse, of course, of course …”) or remembering the inimitable way Ed called his owner — “Willlburrrr.”

The horse that achieved TV stardom and won his first PATSY (Picture Animals Top Star of the Year) Award in 1962 was originally named Bamboo Harvester. An elegant steed, he had appeared in Madison Square Garden horse shows and in the Rose Bowl Parade before embarking upon his career in show biz, according to Ken Beck and Jim Clark’s “The Encyclopedia of TV Pets.”

Mister Ed’s theatrical ancestors were not the stallions of TV and movie Westerns. Instead, he has a direct lineage to Francis the Talking Mule, the equine who starred in seven movie comedies in the 1950s, mostly alongside Donald O’Connor. The low-budget Francis movies were directed by Arthur Lubin, a veteran of Abbott and Costello comedies who later created, produced and directed most of the episodes of “Mister Ed.”

The first-season DVD seeks to rectify one historical wrong — the voice actor behind Mister Ed never received onscreen credit. The DVD includes “A Horse Tale,” a recent interview by Young and Hines about the series, a commentary on the debut episode by the co-stars and a 12-page booklet — all of which give due credit to Allan “Rocky” Lane.

A star of many low-budget Westerns from the 1930s through the ‘50s, Lane provided Ed with an appropriately craggy voice with a Western twang.
“A Horse Tale” also explains the origins of the series. Several years before “Mister Ed” was launched, Lubin had worked with comedian/producer George Burns on a pilot for another series, titled “The Wonderful World of Wilbur Pope,” with a different horse and a different cast. But they couldn’t find any buyers. A few years later, the idea clicked, with the handsome Bamboo Harvester getting the role of Ed, and Young, a two-time Emmy Award winner for his early-’50s variety series, “The Alan Young Show,” being cast as Wilbur (with the new last name of Post).

As Young explains it, he won the part because Burns felt “He looks like the kind of a guy a horse would talk to.”
Or course.