Here's adventure!  Here's romance!  Here's O'Henry's famous bad guy who became a good guy for movies, radio and television ---The Cisco Kid!

Herbert Dunn played him in "The Caballero's Way."  Warner Baxter went home with an Oscar for "In Old Arizona" and 23 more Cisco Kid movies followed.

The daring rogue Gilbert Roland portrayed was the big favorite at Saturday matinees.  Always cool, always confident, always with a cigarette tucked behind his left ear and his own snappy looking sombrero cocked low over his right eye, Roland ( Luis Antonio Damaso de Alonso) entertained us with his own poetry, philosophy, ideas of romance, and a hero way ahead of the smartest bad guy.  Duncan Renaldo's Cisco (with Leo Carrillo as Pancho)?  Well, he identified in so many ways with other characters Renaldo played, there were never any surprises.  Audiences wanted surprises.  But Renaldo won the role again after Roland moved on.

The greatest were on radio --- Jackson Beck (Superman's deep voiced narrator) and Louis Sorin for the Don Lee network series, and Jack Mather and the absolutely brilliant Harry Lang (with occasional fill-ins by Mel Blanc) for the West Coast show.

Mention Cisco and Pancho to anybody who remembers Mather and Lang and you'll get a big, big smile.  Every program ended with Pancho recalling some silly misadventure in the kitchen with his girlfriend, Big Maria, an exasperated Cisco responding with "Oh, Pancho!" and the two laughing hysterically.

Nobody entertained us like Mather and Lang.

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