The Westerns Channel will be paying tribute to Gene Autry beginning Friday night, September 28 with a 100 hour salute the original singing cowboy. At 8 pm Eastern there will be a 30 minute documentary and then at 8:30 pm Eastern it will all start with "Tumbling Tumbleweeds".

I already have some of the early westerns on DVD that I have recorded for the past couple of years, but there are several premiers that they are showing throughout the 100 hour movie-thon.

Hope all of you western fans out there have your DVR's, TiVO's or VCR revved up and ready for this, it is going to be a lot of fun.

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Well the birthday celebration is on the air and they started everything with a 1/2 hour featurette on Gene Autry's career. The first movie out of the chute was 1935's TUMBLING TUMBLEWEEDS, followed by another film from 1935, MELODY TRAIL and then it was THE BIG SHOW, also from 1935. The salute to Gene's 100th Birthday is 100 hours long and ends on Tuesday, October 2nd.

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Well, we are about half way through the 100-hour celebration of "A Century in the Saddle" - Encore Westerns Channel salute to honor Gene Autry's 100th Birthday. So far, so good. TCM should take lessons on restoration of good old classic westerns from the folks at Encore. Not one of these classic Autry westerns shown has been the edited version. They have all been restored to their original theatrical length, and it has been such a joy to see these films again. I am reliving my childhood as I watch and dupe to DVD+RW all of these classic movies. I am basically filling in the empty spots in my Gene Autry collection. I already had about half of his 89-movie library, so I haven't had to record every one, but I have been watching them all. I think that I will have only gotten about eight hours of sleep over the three and a half-days of this festival.

Hope there are more of you who are watching these classic westerns from the 30s, 40s, and 50s.

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Just finishing duping "Blue Canadian Rockies" to DVD+R, and that will make my Gene Autry collection almost complete. With what I had before and what they broadcast over the past four days in their 100-hour salute to "A Century in the Saddle" with Gene Autry I now have 90 of the 92 feature films Gene made between 1935 and 1953.

All of the movies were completely restored theatrical versions in their original length, and even the two Cinecolor films looked very good.

Now if TCM will take notice the next time they want to salute Roy Rogers, maybe I can get a complete collection of his films the way they were meant to be seen.

Hope that you all at least peeked into the Western Channel over the past four days and watched a little of Gene, Smiley Burnette, Pat Buttram and Sterling Holloway. They will never win an Academy Award, but they definitely were not a waste of time to watch.

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Since I seem to be the only person to appreciate Gene Autry I am bumping this thread up because I am beginning my run at getting all 91 television episodes of the The Gene Autry Show. They all ran between 1950 and 1955, and the last season of 13 episodes was done in the cheapie process called Cinecolor.

These shows really were pretty half-hour western stories. And featured a lot of guest stars who would go on to bigger and better things. Some of the guest stars in these 30 minute episodes included Clayton Moore (billed at Clay Moore), Lee Van Cleef, Gail Davis, Sterling Holloway, Chill Wills, Jock Mahoney, and oh, so many more.

Encore Westerns channel shows seven shows a week, but usually the sixth and seventh shows are repeats of one of the episodes shown during the week. Have to really keep up on titles of each episode.

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