Gunsmoke bloopers

[electra225]

The wife and I have been watching every episode of Gunsmoke from the first one to the last one. We are currently in Season 15, which would be from 1969. One of the more interesting features to a trivia buff such as I is to try to identify the actors that appeared on the series. Denver Pyle, Claude Akins, James Best, Lane Bradbury, Morgan Woodward, George Lindsay and Jeanette Nolan are fairly frequent actors. Ben Johnson played a bad guy on one episode. They have been using one farm on several different episodes. There is a disc setting in the barnyard, we have noticed in three recent episodes. Trouble is, it is a 3-point hitch disc. This series is set just after the Civil War, so it would be 70 years hence that Harry Ferguson invented the Ferguson System for Ford tractors centered around the three-point hitch. There are also dual truck wheel tracks in some episodes. People can drive wagons down the streets of Dodge City, in front of the Long Branch Saloon, but there are never any wagon tracks in the dirt street. Some of the acting is pretty amateur, particularly the stunts. Two people can be in a wagon seat, but will change positions side to side in different scenes. Gunsmoke was and is one of my all-time favorite shows, but it is beginning to show its age. They like to make horses drop and roll when the rider gets "shot". The wife thought they were harming the animals, but those horses are trained to drop and roll, sometimes right over the rider. How a stunt horse rider can get rolled under a horse and not get squished, I have never been able to understand.