Season 4 • Episode 13
LatestWhile visiting an amusement park on his birthday, Mickey wins a model airplane at a shooting gallery. Unfortunately, two smugglers have hidden a valuable pearl in the airplane and will stop at nothing to get it back.
Sky King is an American radio and television adventure series. The title character is Arizona rancher and aircraft pilot Schuyler "Sky" King. The series was likely based on a true-life personality of the 1930s, Jack Cones, the "Flying Constable" of Twentynine Palms in San Bernardino County, California, although this claim is unverified. Although the series had strong western elements, King mostly captured criminals and spies, and found lost hikers with the use of his plane, the Songbird. Though the planes used changed during the course of the series, the later model was not given a number, but was still known as the Songbird. King and his niece, Penny, lived on the Flying Crown Ranch, near the town of Grover, Arizona. Penny and Clipper were also pilots, though still relatively inexperienced and looking to their uncle for guidance and mentoring. Penny was an accomplished air racer and rated multi-engine pilot, whom Sky trusted to fly the Songbird. In the third TV episode, Penny refers to Clipper as "my brother", so they are siblings. The musical score was largely the work of Herschel Burke Gilbert.
Practical Effects
Real aircraft stunts that would give modern insurers strokes.
Score
Herschel Burke Gilbert's brassy adventure themes.
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Kirby Grant was a licensed pilot who performed many of his own flying scenes, making him perhaps TV's first method-actor aviator.
The show bridged the dying Western genre with America's postwar aviation obsession, creating a weird hybrid that only 1950s network executives could love.
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