What would you have to do today to get a third-grader to wear a coonskin hat to school and sing about killing “bears when he was only three”? I don’t think it would be possible unless you bribed them with iPods and Playstations. But after “Davy Crockett” aired in late 1954 and 1955, kids would show up at school swinging much-coveted Davy Crockett lunch boxes, they’d run around the neighborhood in official “Davy Crockett: Indian Fighter” coonskin hats and play “The Ballad of Davy Crockett” over and over on their big sister’s turntable.

“If only I had parents who were rich enough to get me a lunch box,” thought the rest of us who were getting our lunch to school in reused paper bags. It never occurred to us that the real Davy wouldn’t know what a lunch box or a paper bag was. The real Crockett never went to school.

It’s hard to believe that all the hoopla was about five, one-hour episodes of a black-and-white TV show. Did it fulfill some primal need for children to wear fur on their heads? Did we crave adventure that we couldn’t get in the treeless, fenced-in back yards of brand new suburban housing developments? Were we tiring of WWII stories? Was it just better than what was on the other two channels during the nights it aired? Or was it that in late 1954, America finally had enough TV sets for Davy to reach a cultural tipping point?